‘Daredevil’ Season 3 Episode 9 Recap: Sister Act

NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*
NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*
NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*

Okay, I lied: There isn’t any actual sex in the flashback sequence that dominates the first reel of “Revelations,” the ninth episode of Daredevil Season 3. And I’m sorry, but this isn’t just a dropped ball, this is a Bill Buckner–level debacle. It’s not just that Isabella Pisacane, the actor cast to play the young Sister Maggie as she falls in love with local boxer Battlin’ Jack Murdock, looks like a cross between actual young Joanne Whalley (the modern-day Sister Maggie) and Game of Thrones‘ Maisie Williams, which is to say she’s stunning. (Ol’ Battlin’ Jack is definitely punching above his weight class, if you’ll pardon the pun.) It’s that the tension between Catholic iconography and guilt on the one hand and raw physicality on the other is Daredevil‘s stock in trade. I believe it was Chekov (or perhaps Sasha Grey?) who said that if you have a sexy nun on the mantle in the first act, she’d better get off by the third.

I’m joking, but only a little. Co-written by Sam Ernst and showrunner Erik Oleson and directed by Jennifer Lynch, a name I remain amazed to see in television credits whenever it pops up, “Revelations” is another one of those oddly structured episode that feels more like a botched solution to the problem of Marvel/Netflix’s overlong seasons than a cohesive unit that needs to exist on its own. There’s some good stuff in here, and some stuff that could have been better, and some downright baffling stuff too.

We’ll start with the good. There’s Pisacane’s note-perfect casting. There’s the genuine, jump-out-of-your-seat shock that occurs when Agent Nadeem learns the hard way that his boss is under Fisk’s thumb, when she murders a fellow agent right in front of him. There’s the weird, gutting cry of Sister Maggie when she learns that Matt knows she’s his mother and abandoned her in rage — a high-pitched, hitching wail that’s Whalley’s finest moment on the show so far, easily. There’s the intensity of Deborah Ann Woll as Karen in pretty much every scene she’s in now, and the striking contrast between the pink rims of her tear-irritated eyes and the piercing ice-blue color of her irises.

There’s this bleak and beautiful shot of a room full of FBI agents, all of them bought or blackmailed into Fisk’s service, all of them scared into referring to him only by his codename…Kingpin.

Yes, Wilson Fisk is the Kingpin at last, in name as well as nature. It’s the nature part that’s really unnerving, though. Painfully so, in fact, to the point where the fun of seeing him as a cool crazy ganglord with delusions of grandeur is sucked right out of the show, deliberately. He isn’t just a snappy dresser who thinks three steps ahead. For example, he murdered one of Nadeem’s boss’s kids, forcing her to get a divorce to protect her husband and work for Fisk to protect her other child. He even had Nadeem’s sister-in-law’s chemotherapy coverage canceled, forcing him into the debt that drove him to act desperately and broker the Fisk deal to earn a promotion in the first place. He’s been methodically destroying all these people’s lives for months and months, and some of them didn’t even know it. So when he’s escorted out of the hotel for a meeting with various crooked businesspeople, clergy, and public officials that he plans to shake down for protection money — a meeting also intended to double as a trap for Daredevil, whom Nadeem is forced to try and lure to it — it’s not badass Gangster Shit. It really does feel wrong, and Matt’s desire to beat the guy to death, which he’s finally admitted is his goal, feels…less so.

That’s just a daydream, but you get the picture.

The problem is that none of this really feels, I dunno, connected in any way. The flashback, Sister Maggie finding out Matt knows she’s his mom and then telling Karen when she comes looking for Matt, the postpartum depression angle to why she gave Matt up and went back to the church, Matt’s anger at Father Paul for keeping this all a secret, Matt’s hallucinations of his dad and of the Kingpin, the whole business with Ray being forced to work alongside Dex and all the FBI agents Fisk now runs, a side plot in which Foggy learns his family has been manipulated into criminal financial fraud by Fisk’s pet bank, the protection meeting, Dex getting back into the Daredevil suit, Matt breaking into the hotel instead of going to the trap as planned — there’s no rhythm to it. It’s a lot of incident, and a lot of overlong two-person conversations connecting it, and that’s all.

And for the second time this season, the episode ends with Matt overhearing bad news about something happening somewhere else, with the credits rolling before he can do anything about it. Early on, this occurred when he got his hearing back after recovering from his Defenders injuries, only for the first thing he heard to be the news that Fisk was out of prison. This time, he’s in the middle of talking to Fisk’s terrified communications-hub monitor — she wears an ankle monitor and seems to be in some kind of indentured servitude — when he overhears one of the corrupted FBI agents saying Karen Page has been spotted in Sister Maggie’s church, and Fisk’s forces are moving in with the intent to kill.

And boom, that’s that! Storytelling segment over, please skip end credits and continue to next episode. Pray for nun sex this time around.

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 9 ("Revelations") on Netflix