‘Daredevil’ Review, Season 3 Episode 11: Out Come the Wolves

When I say this is a sensational episode of Daredevil, I mean that literally. It’s an episode of Daredevil that derives its impact from sensations, at least as much as dialogue or performance or plot. At its best, this show always keeps this front and center.

The story of this antepenultimate ep (“Reunion”) more or less parks itself in one place for the bulk of its running time: Dex orders Ray and the rest of his FBI unit to help him hunt and kill Matt and Karen on the premises of the church where they fought just minutes earlier; Matt and Karen try to hide and escape; Sister Maggie runs interference; Foggy Nelson and his friend Detective Mahoney arrange an NYPD arrest of Karen to keep her from Dex’s clutches, with an assist from Ray; Fisk orders the murder of Ray’s family, which he and Matt thwart just in time.

But when I think of it, I’ll think of Sister Maggie walking through Manhattan at night, slowly becoming aware of the sounds of running feet and screams as she approaches the church where the massacre took place. I’ll think of the buzzing-flies music cue that accompanies Dex’s moments of rage and confusion, like something in his head has gone rotten and is now roiling with insectoid madness.

I’ll think of Fisk hearing that Karen has escaped and killing the messenger by calmly asking for his jacket, then using it as padding as he bashes the man’s face in.

I’ll think of Matt and Karen pressed against each other in the stone coffin in which they hide from their pursuers, like an even more gothic and intimate reenactment of Karen’s exhausted and bloodied elevator ride with Frank Castle in The Punisher.

And as always, I’ll think of Wilson Fisk’s swagger.

But there’s more to the episode than sight and sound. To understand what, let’s start with Fisk, as he detours into a subplot that’s seems jarringly extraneous but is also, sadly, timely.

“Rabbit in a Snowstorm,” the painting Fisk is obsessed with retrieving after its confiscation by the Feds because it was a gift from his beloved Vanessa, is now in the hands of a Holocaust survivor from whose family the Nazis stole the painting decades ago. Lesley Ann Warren (I’ll always think of her as Miss Scarlett from Clue) makes an unexpected and welcome cameo as the woman, who has the steel to stand up to Fisk in defense of what her family lost and regained, even though she knows he won’t hesitate to kill her if it comes to it. In fact, she makes a point of telling him this. “I know who you are, Mr. Fisk,” she says. “You are a wolf too. Men like you took my family, took my ability to love, and almost took my life. You will take nothing more.”

Surprisingly, Fisk backs down. “You have been through so very much,” he says. “Vanessa would want you to keep the painting.” That’s his workaround for being denied what he wants and accepting this state of affairs: not an actual conscience, but an ability to understand how conscience works in other people. And even the biggest sociopaths — well, okay, not the biggest — seem able to pay appropriate lip service to world-historical atrocities, if nothing more. The sequence feels out of place, but Fisk’s behavior fits.

Thinking about it some more, though, I wonder if there’s a deeper connection to the present at play in this sequence. Dex is fascinating during this episode because he transforms from blood-drenched mass murderer in a stolen superhero costume to just a garden-variety kill-crazy cop, breaking rules and laws in order to play judge, jury, and executioner against the innocent and vulnerable. You don’t have to have an ideology to do this, per se — just a vicious id that takes pleasure in exerting control by inflicting suffering.

This is the undercurrent of all fascist movements, from modern-day America and Brazil to Nazi Germany. Dex would have been right at home in the Gestapo, killing the father of the painting’s elderly owner in front of her as a kid. As a matter of fact, Dex just did kill a father of sorts, Father Paul, and that man’s spiritual son was there to see the body before it got cold.

Indeed, there are fascist…well, undertones would imply they’re underneath something, but Fisk’s big speech to press and protesters when his conviction is overturned (??? he murdered multiple cops on a bridge the with the entire city watching, but okay!) is as overtly Make Manhattan Great Again as it gets. He talks about fake news, the powers that be lying about him because they don’t want to hear what he has to say, doing it all for the land he loves and wants to restore to glory, you name it. He’s so persuasive that the protesters actually lower their signs. (This isn’t how protests generally work, but sometimes on Blind Radar Ninja, Attorney-at-Law you have to suspend disbelief a bit.)

As a matter of fact, there’s another overtly political moment, when Matt, Foggy, and Karen are at least reunited and able to compare notes about their plan moving forward. “Some people are so rich and powerful the system simply can’t handle them,” Matt says by way of explaining why he feels he has to kill Fisk rather than risk him beating additional charges if he’s simply re-arrested. “They actually are above the law.” Foggy, ever the idealist, doesn’t buy it, arguing that this is what the rich and powerful want you to believe in order to drive you to despair and preventing you from using the system to take them down.

I think it’s pretty clear that the opposite is true, and that the rich and powerful promulgate the fiction that the law applies equally to everyone; if this is the case, well, if they break the law and nothing happens, they must not have done anything wrong to begin with, right? The system works!

Daredevil operates with a compelling tension on this point. I have a hard time believing a corporate-owned superhero property will ever really challenge the validity of the entire system; like all the Marvel/Netflix shows, Daredevil has enough heroic cops and feds to demonstrate that several times over. In the case of this conversation, too, it seems we’re meant to see system supporter Foggy as the voice of reason.

But Daredevil relies on the military and law enforcement for its villains, which is also like all the other Marvel/Netflix shows. Dex the crazed soldier turned FBI agent; Frank Castle the berserk black-ops veteran, his commanding officer who became a druglord, and his best friend turned nemesis who started a mercenary company when his tour ended; that guy from Jessica Jones who was a soldier turned cop who got super-strength and roid rage from experimental pills; the prison that used its inmates as guinea pigs in Luke Cage; and on and on and on. In many cases they’re augmented by entire FBI offices, police precincts, or military units that are thoroughly corrupted or downright sadistic. The whole system’s out of order, as the saying goes. Daredevil is like an extended experiment in how far the fantasy of The Last Honest Warrior setting it all to rights can be taken.

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 11 ("Reunion") on Netflix