[Warning: This article contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again episode 6.] There’s an old proverb: “As one bad apple spoils the others, so you must show no quarter to sin or sinners.” In Tuesday’s episode of Daredevil: Born Again — which saw Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Mayor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) each react to the graffiti artist/serial killer on the loose by taking the law into their own hands — Matt suited up as a masked vigilante for the first time since Foggy’s murder a year earlier, while Mayor Fisk pressured NYPD Commissioner Gallo (Michael Gaston) into gathering “every bad apple in the barrel” for Fisk’s handpicked Anti-Vigilante Task Force.
Bad apples like Officer Powell (Hamish Allan-Headley), the corrupt cop who had Hector Ayala/White Tiger (Kamar de los Reyes) framed as a cop killer, and the Punisher “fanboy” who shot and killed the vigilante after Matt had him acquitted.
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“It appears your officers have a subculture amongst them,” Mayor Fisk tells Gallo of the crooked cops tattooed with the Punisher’s symbol. “People like to use the word ‘gang.’ I prefer motivated individuals.” Due to the extreme nature of Muse’s crimes, Mayor Fisk’s Task Force permits special powers and privileges: Overtime pay. No body cameras. And the use of excessive force.
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Fisk’s AVTF recruits Sergeant Cole North (Chicago P.D.‘s Jeremy Isaiah Earl), a Chicago transplant who was top of his class in the academy before making detective in just three years. Fisk instructs North to inform his fellow officers how he “lost it all” and ended up in New York, so he says he was responding to a call of possible drug activity in the park. He saw a drug dealer pushing OxyContin on an 11-year-old, but the dealer denied everything.
North explains, “I encouraged him to tell the truth. Captain didn’t see it that way. There’s a lot of sh-tbags in the world, sir. Now there’s a lot less of them.”
As founding members of the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, Fisk has tasked Officers North and Powell — and another dozen officers with Punisher insignia — with hunting masked killers like Muse. Fisk sought these officers out because of their skills and ability to get results by any means necessary — and as New York’s Finest, Fisk wants them to be seen taking the city back.
In the comics, Detective Cole North debuted in the five-part “Know Fear” arc that ran in issues #1-5 of Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto’s Daredevil run in 2019 (a storyline that has more in common with Born Again than Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s eponymous storyline). Except Cole isn’t a crooked cop.
Law & Order
2019’s Daredevil #1 establishes that Cole, who transferred from Chicago to New York’s 18th Precinct, has a clean-cut, by-the-books attitude that clashes with the local officers.
When we meet him, Cole takes umbrage with two officers attempting to cover up vigilante Daredevil’s involvement in beating up a gunman despite Mayor Fisk officially outlawing the city’s heroes via anti-vigilante legislation: the Powers Act.
“This is not something we turn away from. There is no justice here. No law,” Cole tells the officers, explaining that Daredevil isn’t helping by hurting. Meanwhile, Matt, who had only recently returned to being Daredevil after recuperating from an injury, accidentally causes the death of a low-level crook while sloppily breaking up a liquor store robbery. (The crook, Leo Carraro, hits his head in the scuffle and dies from head trauma.)
As a guilt-ridden Matt investigates what he suspects to be a frame job by Kingpin-turned-Mayor Wilson Fisk, Cole doggedly pursues “New York’s most wanted killer”: Daredevil.
Crime & Punishment
It’s revealed later that Cole takes on the homicide case not to bring Daredevil to justice, but to bring down a criminal. As Cole tells himself, “I don’t care about ‘justice.’ I just want to stop crime.” To that end, he upholds Mayor Fisk’s law targeting vigilantism, but Cole is determined to arrest both Daredevil and the supposedly former Kingpin of Crime.
“I don’t think people should wear masks and dole out their versions of ‘justice,’” Cole tells Fisk in the mayor’s office. “I don’t think anyone should be above the law… Mr. Mayor.”
Meanwhile, Matt learns that Fisk wasn’t involved in setting him up, and it turns out that he killed a man, albeit inadvertently. Daredevil then decides to rededicate himself to helping people and not just hurting people, and being more careful with his violence. But being a masked vigilante who takes the law into his own hands makes him a criminal, so Daredevil has to be held accountable, according to Cole.
Cole eventually cuffs and arrests Daredevil after a brutal street brawl witnessed by his fellow officers. (Half of them are cops Daredevil saved; the other half are dirty and too scared to interfere.) Cole calls out the officers for letting an unlawful vigilante run loose in Hell’s Kitchen, and goes to unmask the apprehended Daredevil before another good cop — considering Daredevil one of their own — stops him.
Blue & Red
Later, when the Governor’s office orders police precincts in Hell’s Kitchen not to respond to crimes, and a gang war breaks out between rival crime families, all hell breaks loose in the Kitchen. Cole still wants to do things by the book, but ultimately teams up with the still-outlawed Daredevil to save Hell’s Kitchen in “Inferno.” When he’s ordered by Mayor Fisk to arrest Daredevil, Cole refuses the order — only for Daredevil to hand himself over to the authorities, because Cole was right: vigilantes need to be accountable.
Cole ends up becoming one of Daredevil’s trusted allies, and as he tells the masked man in Daredevil #11, “We thought we could do better working as part of some system. But the systems infect you, don’t they? Chip away at your compass.”
At least for Cole’s counterpart in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it seems Sgt. North has been corrupted by the system.
New episodes of Daredevil: Born Again air Tuesday nights on Disney+.
