‘Daredevil’ Season 3 Episode 10 Recap: The Gospel According to Karen Page

Here’s what we know going into this absolute beast of a Daredevil episode. It’s called “Karen,” it follows a cliffhanger in which the Kingpin orders her murder, and it begins with a cold open labeled “Before” and including these images:

It’s almost funny how inadequately all this prepares you for what’s coming.

Written by Tamara Becher-Wilkinson and directed with both restraint and explosiveness by Alex Garcia Lopez, “Karen” is one of the best episodes in the series’ history. Actually, divided into segments designated “Before” and “Now,” it’s almost two of the best episodes in the series’ history.

It starts with an extended flashback to what looks like it’s going to be Karen’s wayward youth. She parties, she gets high, she sells drugs to college kids alongside her protective but basically decent boyfriend.

But when things go sour, it’s not in the way you expect — an overdose, an irresponsible decision, a horrible gun-related accident, or whatever else the party scene and the little info we have about her history might indicate. When she isn’t sleeping in her boyfriend’s trailer, scenically situated amid the gray rocks and trees of Vermont…

…she’s trying to keep the family diner, operated by her spendthrift father (the great Lee Tergersen of Oz and The Americans) and worried kid brother following the death of Karen’s mom, afloat. She does this with a complicated mix of emotions. She’s resentful of the time she has to spend in this dead-end job in this dead-end town and contemptuous of the sexist pig of a cop who’s their most loyal customer. She’s also desperate to save her father from his poor, overly optimistic instincts, like buying a new five-thousand dollar grill when it looks like they can barely afford to refill the ketchup bottles.

Karen is sticking around and deferring her admission to Georgetown to save the diner, or so she says. But both her brother and her father — usually a character archetype who wants the kid to stay with the family business — encourage her to go. This puts her in the awkward position of having to shoot down their high hopes for both her and the business.

And that devolves into a vicious argument about her choice in boyfriends and her late mother’s despair prior to her death from cancer, culminating in Karen shattering the framed scratch-off lotto ticket her mom bought before she died (this was her one vice, it seems) and discovering it’s a loser. It’s a desecration nearly on the level of blasphemy.

After Karen leaves to drink and snort her sorrows away all night with her boyfriend, her kid brother blames it all on him. He torches the man’s trailer, as if that would force Karen to leave town and make something of herself. The boyfriend attacks the brother with a wrench. Karen fires a warning shot with the gun she and her bf have been target shooting with, and then wings the boyfriend himself when he continues his attack.

She piles her badly wounded brother in her car and speeds away, drunk and high and desperate to escape. In the middle of berating the kid for derailing her plan to set everything right, somehow, she drifts off course and the car flips and crashes, killing him. The aftermath is an impressionistic blur of headlights, police lights, blood, and the animal cry of grief her father emits when he sees his son’s body, mercifully offscreen.

The next morning, Karen’s dad tells his shellshocked daughter that he and the creep cop have agreed to cover up her presence in the car, the cop reasoning that the family has suffered enough. But she’s no longer welcome, he continues. Her presence is too painful. He needs her to go away, for good.

Which leads us to “Now.” Karen is ensconced in the church where Matt had previous stayed, waiting for Sister Mary to make good on her promise of relocating her to keep her from Fisk’s clutches. (If there’s one thing the Catholic Church is good at, it’s moving wanted people from one place to another!) She receives a pep talk from Father Paul, who shares the same burden of feeling like Matt has been failed by the people he trusted.

At the start of Mass that evening, Father Paul delivers a stirring pseudo-sermon to the parishioners regarding the bloody events of the past few days. Those events, he says, have left them wondering “whether the people we thought were fighting for us were monsters all along. We are being told that we are not strong, that we are not safe. Yet here we are: stronger, because we will not accept that we are weak; safer, because we will not be divided.” Remember when I said I was surprised the show didn’t lean harder into the Trumpian climate of fear and oppression when the false Daredevil attacked all those journalists? Nevermind.

But the violence, of course, comes home. Having received orders from Fisk to kill Karen in revenge for her murder of his friend James Wesley, Dex receives a ride to the church from Agent Nadeem (leading to the blackly comic and incongruous image of a man in a Daredevil costume calmly stepping out of the passenger seat of an SUV). He enters the church and calls for Karen, killing several churchgoers first before she steps out to sacrifice herself. Father Paul intervenes and gets killed in the crossfire.

But before Dex can finish the job, the real Daredevil swoops in. This was a yessss moment to me, however corny it seems; I genuinely wasn’t sure if he was going to try to lurk in Fisk’s hotel just long enough to attack him before coming to Karen’s rescue, or if he’d give up on his assassination attempt and just rush straight there. He did the latter, and it made me happy. He’s still a Good Guy.

But he’s also outclassed. In a battle that rages through the church, Matt and Dex go toe to toe, and Matt finds himself on the losing end of the exchange more often than not. Only the timely intervention of Karen, wielding a giant crucifix and whacking Dex right off the balcony into the aisle below, rescues Matt from death at his impostor’s hands.

The fight is thrilling, as fights on this show nearly always are, making use of the unique environment at every turn. (My favorite beat involved Dex tossing the collection plate at Matt’s face.) But there’s more to it than that.

It’s hard to overstate how beautifully balanced the two halves of the episode are, or indeed, how they work better in tandem than they would alone. Remove the church fight and you might be left wondering why the flashback to Karen’s backstory, however excellent, is part of Daredevil at all rather than a traditional drama — or why Daredevil bothers with the costume stuff at all when it can serve up conflict and tragedy this compelling without it.

But remove Karen’s flashback, and much of the emotional life of the church fight goes with it. Though nothing about Karen’s backstory is referenced outright during the battle — there aren’t even implicit echoes between the two events, at least no more than any other life-or-death fight scene in which Karen takes part — our experience of that horrible night in her life and its dreadful morning after unconsciously informs our experience of the attack on the church and Matt Murdock’s fight to stop it. Her father’s howl of despair, her brother’s doomed desperation for her to have a better life, her boyfriend’s unexpected turn to the murderous, her father’s banishment of her from their home, her own emotional cruelty about the death of her mother, and just the general sense that all it takes for life to spin irrevocably out of control is an hour or two of bad decisions with ramifications that will last for decades — it’s all background radiation, eating away at us as Karen, Matt, Dex, Father Paul, and the unlucky parishioners fight to survive.

In the end, we know that Matt Murdock isn’t dead, because it’s his show; the image of Karen crying as she cradles his body in the church is just a genderbent inversion of a famous moment from the comics, that’s all (with the added bonus of evoking the Pieta, of course). Karen herself may not know that history is not in fact repeating itself, but we do.

Which means that the most direct connection between Karen’s experience of losing someone she loves after drawing him into harm’s way and the events of this episode…is to Wilson Fisk. The man is a master manipulator to be sure, and watching him wind Dex up like a toy and set him lose is unpleasant to say the least. But there’s no reason to doubt his sincerity when he talks about Wesley, the associate Karen killed; the man really was Fisk’s friend, and Fisk really did think of him like a son. Fisk’s surprisingly warm relationships with many of his associates, from Wesley and his girlfriend Vanessa on down, was a distinguishing feature of the first season, one that made him one of the most interesting supervillains the genre has seen. It’s difficult to get into Fisk’s head even when monologues and visions invite us inside, but his love for his late friend, his grief over his death — that’s all legit, and he and Karen have those feelings in common. The difference is that while Karen blames herself, Fisk, as always, is capable only of blaming others.

All in all, this is as good an hour of superhero entertainment as you’re likely to see. The raw and nuanced performances of Tergersen and Woll, Garcia Lopez’s proficiency with both New England light and hand-to-hand combat, and a structure in which the realistic and fantastic work together to make each other better than they would be alone — it’s a model the unending onslaught of Marvel and DC movies and shows, up to and including the forthcoming adaptation of Watchmen from the Leftovers team, should seek to emulate. Amen.

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 10 ("Karen") on Netflix