‘Daredevil’ Season 3 Episode 8 Recap: The Upward Spiral

Remember all the complaints I had about the Bullseye origin story? The gaps in plausibility, the slapdash psychology, the less-than-successful cinematography and staging? Well, you can say goodbye to that mess. You can, if you will, vacuum it right up.

“Upstairs/Downstairs,” the eighth episode of Daredevil‘s third season, did more to convince me — in the guts, more than in the mind — of Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter’s madness in this one shot of the man cleaning up his messy apartment in the Daredevil costume he wore to commit mass murder than it did in every other scene involving the character combined. I really can’t say enough good things about writer Dara Resnik and director Alex Zakrzewski, who spent the entire episode showing how Dex’s eggshell mind could be cracked, punctured, sucked dry, and refilled with nothing but trauma and violence, but who neatly (pardon the pun) summed up the whole thing in a single image. Here’s a very sick person clinging desperately to the simple instructions about routine and order that kept him semi-sane for years, while wearing the emblem of that routine and order’s complete and lethal disintegration. It’s a beautiful, horrible thing to behold.

There’s a lot of that going around in this episode, which follows the attempts of all the show’s main characters to push forward after Dex’s massacre at Karen Page’s newspaper. So many moments surprised me, startled me, made me laugh out loud at unexpected humor or gasp at out-of-nowhere horror or cringe at things that fell somewhere in between.

For starters, I didn’t expect Dex to pull himself together, seek out his stalking victim Julie…and then make a sincere and convincing case that, however dishonest he’s being about his previous intentions, he just desperately needs her help as a person in terrible mental distress. During the very public coffee-shop conversation he convinces her to have, he does have a hard time being what you might call normal; the bizarre barnyard bray of “BAAAAAAAAAH” he emits to illustrate how the FBI has made him a scapegoat (get it?) is one of the most unnerving things I’ve ever seen a supervillain do in this genre. But he correctly sussed out that Julie really is a kind and caring enough person to listen, and to want to help a person so obviously in need.

Unfortunately, Dex is not the only one who believes Julie could save him from himself.

The unceremonious way in which Wilson Fisk’s henchmen just casually blow Julie’s brains out as she steps into her apartment hallway — glimpsed through a security camera, for an added touch of dehumanizing distance — literally took my breath away. So sudden, so brutal, and so cruelly brilliant. Having engineered her and Dex’s initial face-to-face encounter to help push him over the edge, Fisk then tosses her life away like garbage to push him even further. Stealing her phone and using it to fake a rejection when Dex texts her again literally adds insult to injury.

But the show doesn’t stop there. It smartly juxtaposes Fisk’s manipulation of Dex with Agent Ray Nadeem’s more well-meaning but otherwise similar messing with the guy’s mind. Having realized that Dex was the Daredevil impostor and relayed that information to the real deal, Ray’s plan is to lure Dex to a meeting with a lawyer hired to sue the Bureau and get him reinstated, just so he and Daredevil will have time to ransack Dex’s apartment for evidence.

When the meeting is cut short, he returns home unexpectedly quickly, and an ingeniously staged chase scene ensues. Using mirrors, odd angles, and ricochets, Dex attacks the two home invaders from an apartment elsewhere in the building, and the pacing is such that it takes both the characters and us in the audience about the same amount of time to figure out what’s even happening. When Daredevil and Ray flee (making Ray’s identity clear to Dex in the process when he runs past a mirror), Dex begins chasing Daredevil up a fire escape, lobbing deadly glass projectiles up at the vigilante.

The battle, if such a one-sided conflict can even be called a battle, not only flips the horizontal hallway-fight model on its access, but also inverts the usual motion of stairway-based fights as well — Daredevil must flee upward, relying on our unconscious sense of gravity working against him, rather than downward, where momentum would really be on his side. That this series’ fight scenes can still innovate and impress this far into its run is a testament to how well its showrunners have all understood their importance to the emotional and thematic tenor of any superhero story. And the betrayal is the last straw for Dex’s sanity: He now clings to Fisk like the father he never had, and burns all the tapes of his sessions with the therapist who stood in for his mother. Ray and Daredevil, who listened to at least one, heard him confess to killing birds and kittens for fun and keeping secrets just for the thrill of it; who knows what else went up in flames.

Like Daredevil and Agent Nadeem, Foggy Nelson and Karen Page also have plans so crazy they just might work, but don’t. Foggy stages an impromptu debate with Blake Tower, his opponent in the race for District Attorney, at a dinner for local logrollers, all in an effort to draw press attention to his theory that Fisk is deliberately ratting out rivals in the bribery, corruption, and protection rackets so he can corner those markets himself. But Tower goes blow for blow with Foggy despite Nelson’s home-turf advantage (it’s a meeting of the Hell’s Kitchen Club, to which his family has long belonged), and in the end Foggy cuts the whole thing short himself out of fear of what the absent Karen might be up to.

He was right to worry. In one of the best scenes of the series, Karen and Fisk have a face-to-face, heart-to-heart confrontation in his penthouse “prison.” This scene is dynamite. Deborah Ann Woll gives one of the best performances of her career as she prods Fisk, desperate to hit emotional weak spots that might goad him into a confession or a violation of the terms of his house arrest.

(Woll is, in fact, terrific throughout the episode; she has one of the best cry-faces in Hollywood, she can convey so much with the simple manipulation of a prop like a crumpled-up tissue held in her hand but never referred to outright, and the curves of her face hold the light like nobody’s business.)

Her eyes wet with unfallen tears, Karen’s voice pops and crackles with emotion as she brings up how she and her murdered mentor Ben Urich tricked Fisk’s elderly mother into revealing that he killed his own father, then taunts him for doing so.

Vincent D’Onofrio’s gravelly stop-start vocal pattern sizzles with barely suppressed glee as he makes insinuations about his involvement in the murder of Urich, the attack on the newspaper, his attempts on the life of Karen herself, and, finally, his knowledge that her friend and former colleague Matt Murdock is Daredevil. (She didn’t know that he knew, and she’s dumbfounded.) Yet he still retains his polite veneer, barking the question “Tea?” at her after she arrives so sharply that I jumped and then laughed out loud.

But his smugness about Matt drives Karen even further. To the great astonishment of both Fisk and, well, me, Karen reveals that she killed James Wesley, Fisk’s right-hand man and, prior to his girlfriend Vanessa, only real friend. “He died quickly, if you were wondering,” she hisses, eyes alight with malice. “Didn’t suffer much.” You can watch Fisk’s gigantic egg head hard-boil itself before your very eyes as he hears this, like he’s never been caught this off guard about something this important to him. Only the timely intervention of the FBI, at the behest of Foggy, seems to save her from getting killed on the spot. The way she talks afterwards, it’s like that’s what she wanted, like dying would be worth it if it meant Fisk, who’s caused her and hers so much misery, went down for good.

Also Sister Maggie is Matt’s mom, and now he knows because he has super-hearing and heard her praying to his late father to help him. After this tense, disturbing, excellent episode, it seems he’s gonna need it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Daredevil Season 3 Episode 8 ("Upstairs/Downstairs") on Netflix