Daredevil: Born Again Season 1, Episode 9 Review – “Straight to Hell”

“Straight to Hell”, Daredevil: Born Again‘s final episode of 2025, does not feel much like the season finale; outside of representing the ascension of Mayor Fisk into full-blown fascist Kingpin mode and revealing Hector Ayala’s killer, “Straight to Hell” doesn’t offer much in the way of resolution – and oddly enough, also seems to lack a lot of kinetic conflict, despite featuring some of the most graphic violence the series (either the original, or the revival) has ever seen. Nonetheless, there’s one important element of Born Again that keeps the season finale tethered to the original series and its legacy; thanks to Karen, “Straight to Hell” doesn’t feel completely perfunctory, surprisingly regrounding the series as a story of a lonely, broken man trying to fight back against a shitty world the only ways he knows how; sacrificing mind, body, and soul to protect and avenge the people, and the city, he loves.

Before Born Again can get to those key scenes though, “Straight to Hell” has to finish weaseling its way out of the lighter version of itself we saw in the season’s middle (and middling) episodes – which it does pretty effectively with the crunch of Commissioner Gallo’s skull between Kingpin’s meaty fingers. Gruesome as it is, it puts a tidy bow on what’s been a rather sloppy story about Wilson’s ascension to mayor; the guardrails came off his mayoral duties off-screen a few episodes ago, and Gallo’s telegraphed death is more of a coda to a boring storyline, than an dramatic, stakes-shifting element of Fisk taking over as New York’s supreme ruler, and deciding the answer to calm the public was to put the city into a deliberate blackout, leading to him declaring martial law and gleefully hoping to find more dead vigilante bodies lying in the street when the lights turned back on the next day.

Wilson’s power play has never been entirely interesting, the various temporary roadblocks Born Again placing in front of him crumbling like dust the moment he touched them. As a narrative, it’s wildly ineffective at times; but when it comes to building up a character of absolute power, a culmination of the character we started to see bubble to the surface back in Daredevil‘s first dozen Netflix episodes, it serves its purpose pretty well. And boy, does D’Onofrio know it; though I think his portrayal has leaned into his cartoonish nature as a bit of crutch as Born Again has gone on, the expression of his absolute power in this episode, as he fully marries his legal and illegal worlds into one unified, horrifying empire of corruption and violence, works well to set the tone for “Straight to Hell”.

For a bit, it seems Born Again‘s counter to this was going to through engaging with some nostalgia; once Karen miraculously reappears in Hell’s Kitchen, it would be easy to see “Straight to Hell” use her return as a manipulative tool to provide an emotional fulcrum neither Heather or Matt’s law firm buddies have provided; what was pleasasntly surprising to see was how Karen’s emergence ends up being the final piece of Daredevil‘s creative reset, re-grounding the journeys of both Matt Murdock and Frank Castle in but a few brief scenes.

It comes with Frank first; after Frank rages through a good chunk of Fisk’s task force (much to Matt’s chagrin), the two barely escape Matt’s apartment being bombed, and are picked up by Karen, who is quickly brought to speed back in Punisher’s goofy little compound (which… is somewhere near where Muse was? I think? That was never really explained well, but whatever – not really important). Karen, being who she is, sees right through Frank’s machismo and Matt’s sullen defeatism; it’s the biggest boon Born Again‘s offered itself all season, finally tethering itself back to the emotional, occasionally existential questions the original series weaved into its stories of ninjas, gang wars, and violent ex-girlfriends (RIP forever Elektra) beyond just using Foggy’s death as a catalyst for change.

Karen and Matt’s scene together, where she talks about the wrath and mercy her and Foggy have always seen in Matt, is a moment that would’ve felt a lot cornier had it happened during the show’s distonal middle episodes; as a light peeking through the dour landscape of Hell’s Kitchen and Matt’s life where it stands at the start of “Straight to Hell”, however, she provides Born Again a soul that it’s kind of always been missing – and in some ways, allows her the space to embody those ideas more potently than the original series sometimes would. Born Again reigniting the connection between her and Frank is amazing, too (a nod back to arguably the strongest part of Daredevil‘s second season), but it’s icing on the cake for what it offers up to the show’s protagonist, a critically executed bit of plot and character that helps center what is otherwise a rather scattered, laborious and often anticlimactic season finale.

There are other elements of the season finale that flat do not work; I appreciate what the series aims for with its Daniel and BB segments, but their individual presences are so underdeveloped, outside of the few scenes they’ve had with each other, neither the street reporting or “protege realizes the horrors of his own new power” arc add anything to Born Again‘s stronger, more potent stories – and it renders them both rather flat and redundant, particularly with Daniel, whose arc folds into Wilson and Vanessa’s in particularly underwhelming fashion. Daniel’s material is just so rote and obvious; there’s not a lot of nuance in writing or delivery here, and alongside the oddly-inserted “interview on the street” segments, make for an incongruous pair of stories, unable to grab hold of anything tangential at the series’ core, more distractions and conveniences than critical parts of the story (the same goes for Regina, though the show at least tries a bit harder to give some balance to her selfish decision to sell out Gallo to Fisk).

Perhaps the strangest part is how it just all ends; with a few swift sequences, Heather is installed as the city’s new mental health commissioner (which… the show does absolutely nothing to try and explain how she gets on board with such obviously fascistic behavior, except “he was a client once”), Frank Castle is locked up in Fisk’s new prison dungeon, and Cherry and Detective Forgot-Her-Name show up in Josie’s, ready to team up and exact revenge on Kingpin, who is about to start running drugs and money and who knows what else, through one of the flimsiest legal loopholes seen this side of a bad Suits episode.

As Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place” (the opening track to Kid A, for those not old enough to have experienced that album in their teen years), Born Again quickly closes with a series of pans over New York faces, its various characters staring offscreen for one reason or another (oh hey, there’s Dex – almost forgot he got away after shooting Kingpin!), a growly voiceover from Matt clumsily talks about being in the city “without fear”; it’s as abrupt and corny as it sounds, but it oddly works, a bit of melodramatic monologuing reaching into the darkness for something to tether its final moments to and stumbling on a last bit of resonance to resolve some of the narrative abruptness. It lands on a final image of an angry Daredevil, coated in red from some unknown light source, staring through the looking glass (of Josie’s boarded-up window) and into Born Again‘s second half – it’s a fitting visual for an overstuffed, underdeveloped, but still mostly satisfying, season finale. (And then, of course, the season really ends when Frank breaks out. See you later this year(?), Frankie-boy!).

Grade: B

Other thoughts/observations:

• Of course, the season really ends when Frank breaks out of his cage in appropriately graphic fashion. See you later this year(?), Frankie-boy!
  
• Speaking of – we got a lot of good Frank Castle grunting and growling this season. Always worth it.
  
• There’s something to be said about the shared disillusionment of Heather, Regina, and Kirsten in the men of Daredevil, but its an idea too disparately observed to really find any connective tissue. It’s an interesting idea, however, to see so many voices of logic fail around Matt and Wilson, though they (respectively) still let Karen and Vanessa through.
  
• Hector Ayala’s killer is revealed in underwhelming fashion; more satisfying is Frank emptying a clip into someone, just to express to Matt what a ridiculous moralist he can be sometimes, for someone who beats the shit out of people.
  
• UGH that Frank and Karen moment is so fucking good, recapturing a dynamic I feared the series would never even attempt to find again.
  
• So…. what’s The Hand up to these days?
  
• It is hilarious how little anyone seems to care about Dex being on the loose, though Matt and Wilson should probably be worried the most?
  
• I really like how “Straight to Hell” builds to the moment where the injured Matt takes on the world to get to Kingpin – and then backs away from it, pointing out that Matt got shot not 24 hours earlier, and probably needs to take a beat before he goes after the most powerful man in the city.
  
• And that’s it for Born Again season one! Hopefully The Punisher one-off and season two are able to capture more of that good ol’ Daredevil tone – I wish it didn’t take seven hours to start putting one foot in front of the other, but I’m certainly glad the season finished in a stronger place than it started.