Daredevil: Born Again Series Premiere: Recap, Easter Eggs, and Everything Important You Missed

It's been a rather long and circuitous path for the blind superhero Daredevil to return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe since his Netflix series was shut down years ago But after years of development and a revamp of the entire project after much of it had already been filmed, the newly rebooted Daredevil: Born Again has finally premiered on Disney+ with a two-episode drop. And, uh, if you were a fan of the previous Daredevil series, this premiere is quite a doozy.

Warning: The rest of this article is full of spoilers for the first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again.

This revival opens in such dramatic fashion that it feels like the powers-that-be really want you to know that the Disney version of this series is just as mean and violent as it was on Netflix. We begin with a scene of Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) going out for drinks after another long day at the law firm. 

But something is wrong. Foggy gets a call from a guy named Benny, who's being threatened by someone dastardly. Matt, overhearing the phone call with his amplified hearing, sneaks off and puts on his Daredevil suit and heads to Benny's apartment — but the whole thing is a ruse to get Matt away from Foggy so that Bullseye (Wilson Bethel), Daredevil's nemesis from Season 3 of the original series, can pop in and shoot Foggy. Distraught, Daredevil beats the hell out of Bullseye in a brutal and drawn-out one-take fight scene, a la those memorable sequences from the Netflix series, and throws him off a six-story building, but Bullseye somehow survives. Foggy is not so lucky.

This is obviously a massively painful moment for Matt Murdock, losing his best friend to one of his worst enemies — and to make things worse, we don't even really know why Bullseye did it. The situation is so traumatic that Matt quits being Daredevil entirely, opting to try to work within the system for a while instead, and doing what he can to make sure Bullseye is sent to prison. But his relationship with Karen is another apparent casualty of this tragedy — seeing each other is just too painful for both of them.

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From there, we fast forward a little bit. Matt's law firm is doing well, and he's got a new partner (at work) in Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James), who we'd seen flirting with Foggy in the opening scene. Kirsten is a solid wingman, apparently — she sets up Matt on a blind date with Dr. Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva), a therapist, and they start a relationship.

Elsewhere in New York, Wilson "Kingpin" Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) has returned from his adventure to Oklahoma in Echo with an all-new ambition: to become the mayor of New York. His campaign is unconventional, but it's working in a crowded and chaotic field of candidates. Matt confronts him after a campaign stop, and the two have a contentious chat at a diner — Kingpin promises not to allow any of that vigilante crap when he's mayor, and warns Matt against going back to that life. Fisk is, of course, elected by the end of the first episode.

The first episode essentially serves as the prologue, and it's in Episode 2 where we get down and dirty. Kingpin is the incoming mayor, and even though Daredevil has been absent, there's another vigilante doing his thing on the streets still, a mysterious man known as the White Tiger, aka Hector Ayala (Kamar de los Reyes). But our first real scene with this costumed hero has him out of his suit — he's simply trying to catch a subway train when he encounters a couple of men beating someone up. He intervenes, and one of the apparent muggers falls in front of a train during the fight — and his buddy then immediately flashes an NYPD badge and arrests Hector for murdering his partner. The dead man was a cop.

Naturally, Matt takes on this case, intrigued by Hector's story. And it doesn't take long before Matt's investigator, a retired cop named Cherry, discovers Hector's secret identity as a vigilante, but Matt convinces the judge to suppress that fact from the jury. And, in the meantime, he chases down the only available lead he has: the missing guy who was getting roughed up by the cops. Matt is able to track him down, just before the bad cops get to him. He tries to keep it cool and keep playing the blind lawyer, but when the cops decide they should murder him, Matt beats the daylight out of 'em, but not before we notice a very familiar skull tattoo on one of their wrists — the dirty cops are fans of the Punisher.

Kingpin, meanwhile, is trying to play nice with all the people he has to play nice with for political reasons, but there's one nut he simply cannot crack: police commissioner Gallo (Michael Gaston), one of the few people in the New York establishment who's still mad about Fisk's previous career as a crime boss. Kingpin's overly firm handshakes aren't gonna work on this guy. But Fisk has a more immediate concern. He's not on great terms with his wife, Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), who has been serving essentially as the new Kingpin since Echo shot the big guy in the finale episode of Hawkeye. So the two Kingpins go to marriage counseling — and Matt's girlfriend Dr. Glenn is their therapist.

There's a lot to mull over in these first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again beyond just remembering the events themselves. Read on for some deeper dives into the series' callbacks and Easter eggs, as well as our biggest takeaways from the two-episode premiere.

1. We are mostly moving on from Daredevil's past…

Daredevil: Born Again is a soft reboot of Netflix's 2015 Daredevil, meaning that those three seasons of TV are part of the backstory, but there won't be very many specific references to any of the stuff that happened in them. It's very telling, for example, that Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist are not even alluded to, while the series instead adds a new vigilante hero called White Tiger in their place.

Born Again largely puts the past to bed in the opening scene by having Bullseye kill Foggy — using that event as the catalyst for refreshing most of the main cast. They even managed to completely wreck Josie's Bar, their longtime hangout, in the process. If that isn't a metaphor for moving on, I don't know what is.

2. …but not completely 

There isn't much specific history you need to remember to keep up with the plot of Daredevil: Born Again, strangely. Daredevil's permanent feud with Wilson Fisk obviously continues here, but it doesn't really matter what they were previously fighting about — you just need to remember that they don't like each other and used to regularly have cataclysmic fistfights. That said, the new series does play on some specific past events — but we're mostly talking about stuff from other shows, rather than the past seasons of Daredevil. The biggest bits are actually from Hawkeye, which revealed Kingpin as the secret bad guy in the finale. The tracksuit mafia were major players in that show and this one, and the traumatic injury Kingpin sustained that separated him from Vanessa happened when Echo shot him in the face at the end of the episode. 

Meanwhile, the Red Hook docks are an amusing area to include here, because they were a key location in Iron Fist, as New York's crime families spent most of two seasons fighting each other and Danny Rand for control of it. Is this spot just being used as an Easter egg, or is it some indicator of what's in store?

And the other big returning element is BB Urich (Genneya Walton) and her apparently very popular news/video blog The BB Report — her uncle, Ben Urich, was murdered by Fisk during Season 1 of the original Daredevil series. It's unclear if BB knows about that.

3. An interesting supporting cast of characters from the comics

Daredevil: Born Again makes use of a number of minor characters from the comics to fill out its cast, though the key ones are pretty different from the source material. Matt's new girlfriend Heather Glenn, for example, is not a therapist in the comics but rather an heiress who eventually takes control of the family business, Glenn Industries. The British guy on Kingpin's staff is Buck Cashman (Arty Froushan), who in the comics is a super-powered villain called Bulle It's probably safe to assume that guy is gonna have a lot more going on than it may seem after two episodes. And the prosecutor in Hector's trial, Benjamin Hochberg (actor?), has a handful of appearances in that same role in the comics.

But the most key new supporting comics character (aside from White Tiger, who we'll discuss below) is Kirsten McDuffie, who serves as half of Matt's law firm these days — a role she also served in the comics during a run of Daredevil in which Matt's secret identity as Daredevil is revealed to the world. 

4. We have a Spider-Man reference!

In his New Year's Eve address, Mayor Kingpin rails against the scourge of vigilante heroes, and specifically calls out three of them: Daredevil, the Punisher, and Spider-Man. Though he describes them euphemistically rather than by their names — Spider-Man is "a man who dresses in a spider outfit." This is basically the same way that the old Netflix shows would interact with the movies, by vaguely referring to them without interacting with them, and so it's best not to take this as a sign that Spider-Man is going to show up here. It's not gonna happen. But that line is the lone reference to the greater MCU in these first two episodes, so it's significant in that way, too.

5. White Tiger

While we don't get much info about what White Tiger's whole deal is in the premiere episodes, here's some details from the comics that will help. Hector Ayala, the White Tiger, is a minor hero in the comics who makes use of Amulets of Power that grant him the enhanced abilities of Marvel's Tiger God. The amulets were carved from a jade statue in K'un Lun, the mystical city where Iron Fist learned to fight and channel his chi. 

In the comics, Hector's niece Angela — also a character in Daredevil: Born Again — eventually takes on the White Tiger mantle after Hector gives it up. So keep an eye on that one.

6. The Punisher club

One of the dirty cops assaulting Matt at the end of the second episode has a conspicuous tattoo of a stylized skull logo that is clearly meant to evoke the Punisher's symbol. Considering that Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) is a loner and doesn't like cops, it's extremely doubtful he's actually involved in whatever this is — this is more likely a riff on the popularity of the Punisher among real life American police. Which could be a really interesting thing to explore in our current political environment. Whatever the tattoo means, though, it's original to the show — there's no "Punisher Society" or anything like that in the comics.

New episodes of Daredevil: Born Again drop Wednesdays on Disney+