The Multiverse Saga is building to a head in this year’s Avengers: Doomsday, but first we have the street-level action of Daredevil: Born Again Season 2. This epic series has brought back Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock and the rest of his supporting cast, with other Marvel Netflix Defenders set to make their mainstream MCU debuts as well. It proves there’s a real demand for this kind of grounded story, with Season 2 rightfully earning a 90% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and an 88% audience score too.
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Born Again Season 2’s focus is on the vendetta between Daredevil and the Kingpin, with Wilson Fisk now taking charge of New York as its mayor. He’s outlawed vigilantes, with an Anti-Vigilante Task Force now patrolling the streets and picking up anybody who catches their eye (they aren’t particularly good at their job, with Daredevil learning only one other vigilante had actually been caught). But amidst all the action, viewers were taken aback at an unexpected – now confirmed – cameo.
The Watcher Appeared in Daredevil: Born Again Season 2
It all began when attentive viewers noted a familiar pattern in the broken window of Fogwell’s Gym. It appeared to be the outline of a god-tier Marvel character known as Uatu the Watcher, a cosmic entity from the comics who looks over the entire multiverse and witnesses important events. Marvel’s Brad Winderbaum, head of Marvel Television, took to social media to confirm this was intention. The Watcher had made his live-action MCU debut at last.
There’s a sense in which Marvel has been setting up the Watcher’s live-action debut for a while. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 revealed the MCU’s traditional Stan Lee cameos were a Watcher’s informant who wandered throughout the timeline, monitoring events on behalf of some of the Watchers. Uatu, the Watcher assigned to Earth, made his animated debut in What If..? Season 1, and he’s also appeared in I Am Groot, X-Men ’97, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Eyes of Wakanda, and Marvel Zombies.
Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 has become surprisingly important for the cosmic MCU, with the Watcher moving to live-action at last. There’s something quite amusing about a Watcher cameo in this show, given the character is so abstract even Daredevil’s hyper-senses can’t detect him. In the comics, the Watcher sometimes chooses to allow himself to be seen, but you really need a power called “cosmic awareness” to be able to detect him. The Watcher tends to only show up at moments of tremendous significance – an ominous portent for the rest of Season 2 after Vanessa Fisk’s death.
What the Watcher’s Daredevil: Born Again Cameo Means for the MCU
The Watcher isn’t the first MCU animated character to make his way into live-action; in fact, the Multiverse Saga has already introduced a version of Peggy Atwell’s Captain Carter, another What If..? stalwart. But he is surely the most significant, especially as the Multiverse Saga builds towards Avengers: Doomsday and next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars. The Watcher tends to observe significant events, and he’s hardly going to ignore the multiversal collapse most viewers are anticipating.
Oddly, then, the street-level story of Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 now appears to be important setup for the Multiverse Saga’s climax. It’s a perfect reminder that the MCU can embrace cosmic and grounded narratives at one and the same time, and that there doesn’t need to be a neat division between the two. The interesting question is whether the Watcher will remain merely an observer, or whether he’ll begin to interfere. In the comics, Uatu ultimately sided with Earth to save the planet from many cosmic threats, and wound up on trial for breach of his race’s laws on non-intervention.
It’s easy to imagine a scenario where the Watcher himself becomes the new Stan Lee cameo, with the MCU’s films and TV shows carefully weaving him in. That would be an appropriate fate for the character, turning this grand observer into the MCU’s connective tissue. It’s a role the Watcher has often held in the comics, too, where his rare interventions carry all the more weight because of his ubiquitous presence. Marvel could even retroactively add the Watcher into previous movies; Avengers: Endgame is being re-released with new footage, and it would make sense for him to watch Thanos’ defeat.
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