Main cast: Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock/Daredevil), Vincent D’Onofrio (Wilson Fisk/Kingpin), Margarita Levieva (Heather Glenn), Zabryna Guevara (Sheila Rivera), Nikki M James (Kirsten Mcduffie), Genneya Walton (BB Urich), Arty Froushan (Buck Cashman), Clark Johnson (Cherry), Michael Gandolfini (Daniel Blake), and Ayelet Zurer (Vanessa Fisk)
Director: David Boyd
Good news, everyone! In a stunning break from formula, this week’s episode Art for Art’s Sake has Daredevil beating yet another non-powered human into a paste. How many times in a row has he done that—our boy’s on a roll! Maybe next week he’ll graduate to taking candy from babies and kicking kittens into the sun.
So, the killer—Muse, Mooz, Muesli, whatever—turns out to be some guy from episode two. Cue dramatic music… except, um, no one remembered him from episode two. It’s the TV equivalent of being excited that your Starbucks barista might actually be the Zodiac Killer. He’s got all the build-up of a Halloween store manager trying to moonlight as the Joker.
Matt saves Heather, Weather, or whatever her name is (seriously, we know she’s nice, but could she be any more generic?), and you could be excited that she’s the one to take down MuMu. Yay empowerment! But it happens after Matt smashes the dude into the abstract expressionist version of roadkill, so her big moment has all the punch of someone popping bubble wrap after the package is already open. Thanks for trying, though!
Meanwhile, over on Real Housewives of Hell’s Kitchen, Fisk’s second-in-command conspires with Fisk’s wife, whose character arc is basically gaslight, girlboss, guillotine. The twist? They’re planning to eliminate Fisk. Shocking! Revolutionary! Oh wait—it’s just every mobster movie ever made, now with a fresh coat of Disney+ gray.
Vincent D’Onofrio and Charlie Cox, to their credit, continue to act like this is King Lear and not CSI: Marvel but Everyone’s Sad. They’re giving it their all, even when the writing feels like someone just stapled together the synopsis of The Godfather and Law & Order: SVU with “edgy” dialogue generated by ChatGPT after a long nap.
Margarita Levieva tries hard too, bless her, but her character has all the depth of a high school girlfriend written into a reboot because the writers forgot to invent someone new. She emotes with the sincerity of someone who realizes halfway through filming that she’s probably getting killed off soon.
And with only two episodes left, we’re somehow both exhausted and underwhelmed. The show feels like it’s been going on since 2015, and yet absolutely nothing of consequence has happened. It’s a legal drama with no bite and a superhero show that refuses to wear its cape, like watching a Batman movie where Bruce Wayne spends ten hours in traffic court.
Still, we hold out hope. Maybe in the final stretch, someone will finally hand Matt a coffee, slap him gently, and tell him to lighten up. At the very least, let the man smile more. Charlie Cox’s dimples are MCU Tier-1 content, and Disney is wasting them like they’re tax credits in a Florida film budget.
