Daredevil: Born Again’s Kingpin Story Means the MCU’s Best Missing Character Should Finally Return

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 wastes no time establishing just how thoroughly Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) has reshaped New York City. Set roughly six months after the Season 1 finale, the new installment finds the city still locked under martial law, with Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force now operating as a normalized feature of daily life. With crime statistics down and the mayor’s approval ratings strong, the public has largely accepted the argument that the collateral damage of vigilantism outweighs any good these figures may do. That normalization has left Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) in a difficult position, as they are running a shadow resistance against a regime that most of New York would rather not oppose. Furthermore, Fisk has chosen to consolidate his control through the public spectacle of a vigilante trial.

As the Daredevil: Born Again season premiere reveals, the imprisoned Jack Duquesne (Tony Dalton), the sword-wielding philanthropist known as Swordsman who refused to cooperate with the Kingpin in Season 1, is the centerpiece of a highly publicized legal proceeding designed to reframe every masked figure in the city as a threat to civil order. Fisk is leaving nothing to chance with this trial. For instance, Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva), Matt’s ex-girlfriend and a trained therapist, has accepted a position as Fisk’s Mental Health Commissioner, and her role includes altering the psychiatric evaluation of Duquesne to ensure the public sees him as a violent psychopath. As expected, the trial is not about justice, but about ratifying the mayor’s preferred version of reality. Fortunately, this narrative thread leaves the door open for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to bring back one of its best recent characters.

Kate Bishop Should Be Part of Daredevil: Born Again Season 2

The current  Daredevil: Born Again storyline makes Kate Bishop’s (Hailee Steinfeld) return almost mandatory for narrative cohesion. For starters, as far as we know from her previous appearances, Bishop is living in New York City, operating in the same streets where Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force has made heroics a prosecutable offense. That means she is the kind of active costumed figure that Fisk’s regime has declared war on, and the city being under martial law gives her a reason to rise against the tyrannical mayor. It’s also worth noting that Kate Bishop has always chosen to act against the instructions of law enforcement, legal advisors, and even her own mentor, Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), when she believed the situation demanded it, so it’s impossible for her to stand down as the city is taken over by Fisk.

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Plus, at the climax of Hawkeye, it was Kate who physically confronted the Kingpin to prevent her mother (Vera Farmiga) from being killed. That confrontation was not resolved in any clean sense, as Fisk survived, regrouped, and went on to seize the mayoralty of the very city Kate calls home. From her perspective, Fisk is the crime lord who threatened her family and whom she failed to stop. The idea that she would observe his institutional stranglehold on New York from a distance, while her former adversary engineers show trials against the city’s remaining heroes, contradicts everything the character established in her MCU debut.

The Swordsman trial gives Kate Bishop another reason to rebel. In Hawkeye, Jack Duquesne was introduced as the man engaged to Eleanor Bishop, Kate’s mother, and while Kate initially suspected him of criminal involvement, the series ultimately revealed that he had been manipulated by Eleanor’s actual dealings with Fisk. Duquesne is, at a minimum, someone Bishop has a complicated history with and a reason to follow. Watching him become the instrument of Fisk’s anti-vigilante propaganda campaign is the kind of injustice that would compel her to act.

Another great reason to bring Kate Bishop back in Season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again is how the character has been underserved since Hawkeye concluded. In live-action, her only appearance outside of that series was a brief cameo in The Marvels, where she was recruited by Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) to a Young Avengers initiative—of which we had no official news since. Her other MCU credits since then are both animated and both removed from the primary timeline: a voiced alternate-universe version of the character in What If…? Season 3, set in a reimagined 1872 frontier that bears no relationship to contemporary MCU events, and a role in Marvel Zombies, set in a parallel reality overrun by an undead apocalypse. These appearances kept Kate visible without advancing her MCU arc in any meaningful way. Given how Daredevil: Born Again intersects with Kate’s MCU history, it would be a wasted opportunity for her to be absent from the show.

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 is currently streaming on Disney+, with new episodes releasing weekly every Tuesday. 

Should Marvel bring Kate Bishop into Hell’s Kitchen to stand against Fisk’s regime in Daredevil: Born Again Season 2? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!