Daredevil Showrunner Suggests Major Character Could Return: ”You Can’t Do This Show” Without Them

[Warning: This article contains major spoilers from Daredevil: Born Again episode 1, “Heaven’s Half Hour.”] Reports of Foggy Nelson’s death may have been premature. Fans were blindsided when Marvel Studios’ revival of Daredevil killed off Foggy (Elden Henson) of Nelson, Murdock & Page just minutes into the series premiere, shattering any hope of a true resurrection of the series that was cancelled at Netflix in 2018. After all, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) heard Foggy’s slowing heartbeat, and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) was a blood-covered witness to Foggy’s final moments as his heart stopped beating — gunned down by Bullseye (Wilson Bethel).

It’s not unlike Foggy’s apparent death in the comics. Matt’s heightened senses heard his best friend’s beating heart as he was stabbed to death by a prison inmate, only for it to be revealed that Foggy was resuscitated and relocated into FBI witness protection (a turn of events that Matt was in the dark about for months). In fact, fans think they’ve uncovered a clue hinting at the possibility someone faked Foggy’s death.

RELATED: Making the Case For Foggy Nelson’s Return in Daredevil: Born Again

Marvel’s Head of Television, Brad Winderbaum, has already confirmed that Henson will be back for Daredevil: Born Again season 2, although it’s unclear how. Would Foggy return in flashbacks? Would it be an Elektra-style resurrection by the Hand? Or would the show pull the old trope of a long-lost twin brother? The answer — like the devil — is in the details.

Even before the series premiered, showrunner Dario Scardapane revealed that, in the version developed by original showrunners and series co-creators Chris Ord and Matt Corman, Foggy and Karen were missing from Born Again despite the ending promise of Daredevil‘s third and final season: the formation of the Nelson, Murdock & Page law firm.

Not only was there no Foggy, but his death would have occurred off-screen.

“It was really weird,” Scardapane told GamesRadar+. “It was determined before I came on. But unfortunately in the original version, [Foggy’s death] occurred off-screen and I was like, if something that intense and horrible and earth-shattering is gonna happen, we’ve gotta feel it and we’ve gotta see the ripple effect it’s gonna have on Karen and Matt and the world … There’s only a few things that could have made him question whether to put down the mask, whether to kind of sublimate who he is. And that was one of them. So we didn’t take the choice lightly.”

“In a way we amped it up. We embedded it into this massive action sequence,” he added of the obviously-reshot first episode. “Your attention is grabbed, you have this heartbeat going, and then when it happens, I think you should walk away with it like, ‘oh my God, everything has just changed. Everything is different now.’”

As Scardapane was brought on to rework the series during a creative overhaul in 2023, there were elements from the old version that had to be retained due to developments in the nine-episode season — namely Foggy’s death.

But as Scardapane noted in a pre-premiere interview in February, “That was actually one of the first things I said to the bosses: You can’t do this show without Karen and Foggy,” he told Empire Magazine. “They’re Matt’s family. They’re the heart of his world. You can’t take them out without explaining why, and if that explanation doesn’t ring true, don’t take them out.”

The version of the series predating the creative reboot “was much less the world we knew, and more trying to blaze a new trail,” Scardapane said, “but in doing so, they’d forgotten some things that really were necessary to the engine of the story.”

That means Karen and Foggy. “I was willing to lose a job over this one,” Scardapane said. “Because season 3 of the Netflix show ended with a dream, with the names on that napkin. If you don’t pay that off, you’re not giving your characters context. You can’t ignore that dream.”

So, how do you pay off Foggy, Matt and Karen’s dream of Nelson, Murdock & Page if you kill one-third of the trio not ten minutes into the first episode? Do you “kill off” a character whose fate is ingrained into the season, only to have Foggy Nelson be born again? That remains to be seen.

New episodes of Daredevil: Born Again premiere Tuesdays on Disney+.