Warning: This article discusses potential Daredevil: Born Again spoilers.
To quote a wise Jedi from another Disney-owned franchise, Daredevil: Born Again was supposed to be the Chosen One. The one upcoming Disney Plus series that could really help get the MCU on TV back on track following a series of over-expensive misfires. Echo might not have been a blockbuster success, but it certainly marked Marvel turning a corner towards more grounded, street-level stories, of the kind that were so popular — and, importantly for the studio, cost-effective — on Netflix.
And Born Again has had a bumpy ride of it over its protracted production period. After holdups due to the strikes and a top-down creative overhaul, the ship appears to be sailing smoothly now as filming plows ahead on the streets of New York. As of February 2024, set photos of increasing spoiler-levels keep emerging online to whet our appetites and tease what’s to come from Matt Murdock’s streaming return. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates that the new show is about to betray our trust in the cruelest way.
Daredevil: Born Again details suggest it’s going to adapt a controversial twist Netflix wisely subverted
As Daredevil fans will know, Born Again shares its title with the seminal comic book arc of the same name from Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli. Despite this, fans have never assumed that it would closely hue to the original storyline, for one big reason: Daredevil season 3 already adapted this same plot, taking the elements of a Matt Murdock at his lowest facing a vengeful Kingpin and merging them with the hero’s battle with Bullseye from the “Guardian Devil” arc, which features a key role for Karen Page.
Ironically, the more we learn about Born Again, the more it seems like the series is doing the exact same thing all over again. Wilson Bethel is confirmed to be reprising Bullseye, with Deborah Ann Woll back as Karen. Both of these castings are being welcomed with open arms, of course, but things look a little darker when you pull all the facts together. It’s understood that both Bethel and Woll will only appear for three episodes, which suggests their storylines in Born Again are inextricably connected.
With set pics confirming Bethel’s Benjamin Pointdexter will suit up this time, fears are rising that Disney Plus, if you can believe it, is about to get even darker and more tragic than Netflix did. ‘Cause here’s the thing: in the original “Guardian Devil” arc, Bullseye kills Karen. One of the smartest decisions DD season 3 made was to play with comic book readers’ expectations by recreating the moment Karen dies — during a fight between Daredevil and Bullseye in a church — and have her survive the ordeal.
This had the dual effect of tipping its hat to the source material but without falling into one of the superhero genre’s most toxic tropes — “fridging,” as it’s called, when a supporting female character is murdered just to increase the stakes for the hero. Sadly, Marvel on Disney Plus is already no stranger to this troubling trope, having committed it before by killing off Maria Hill to further Nick Fury’s arc in Secret Invasion.
Needless to say, if Born Again is undoing the good work of the Netflix showrunners by bringing Karen back only to kill her, it would be a supreme waste and a betrayal of both the audience’s investment in these characters and the series’ own title. We want to watch these characters be born again on screen, not to die again.