With the debut of Secret Invasion episode 2 earlier this week, fans have pieced together a subtle clue that seems to legitimize at least one aspect of a previous Marvel show whose canonicity in the MCU has been in dispute — Daredevil.
As one intrepid Reddit user pointed out on the r/MarvelStudios subreddit, the latest Secret Invasion episode featured a throwback to the fictional news station FXN. The reason this is significant is that it was a news channel first featured in the Netflix show Daredevil back in 2018 — and doesn’t originate from any comic book.
Another Reddit user claimed FXN was also featured in WandaVision in the background on some TV monitors.
What’s somewhat strange about this is the fact that Daredevil and all of the other Defenders-verse shows that first debuted on Netflix have a nebulous status when it comes to their canonicity in the broader MCU. Only vague references to “The Battle of New York” are made in the shows, but no references to Ultron or Thanos are ever made, for instance.
Complicating things further, Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page — who appears in the scene where we first saw FXN in Daredevil — won’t be returning for the Disney Plus revival Daredevil: Born Again. And Matt Murdock himself, Charlie Cox, has also clarified Born Again will be a full-blown reboot of the series, rather than a continuation.
Fans of Woll and Elden Henson’s Foggy Nelson — another ousted actor — will have to hold their breath to see if the characters are merely being recast or written out of Born Again entirely.
One actor who is confirmed to be returning for Born Again, alongside Cox, is Vincent D’Onofrio, whose Kingpin character has already had a cameo in the Disney Plus show Hawkeye. D’Onofrio told a fan on Twitter that Born Again will be “very different” and “brand new” compared to the Netflix show. Of course, there’s always the multiverse to explain away any incongruencies between the MCU and the Defenders-verse.