The MCU Just Set Up the Best New Avenger

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has gone through some big changes since Avengers: Endgame, and the lines between heroes and villains have certainly gotten blurred. That couldn’t be truer of the “New Avengers” team that made its debut at the end of the Thunderbolts* movie. Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) took some of the worst assassins and/or thieves in the world and rebranded them as a government-sponsored Avengers team.

Now it seems that Valentina is upping her roster by tapping arguably the greatest assassin in the world to join her ranks, with all the same superhero privileges as the New Avengers. But how long can she leash a tiger? And can this particular villain even play with others?

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Bullseye Joins Valentina’s Ranks

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 ended with some big character shifts. Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) was ousted from the mayor’s office and exiled from New York; Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) revealed to the world that he was Daredevil and was arrested for his vigilante actions. Meanwhile, Dex Poindexter (Wilson Bethel) was rewarded for his “heroic” work helping to bring down Kingpin and protecting Governor Marge McCaffrey (Lili Taylor). Poindexter was contacted and recruited by Mr. Charles (Matthew Lillard) and was last seen on a plane bound for whatever job Charles has planned for him overseas. Another epilogue scene revealed that Bullseye was recruited as a replacement for Luke Cage (Mike Colter), who came home to Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) and their daughter, looking like his soul had been dimmed a bit by whatever Charles had him doing.

Is Bullseye A New Avenger Now?

There’s still a lot to learn about what Valentina is doing with her whole Avengers rebrand, or trying to create her own superhero (like the Sentry Program). However, Valentina is a CIA veteran who is running any number of operations simultaneously, using proxies like Mr. Charles to help maintain her network of influence. Luke Cage and Bullseye might be brought in to work with the New Avengers squad led by Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and John Walker (Wyatt Russell); however, based on what we saw during Daredevil: Born Again, it’s more likely that Cage and Bullseye were recruited as independent operators, doing the kind of black bag work (assassinations) that Valentina wants to keep off the books.

Bullseye actor Wilson Bethel couldn’t reveal much, but did soft-confirm that Valentina and Charles recruited Bullseye to be their government-sponsored hitman, much like he’s been in the comics.

“Yeah, I think there’s a very fair assumption to make… We know from the comics, too, that at various moments, Bullseye has worked for the government in all kinds of shady capacities,” Bethel told Collider. “Bullseye at the end of the day, in a lot of the comics, is just a straight-up hitman for hire, and so, I don’t think it would be out of the realm of possibility for a government to be the one that comes up with the money to hire him.”

As with so many things in the current MCU, it’s hard to know how Valentina and Charles’ secret missions with compromised superheroes (or supervillains) connect to the New Avengers, Sam Wilson’s Captain America, and the original Avengers team he’s leading, the Damage Control organization that’s policing superpowered people, or any of the other geopolitical events that are currently unfolding in the MCU. What every fan already knows is that Valentina may have lured Dex into her service for now, but it’s going to be very tough to keep him on a leash for too long. As we’ve come to learn, Bullseye is gonna Bullseye eventually, and it rarely ends well for his employers.

“I think it all depends on the terms of the arrangement. How much freedom does a guy like that get to be who he is? I think that’s what it comes down to,” Bethel said. He went on to say that this time, he expected Dex not to be manipulated by Valentina the same way he was by Wilson and Vanessa Fisk. “I like to think that if he’s [Dex] making any kind of bargains or deals about what his future holds at this point, he’s doing it from a position of power, and I think that gives him a lot more freedom.”

Daredevil: Born Again is streaming on Disney+. Discuss the Season 2 Finale with us on the ComicBook Forum!