‘Daredevil’ Season 3 Finale Recap: It’s a Nice Day for a Fight Wedding

Wilson Fisk spent ages orchestrating the perfect plan for victory, only for it all to come crashing down in the final hour. After watching the Season 3 finale of Daredevil, I know how he feels.

Rushed, slapdash, illogical, and — horror of horrors — even poorly fight-choreographed, “A New Napkin,” the final episode of Daredevil‘s enthusiastically received third season, feels less like a considered episode of television than a mistake someone made along the way to making one. The funny thing is that it has the opposite problem of most shaky-to-downright-bad Marvel/Netflix episodes, which bloat and drag tediously along to the closing credits. This one feels like the writers went to work one day and realized they’d lost track of how many episodes they’d already done, forcing them to wrap things up as quickly, and therefore as clumsily, as possible. It’s a suitcase packed by someone who overslept their alarm and has a flight to catch in 45 minutes, in television form.

At first, the no-messing-around pace felt refreshing, even daring. We join the opening scenes essentially in medias res, with significant story developments taking place offscreen since the down ending of the season’s excellent penultimate episode. Wilson Fisk and Vanessa Marianna are already getting dressed for their wedding. Matt Murdock has already kidnapped Fisk’s lieutenant Felix Manning to find out Fisk’s next move. Detective Brett Mahoney has already informed Agent Ray Nadeem’s widow about his death. For a while anyway, the fast pace feels deliberate, a way of giving us that “oh shit it’s about to go down” feeling.

As well it should, since Matt has formulated a master plan of his own, and it’s an explosive one. After learning about the existence, and murder, of Julie Barnes — the woman Agent Ben “Dex” Poindexter stalked but then confided in, whom Fisk then had killed to leave Dex adrift — from Manning, Matt tips Dex off, knowing he’ll go after the Kingpin the moment he accepts the truth. This leads to some horrific imagery involving Julie’s frozen corpse, which Dex, once again in the Daredevil costume (it looks really creepy when he’s wearing it), actually drives to the hotel where Wilson’s big wedding is taking place.

This is strong stuff, to say the least. Visually, the episode has the series’ usual flair for strong shot compositions as well.

Matt even has a funny — and, for fans of superhero movies and TV in which the superheroes dress like superheroes, very promising — line: “I’m coming for you, Dex. And my suit.”

But around that time is when the problems begin.

We’ll take Fisk first. Last episode, he’d suggested framing Ray, only for Vanessa to suggest killing him outright instead. He winds up doing both, pinning the murder of an agent committed by his boss S.A.C. Hattley on Ray, then claiming his death was a suicide when other agents came to arrest him. But he’s outfoxed by Ray himself, who recorded a confession to his own crimes while implicating Fisk, Dex, Hattley, and all the agents involved as a dying declaration while waiting for Fisk’s hitman to come finish him off. He got this video to his wife, who gets it to Foggy, who gets it to Karen, who gets it to her editor, who gets it to the world.

This doesn’t just rehabilitate Ray’s reputation and place the blame for the various killings on the more directly responsible parties, mind you: Since dying declarations are admissible in court, it’s the “silver bullet” that can send Fisk right back to prison, which by episode’s end it does.

What it means in narrative terms, though, is that the same arch-criminal who staged an assassination attempt, arranged for house arrest at a hotel he’d secretly bought in a specific penthouse he’d rigged with a secret passage to a communications hub, corrupted an entire FBI office both during and after his incarceration, reconquered the organized crime structure of an entire city while nominally a prisoner, and gotten all the charges against him dropped and all his convictions overturned so he could get married as a free man…got beaten by a dead guy’s YouTube video. Either videotaped confessions are the most slam-dunk evidence in human history, or Fisk actually kinda sucks at his job all of a sudden.

There’s more. Fisk’s wedding features the usual smiley-faced extras in fancy-looking clothing, happily eating and drinking and chatting and toasting to the couple’s good health. I get that at this point he’s been cleared, but it’s hard to imagine him filling a ballroom with generic well-wishers instead of just the various gangsters and corrupt officials obligated to pay their respects. But this remarkable turnaround in public opinion is itself undone the second Ray’s video goes live online, at which point everyone looks at Fisk and Vanessa in horror, like they had no idea the guy responsible for a cop-killing firefight on live television could have done such a thing. I’m surprised they were able to Save the Date for the wedding given that they have no object permanence.

And what about Matt’s big plan? Though it seems as if he’s put Dex on Fisk’s scent so that the assassin can kill the Kingpin for him, he winds up stopping Dex from killing doing so, presumably so he can kill Fisk himself. But setting a maniac like Dex loose is a virtual guarantee that people, not just Fisk, will die, and Fisk might too if anything goes wrong. Matt sure is putting a lot of trust in his ability to get their in the nick of time — and in Dex’s restraint in not capriciously slaughtering the entire hotel, which would be blood directly on Matt’s hands. (He doesn’t even kill the FBI agents who try to stop him from reaching the wedding, which does not exactly track with how Dex handles armed opponents as a general rule.)

Matt, Dex, and Fisk wind up having a three-way fight in the penthouse suite, which sounds way cooler than it actually is. Perhaps a point is being made with the fight’s emphasis on people just kinda grabbing each other and ramming or tossing them into walls or furniture or whatever, like they’re so mad it’s all raw brute strength and hatred, but it comes across as sloppy and random. The fact that Matt’s in his cloth ninja togs and Dex is the one in the Daredevil suit complicates the iconography as well, as does Vanessa standing and watching but neither doing anything active nor ever seeming to be in much physical or emotional danger.

The fight’s conclusion is so cockamamie I’m not even sure I understand it. Fisk is so determined to never let Vanessa go that he…literally yells at Daredevil to kill him. Matt says no, he’s sending him back to prison, he won’t let him destroy his morality. Fisk says if he’s left alive he’ll never stop hunting Matt’s friends Foggy and Karen. Matt says yes he will, because if he doesn’t, Matt will narc on Vanessa’s involvement in the murder of Agent Nadeem, and then Fisk really will be forced to let her go. Fisk agrees to the deal and they literally shake on it and that’s that, basically.

But here’s the thing. Let’s say Matt is right, and that while Fisk himself can’t be trusted, Fisk’s love for Vanessa can be, so he’ll go back to prison like a good boy and not attack Karen and Foggy and not out Matt’s secret identity to the press. Matt’s next move is to agree to go back into business with Karen and Foggy as a legal and investigative team, since they’re now friends again and hang out  and he’s back in his old apartment and all that jazz. He could not possibly have made it easier for Fisk to have all three of them blown up in their office simultaneously if he rigged the dynamite himself. That would let Vanessa off the hook and give Fisk his revenge all in one fell swoop. Aren’t these supposed to be the sharpest legal and journalistic minds in the city?

After the fight concludes there’s like 13 minutes of conversations and speeches about God and help and love and friendship and sacrifice and living without fear, none of which I remember a word from, with the exception of Matt saying “Seems like half of Hell’s Kitchen” is at Father Lantom’s funeral when the church is visibly three-quarters empty. It concludes with the absurd final shot of Dex having spinal replacement surgery (Fisk broke his back and paralyzed him during the big fight); when he opens his eyes, there’s a bullseye pattern in there. Anything this image could possibly convey — that Dex is insane, that he’s furious, that he’s freaking Bullseye the marksman supervillain — is already painfully obvious without the need for the dopiest special effect in the history of the show; it just makes me frustrated that we spent an entire season in which Daredevil never dresses like Daredevil and Bullseye only dresses like Daredevil. It’s a stinger for sting’s sake. It’s meaningless.

Daredevil is a fun, and usually fine, show, don’t get me wrong. It and The Punisher are the only live-action franchise superhero things I’d recommend to anyone with any enthusiasm at all since the first Tim Burton Batman movie, and this doesn’t change that. Some of those fight-centric episodes and the Karen Page spotlight were killer, and Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Deborah Ann Woll have all been fantastic from the start. But man, what a letdown — and what a bucket of cold water on the very popular idea that this season represents some sort of major breakthrough for the ailing Marvel/Netflix cinematic universe. Daredevil was better than people gave it credit for being before, and it’s not as good as people are giving it credit for being now. No bullseye, in more ways than one.

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 Finale ("A New Napkin") on Netflix