Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 is getting way more hype than Season 1, as it looks like Marvel Studios and the creative team behind the show have finally found their footing. Episode 4, “Gloves Off” has had a major impact on the Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom, as it finally paid off conflicts that have been brewing ever since the end of Netflix’s Daredevil series.
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Daredevil (Charlie Cox) found himself in a race against his nemesis Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) to get to Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) and his wife Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer). Daredevil wanted to protect the Fisks from being assassinated, and save Bullseye from a deadly trap – but as the episode quickly establishes, Bullseye does not need saving. At all.
Bullseye’s Diner Fight is the MCU Successor to Daredevil‘s Iconic Hallway Fight
The opening of Daredevil: Born Again‘s “Gloves Off” episode sees Dex Poindexter starting a “typical” day in NYC (to the tune of Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind”), going through his morning stretch and fitness routine, bathing, making a sensible breakfast – even helping his elderly neighbor in the apartment building. Dex wanders into a local diner, orders a milkshake, then puts in a call to Mayor Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF), claiming the Punisher is in the diner. That brings down an entire S.W.A.T. team on the place, only for the officers to realize, to their horror, that it is Bullseye they are facing. It’s too late: Dex dispatches every officer in the room using nothing but the objects and utensils from the diner tha the scoped out beforehand (forks, knives, even a toothpick and straw as a makeshift blowgun). Bullseye spares the innocent bystanders from the carnage, claiming to one horrified onlooker that he’s “one of the good guys.”
Some Marvel fans have been continuously critical of Born Again‘s stunt choreography in Season 2, after Season 1 was declared a downgrade in action from the Netflix Daredevil series. Season 2 has already upped the action quotient per episode, but fans have not been thrilled with some of the filming and production techniques. Whether that’s darky, murky, shaky, footage, of Daredevil being trapped on a ship that’s capsizing (impossibly fast), or a jailbreak sequence that uses forced POV and quick editing over more complicated martial arts choreography.
However, “Gloves Off” was a major showcase of superior action and tension on a prestige TV level. The Bullseye diner fight is just the first glimpse of that epic ride, which is why Marvel Studios wasn’t scared to release the clip of it before Episode 4 ever started streaming. Fans were so focused on worrying that the clip had spoiled a major action highlight that they were caught even more off guard when “Gloves Off” delivers two more great action set pieces afterward. That would be Daredevil and Bullseye’s brutal rematch in Dex’s apartment, and the final, climactic showdown between Daredevil, Bullseye, the Fisks, and the AVTF, at the charity boxing match Kingpin fights in.
And yet, even in an episode that ranks with the best of Netflix’s Daredevil, with action galore, this Bullseye diner fight sequence is still emerging as a fan-favorite standout moment, which will like live on in TikToks, memes and clips, long after the season is over. And please don’t take the headline to be an insult: those Netflix Daredevil hallway fights paved the way for the MCU reboot to run wild like this. All respect due.
Daredevil: Born Again is now streaming Season 2 only on Disney+.
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