Daredevil: Born Again Delivers an Explosive Season 2 Finale

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Daredevil: Born Again, "The Southern Cross."]

In superhero comics, no victory can last forever. The Joker never stays in Arkham Asylum for long, and Lex Luthor always comes back for another plot against Superman. Over the past decade, the MCU's small-screen Daredevil has established a similar cycle with its hero and villain. Daredevil's nemesis Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) has now been defeated several times over, and as Season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again draws to a close, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) finally acknowledges the obvious. If he and Fisk stick to their preordained roles — Matt as a masked vigilante, opposite Fisk as a crime boss hell-bent on his destruction — then their feud will never end, creating escalating waves of collateral damage. The only way out is to disrupt the cycle, so in the season finale, Matt pulls the trigger on the biggest possible twist for a Daredevil story: He reveals his secret identity to the public.

Then, when he and Fisk square up for their final confrontation, Matt makes another shocking departure from the norm. Abandoning his plan to make Fisk pay for his many crimes, Matt encourages him to just leave New York and find peace elsewhere. Sending him to jail didn't work last time, so it's time to try something new.

This wraps up what may be the strongest season of Charlie Cox's tenure as Daredevil, employing Fisk as an avatar of authoritarian violence. As the mayor of New York City, he uses corrupt cops to terrorize the populace, while an inner circle of lackeys smooth down the rough edges of his public persona. But the more Fisk tries to clamp down on the people of New York, the more they rebel. In the season finale, protesters dressed in Daredevil costumes take to the streets. Meanwhile, Fisk's core group of supporters have begun to collapse. His wife has been assassinated, leaving Fisk without emotional support. His protégé (Michael Gandolfini) gets caught leaking secrets to the press, and is consequently killed by another of Fisk's lieutenants. And thanks to Fisk's lack of interest in playing by the rules, the New York state governor threatens to remove him from office.

Rather than being defeated in a traditional final-act standoff with the hero (although that does obviously occur), his downfall is actually group effort, utilizing the combined forces of civilian insurrection, legal action, journalism, and vigilante justice. In the context of the show's transparent allusions to ICE and the Trump administration, this paints a more realistic picture than anything we saw during Daredevil's Netflix era.

The final two episodes hinge on a court case where Matt Murdock unveils the extent of Fisk's criminality: a revelation that can only be proven via testimony from Daredevil himself. After more than a decade of protecting his secret identity, it's both shocking and oddly satisfying to see Matt Murdock reveal his secret, showing off his powers to a disbelieving audience. In turn, this provokes a kind of unmasking for Fisk as well. He spent the past two seasons hiding behind a respectable persona, but after Matt proves his guilt to the public, the facade comes crashing down. Faced with criminal charges as the federal government freezes his assets, Fisk declares war on the city, ordering his police goons to bar the doors of the courthouse as protesters clamor for his removal.

This siege doesn't last long. The cops soon let the protesters inside, and Fisk surrenders to his most violent impulses, whaling on random civilians as he storms through the building in a rage. (Happily, the show isn't too serious to embrace Fisk's most self-indulgent trait as a comic book villain, casting the 66-year-old D'Onofrio as an MMA berserker who can punch adult men across a room.)

Backed into a corner, Fisk only gives up once he encounters a similarly exhausted Matt Murdock, who pleads with him to leave the city while he still has a chance. "You go to prison, you die locked away from her memory," says Matt, referring to Fisk's dead wife, Vanessa. "Or you do what you do and this whole thing starts over again." 

Fisk agrees to Matt's offer and ends the season alone on a beach, having fled the country and presumably renounced his citizenship. This image suggests a life of luxury for an exiled dictator, but while that's hardly a fitting punishment, it's not a happy ending either. Matt's conclusion is similarly bittersweet. By revealing his secret identity, he became legally culpable for all of Daredevil's crimes, leading to his arrest and imprisonment during the final scenes of the season. So the villain goes free while the hero ends up in jail surrounded by enemies, reiterating the show's ambivalent relationship with the justice system.

Unlike the MCU's Spider-Man movies, which unmasked Peter Parker but then reversed their decision by altering the fabric of reality, Daredevil: Born Again is too grounded for a magic reset button. What's done is done, and that's a bold choice for a character whose story revolves around maintaining a dual identity.

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In the comics, revealing a hero's secret identity can be just as impactful as killing them off. Here, it becomes a kind of meta-story about Matt's ability to accept change. Born Again sees him adopt a new approach to his work as Daredevil, pivoting back to his legal career before sacrificing his role as a vigilante. Fisk, however, isn't capable of that kind of personal growth. He's always driven by the same obsessive desire for control, and as mayor, his inflexibility becomes his downfall. He can't let go of his vendetta against Daredevil, so once Matt takes the initiative and destroys Daredevil himself, their feud has nowhere else to go.

Does that mean Wilson Fisk is gone for good? Probably not, but it does suggest that Season 3 will explore a very different version of Matt Murdock. After years of revisiting the same general material, the show has finally removed Daredevil's safety net, making him more vulnerable — and more unpredictable — than ever before.

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 is now streaming on Disney+.