Why won’t anyone in Daredevil: Born Again talk about Sokovia?

Daredevil: Born Again is off to a quick start. There’s already been tragedy, turmoil, blossoming love, a whole-ass mayoral election, and more. The show is certainly the most grounded and lived-in New York has felt in any of Marvel’s Disney Plus shows so far, but it also feels distinctly like part of the MCU. People in this show’s version of New York seem used to the idea of superheroes, and they’re mostly over the shock of the Battle of New York, though they’re not quite comfortable with the idea of street-level heroes playing crime fighters in their city just yet. Daredevil doesn’t have to sacrifice realism to add superheroes; it simply builds a believable world out of the bones of the rest of the cinematic universe. 

Despite all this, there is one glaring exception. 

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again episodes 1 and 2.]

A major part of the first couple of episodes of Born Again is the mayoral campaign of one Wilson Fisk. Unsurprisingly, the Kingpin is running on a platform of taking the streets back from the menace of masked vigilantes. This makes perfect sense, especially considering how Daredevil treated him during the run of the Netflix show. It’s not even strange that Fisk and others in the show talk about vigilantes without ever invoking the larger apparatus of superheroes at work in their world, with not a single mention of the Avengers or Spider-Man or Iron Man. After all, talking about the people who verifiably saved the universe probably won’t help their anti-vigilante campaign. 

What is odd, however, is that at no point in talking about the legality of anonymous crime fighters does anyone mention the Sokovia Accords. In fact, the last time the MCU acknowledged the Accords at all, it came from Matt Murdock revealing that they had been repealed during the eighth episode of She-Hulk, so it seems a little weird that in all his campaigning and public speaking, Kingpin doesn’t once acknowledge the fact that registering superheroes was already common practice in this universe, at least for a little while. 

Killing off the Accords in a toss-off line in Marvel’s jokiest show is a pretty weird way to get rid of something that was the main plot of a whole movie just nine years ago. Then again, that seems to basically be Marvel’s whole stance on Captain America: Civil War in general: It exists not to be talked about. Outside of introducing Black Panther, Civil War didn’t exactly have a massive impact on the MCU after its release. In fact, the movie’s entire central conflict is wrapped up in Avengers: Infinity War with a cellphone call. So given how little Marvel cared about the events of Civil War, it’s probably not surprising it isn’t mentioning its bureaucratic McGuffin in a TV show almost a decade later.

There’s also the question of tone to consider. Daredevil is a fairly gritty show. Meanwhile, Sokovia’s main point of reference is an in-universe event where a super-intelligent robot picked up a city and threw it back down to Earth, so referencing it even in passing might break a bit of Daredevil’s gritty immersion. 

This is one of the wonderful quirks of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at this point. There’s so much built-up lore that each individual show and movie gets to decide individually what it wants to engage with and what it wants to leave out. Technically, somewhere in Fisk’s New York City, Peter Parker is also trying to sort through what the vigilante ban means for him; that doesn’t have to be Daredevil: Born Again’s problem. In other words, no matter how badly I want to hear Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin gravel out the phrase “Sokovia Accords,” it’s probably for the best that Marvel shows and movies aren’t always beholden to every corner of the MCU’s lore.

The first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again are now streaming on Disney Plus. New episodes drop Tuesdays at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET.