Daredevil: Born Again Season 1, Episode 8 Review – “Isle of Joy”

With its color-tinted backgrounds and much grimmer grasp on the Daredevil mythos, “Isle of Joy” is unsurprisingly the first “brand new” episode of Born Again‘s creative retooling since the pilot episode – unlike the premiere, however, Born Again‘s penultimate hour is unmoored from the nonsense of law firms, marriage counseling, and pussyfooting around the show’s central conflict, and it’s all the better for it. Sure, there’s still some MCU tendrils Born Again can’t completely excise from its grasp – but there’s a definite shift in the winds of Hell’s Kitchen in this hour, in what makes for a surprisingly entertaining episode… and, importantly, the first hour of the series that truly feels spiritually connected to the original.

With Muse and his disappointing storyline finally six feet underground, his death instead serves as a catalyst for Fisk’s total takeover for New York. It’s not an elegant piece of plotting, one that requires his (mostly off-screen) task force intimidate the city, while he uses vague political machinations to set up his little Red Hook pet project. Though Born Again disappoints once again in its world building, the result is a rather arresting sequence, bouncing back and forth between Matt and Wilson, as some difficult truths begin coming to light.

At first, Matt and Rebecca’s conversation seems asynchronous with Wilson and Vanessa’s; however, as the first act continues to bounce back and forth between living room and murder dungeon, Born Again begins to tap into something much more familiar to older fans of the series – in a way, it shows some of the Devil being put back into Daredevil, as the two men contemplate their inability to compromise – and once again, we see how Wilson’s influence infects everything around him, as Vanessa joins Rebecca spiritually by killing her imprisoned former lover, gunning him down in a fashion not too dissimilar from what we saw in “Art for Art’s Sake” bloody centerpiece (and ending arguably the dumbest subplot of Born Again, or really anything since the “endless cascade of ninjas” scenes of season two and parts of The Defenders… well that, and the season three episode “Karen”, of course).

A lot of that first act momentum gets lost when Born Again shifts back into law firm mode; could a TV show seem less disinterested in its own story? It’s not just a vibe that comes from Matt’s total disillusionment with the legal system (“we’re not serving justice; we’re babysitting chaos”, he opines), as it seems nobody writing about this series cares to use Kristen or Cherry as anything but cardboard stand-ins for Karen and Foggy’s value systems. Since the end of the White Tiger case, Born Again‘s time at the law firm has felt perfunctory and lifeless – which nothing about these scenes add here, reinforcing the familiar cycle of Matt’s internal strife the series has done better before (both in and out of Matt’s day job).

Thankfully, it doesn’t take long for Daredevil to get back to it, signified loudly when a fed-up Matt begins bashing Dex’s head repeatedly into a table, unknowingly setting up his subsequent escape and the episode’s dramatic third act, set at an event where the public watches the identities of Mayor Fisk and New York’s Kingpin became one, a sweaty, white-suited ball of arrogant dominance set at the appropriately theatrical setting of a mayoral gala.

That final act, which culminates in Matt taking a bullet from Dex, is a tricky bit of business for Born Again, as it tries to streamline the many threads of story gathering around Wilson and Vanessa, into one gregariously-staged sequence. The result is a bit awkward, especially when it cuts from moments like Wilson threatening Jack Duquesne, to the sneering Daniel talking about how powerful he’s becoming to BB, to the violence Fisk’s task force exacts on a journalist who tried sneaking into the event to take pictures.

Though all of these are somewhat unified under Fisk’s incredible gravitational pull (which D’Onofrio continues to play with a big, dramatic performance, which I think still mostly works across the hour), the tone of these coalescing stories come from disparate creative visions of the series, and that dichotomy can be felt, be it in Daniel’s overtures about the good he’s going to do for the city, or the moment when the police commissioner reveals to BB that he’s got files on all the dirty cops – which of course means he’s due to meet a similar fate to that of BB’s uncle back in the show’s first season. It’s not bad material, but it feels a bit off-kilter next to the weightier motivations of Wilson and Matt – an expected imbalance to a degree, but one that creates enough dissonance that the gala scenes and their swirling plots aren’t quite able to find a consistent thematic harmony.

(It also continues to render the Muse storyline completely and utterly pointless, which… I guess we just shrug at and forget ever happened?)

Where it all builds to, where Matt and Wilson dance with each other’s partners, proverbially stepping around the many obvious, but silent truths lying between them all on the dance floor, is a fun moment for Daredevil – the fact it is a big event interrupted by Bullseye’s persistent pursuit of violence against his creator (and the man he impersonated, of course) as it was in season three’s “A New Napkin” actually serving as a nice bridge between the end of that season and where the series is now. It distinctly feels like a creative team stepping over the mess of stories and tones from the first seven episodes, into something more comfortable and fitting – and though I’m still not convinced Born Again has much new to say about the devil of Hell’s Kitchen (particularly as the original show’s religious element has been largely removed), or the power couple at the top of NY’s corrupt world, the first and last acts were a bit reassuring that the second season of this series will at least have a more consistent, clear voice about its vigilantes, journalists, criminal masterminds, and the opportunistic people festering in their system.

“Isle of Joy” is not a perfect transition between what Born Again was and what it really wants to be, but its decidedly smoother than expected, especially considering earlier attempts this season to return to Daredevil‘s specifically endearing brand of dour brutalism. Nonetheless, there’s still some work to be done in the course of one short episode for Born Again to not only resolve its many running stories (we all expect to see something happen with those bullets with Punisher logos on them, yes?), but to use its season finale to make a coherent case for what its second season is going to be, defining its aims (emotionally and narratively) through whatever forms of inevitably bloody conflict lies awaiting in the finale.

Grade: B