‘Daredevil’ Season 3 Episode 12 Recap: It’s a Shame About Ray

“We’ve been manipulated by a sociopath who doesn’t care about the truth, or about who he hurts, or about anyone other than himself,” said the publicly shamed woman about the crooked New York billionaire hotel owner who seems able to flout the law and inflict suffering at will, in an episode where the judicial system is undermined and a sadistic white man murders a brown man and a Holocaust victim in cold blood. Sometimes, a show writes your review for you.

Directed by prestige-TV favorite and Daredevil veteran Phil Abraham, the penultimate episode of Daredevil Season 3 (“One Last Shot”) feels painfully familiar. It’s not so much the specific details that hurt, though despite the disparity between when the show was made and when I watched it, it’s hard for certain similarities between recent events in its world and ours not to hurt. And I tend to be skeptical about any writing premised on the idea of franchised corporate art speaking truth to power; if you thought, say, Black Panther had a message worth hearing, you and the CIA have something in common.

It’s the mood of the episode that makes the metaphorical resonance between Wilson Fisk and Donald Trump so strong. The odyssey of fear, shame, confusion, rage, horror, and despair through which Agent Ray Nadeem travels on his way to court, and then to his death — the sense that anything could happen at any moment, that it will almost certainly be bad, and that nothing that’s supposed to stop it actually can or will — this is the emotional tenor of our age.

This being Daredevil, it’s not entirely the grim business of things falling apart. Yes, Foggy and Matt convince Ray to testify against the Kingpin in court, with the help of their friend Detective Mahoney and their enemy A.D.A. Blake Tower. Yes, they also convince Karen to convince her old boss Ellison to stage a press conference in which she’ll defend her good name and attack the man who sullied it. And yes, both events turn to shit when Fisk threatens the grand jury and they refuse to indict, leading Ray to vomit in horror, cold-cock Foggy, and run back to his house to await his execution by Dex (fresh from the off-screen, on-spec slaying of the Holocaust survivor who owned that painting Fisk loves), reasoning that his death is the only way his family will ever be safe.

But hey, how about that hallway-style fight scene staged in bumper-to-bumper traffic, huh? What a brilliantly staged bit of action business that was, retaining the cramped, close-quarters feeling of the hallway fights in an entirely new context while adding all the site-specific advantages (no ceiling, the ability to hide) and obstacles (inability to immediately see where the next attack is coming from, the vulnerability of all those windows and mirrors, the need to preserve the lives of motorists) required by the new setting. Plus, there’s the added wrinkle of maintaining the fiction that Matt Murdock can’t “see,” which forces he and Ray to stay close while playacting the parts of disabled man and caretaker.

Or how about the return of Vanessa, the love of Fisk’s life? The woman is played by Ayelet Zurer as if she’s an omega-level mutant with the power to project sexiness at dangerous levels; my only regret in that department is that the plot requires her to keep Wilson at arm’s length until the very end, so that the physical chemistry between the pair can’t ever really ignite. (It’s not just Zurer’s Vanessa at issue here, mind you — I think Fisk’s size and commanding demeanor could easily make a Gandolfiniesque sex symbol out of D’Onofrio, too.)

Vanessa remains a fascinating character, and a very rare one in the genre. She’s a perfectly normal (if artistic and glamorous) person who meets the Devil and becomes enthusiastically corrupt, voluntarily, out of sheer attraction to his evil. She’s not broken or mad or desperate, or (like Dex) all three — standard characteristics for supervillain origin stories. When she demands to be included in his criminal life rather than simply living off the proceeds, she says that she recognized not just his “strength” but his “brutality” from the start, and loved it. It is Vanessa who orders Ray’s death, even as Fisk was preparing to leave him ruined but alive; the look on her face as she gazes at the monitor screen where Agent Nadeem is being watched should be familiar to anyone who’s ever spent private time with a video they find arousing.

But in the main? Two viewpoints are advanced here. There’s Foggy, who insists “The system will work!” even after their secret plan to take Fisk down while keeping everyone alive has gone up in flames because Fisk sussed it out and got to the grand jury before they did. And there’s Ray, who says “Fisk is unstoppable. My family’s never gonna be safe.” Based on this episode’s events, Ray’s pessimism is simply realism, as is Matt’s conviction that the only way to stop the unstoppable man is killing him.

But again, it isn’t the plot beats, it’s the feeling they engender. Ray has never been a more interesting character than he is here: berated by Matt for his failure to defy Fisk, desperate to defend himself but still atone for the crimes he helped commit, mistrusted and rejected by his wife, tearing himself apart to set a good example for his son, and ultimately deprived of all hope and ready to commit suicide-by-Dex as his least worst option. He’s a tremendously empathetic character during every step of that journey, because his pain, like Matt’s, and like Karen and Foggy’s too in their own way, is a pain you’ve probably felt. It’s the pain of trying to be a good person in a bad age, an age that has you at its mercy, an age whose character you feel both compelled and powerless to change.

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 12 ("One Last Shot") on Netflix