Hello Pulsers, it’s your friendly neighbourhood intermittently posting mouthy fat lesbian pal Penny, and at Widro’s request, (mostly because I happen to have Netflix and was going to watch it anyway), I’ll be recapping every episode of Netflix and Marvel’s second season of Daredevil, which dropped all at once today.
Quick season one recap; when we last saw our intrepid multitasking blind vigilante lawyer Matt Murdock, he had defeated Wilson Fisk, gotten some kinda silly looking but more superhero-y threads, and an actual non-handwritten plaque on his law office.
Spoilers ahoy.
So we start out fast-paced right out of the gate with beat cops chasing 3 guys running from an obvious robbery of some kind.And the Batman comparisons are already level Arrow as the first two crooks are dispatched one after another by an unseen assailant. The third is taken down in a church, terrified as his hostage is freed and he gets taken out by the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. and of course the col open ends with the traditional Batman establishing shot of the cops arresting the crooks as the camera pans up to Daredevil on the rooftops looking ominous against the night sky.
Yeah this is gonna be fun. Well, except for the constant ep pausing so I can keep up with the show whilst recapping.
After the bloody opening credit sequence, we see Foggy and Matt walking down a street talking and cracking jokes about bruises and pain, then things get serious as Foggy hints he still wishes Matt would give up his night job so Foggy won’t have to make excuses for his war wounds anymore. Matt responds by telling him about a client of theirs who would almost certainly have been brutally murdered by her abusive husband had Daredevil not dramatically injured him. Foggy concedes, if reluctantly, that Matt has a point, but doesn’t want to lose his friend. Matt cheekily swears he’ll never get killed.
They arrive to a packed law office, having garnered a reputation as good honest helpful lawyers in the space between seasons, and to their sectretary Karen filling them in on each case as well as their rock bottom financial woes, which is reasonable given that their clients appear to be paying them exclusively in fruit and pastries. Matt glibly reassures Karen they’ll manage the rent somehow, Karen nervously smiles seeming somewhat less than reassured, but also seemingly with a subtle hint at liking her boss.
Later that night some Irish mobsters gather for dinner, and their leader gives a rousing angry speech to his boys about how the Irish once ruled Hell’s Kitchen until they got complacent and allowed Fisk to take over, but now with Fisk in jail and the Russians dead, and with the Chinese having left town and the Yakuza gone silent, now is the time for the Irish to take over again, and the streets will run red will the blood of anyone who opposes them. Which of course is the exact moment a hail of bullets starts cutting through the rear window and killing them all brutally in a massacre worthy of the Boondock Saints, leaving only a terrified cowering bartender as a survivor.
Gee, I wonder who the shooter could possibly have been?
Across town at Josie’s bar, our heroes are drinking and playing pool after work, and while Foggy hits the head, Karen shows more pretty clear signs of wanting her some Mattcakes. Then when Karen goes to the bar to get fresh drinks, Matt and Foggy notice, each in their own way, a guy at the bar who is very out of place and likely armed. They politely suggest he leave but he says he’s here to talk to them, he being the survivor of the massacre. He’s there to tell them what happened and wants to hire them to get him witness protection from the DA, willing to tell the police anything to not get murdered by fellow mobsters who might think he was behind the shooting. He then passes out from the blood loss of a bullet wound he’d been hiding.
Back at the crime scene cops are picking over the scene as Foggy and Matt show up. Foggy distracts his sort of cop friend so Matt can use his heightened hearing to eavesdrop on the cops inside. The shooter used some pretty serious ordinance as it tore through kevlar one of the mobsters was wearing like tissue paper. The cop and Matt decide they can help each other and he fills them in on the fact that this is not the first massacre of mobsters in Hell’s Kitchen, with a biker gang having met the same fate the week before and the police having kept it quiet.
The survivor wakes up in the hospital and panics, trying to run, but Karen’s been waiting with him, having passed him off as her drunk Irish hubby who got in a bar fight. She plays her badass card and convinces him to stay put. Meanwhile Daredivil pays a visit to the low level gun dealer from last season, who’s branched out on his own since Fisk went away. He gets some info on a possible source for the ordinance the mob slaughterer is using, and then knocks the gunseller out.
Foggy of course has to get in on the risking-one’s-life action, and goes to a biker bar to see a contact, hoping to talk to one he went to school with. It does NOT seem to go well for him. Before we can see if he indeed gets hurt as is implied, we switch to what looks like a closed restaurant kitchen, a voice yelling in Spanish, and Daredevil creeping through the kitchen towards it. He finds a huge meat locker full of cow husks and the voice stops, and shortly after DD finds a dead guy hung from one of the meat hooks, then another. A third guy is still alive, and DD tries to get him down and keep him calm. Back to Foggy, he manages to talk his way out of getting cut up and asks his would-be murderer what’s going on with all the massacres. The biker tells Foggy what happened to his buddies, nd Foggy hightails it out of there.
Back in the meat locker, DD offers to get the third guy medical help, but he knows he’ll be dead soon, and tells DD it’s no army, it’s just one man.
At the hospital, that one man is making his way towards Karen and the survivor, and easily takes down security.
He starts shooting up the place to scare bystanders and staff out, and Karen makes a run for it with the survivor. They get in her “dead friend’s” caar, (most likely Fisk’s right hand man’s car, given how it would never have been reported stolen), but the killer follows them. DD incercepts him and they fight, but he brutally takes DD down. DD follows him and tries again, this time getting the upper hand, but the killer whips out a small hidden handgun, and with a smile he namedrops the episode title and shoots DD right off a rooftop.
And that ends the Season 2 Episode 1 recap. See you shortly for Episode 2.
