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| Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com |
Can you believe
it? Daredevil has been out for a
little over three weeks now, and they’ve already announced a second season
which will be coming out around this time next year. It’s incredible just how well the series has
done. Of course, everything about this
show is so good that a second season was inevitable.
Continuing my series
of reviews of Daredevil, we come to one of my favorite episodes, because
we get to see Matt as more than a masked vigilante with preternaturally
heightened senses. We also see him as a
lawyer, and some of the tension he feels between his vigilantism and legal
career. Daredevil’s third
episode, “Rabbit in a Snowstorm,” serves to build up the tension of the show
and raise the stakes for Matt and his friends.
The episode begins in
a bowling alley. A man named Healy walks
in, asks to bowl, walks up to another patron, and starts beating him up, going
so far as to bash his face in multiple times with a bowling ball. Though from the audience’s perspective this
is a clear-cut case of pre-meditated murder, Healy claims self-defense, and
asks for a lawyer. This incident sets up
the conflict for the episode: Healy is
clearly not an innocent man, and he is also very clearly working for someone
else. It is up to Matt and Foggy to
defend him (without compromising their morals) and at the same time Matt needs
to figure out how Healy and his employer fit into the suspicious activity he’s
been investigating under the mask. I
like that this episode reminds us that Matt Murdock has a day job, and that his
activity as a vigilante does not run counter to his legal work, but rather that
he sees both as working together.
The beginning of the
episode also introduces us to Ben Urich, a reporter for the New York
Bulletin (the Daily Bugle in the comics) who is investigating
organized crime in the City. He is
interested in the same suspicious activity that Matt has been investigating,
and has even heard about the masked vigilante that has been going after the
Russians. The other key in this scene is
that Ben’s contact in organized crime is very worried about what has been going
on—and is going to be pulling out and retiring.
This helps set the scene for the season:
those who are in organized crime are worried about Kingpin and what he’s
been doing to consolidate his power in the City. However, it feels to me as though this scene
does not fit: we don’t really find out
who Ben Urich is, we never meet his contact again, and the pieces don’t get
filled in until later in the episode.
However, this may be the only misstep of the entire series, so I think I
can give it a pass!
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| Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com |
At this point the
story turns to Foggy, Matt, and Karen at the office. A stranger in a well-groomed suit—familiar to
the audience as Kingpin’s assistant Wesley—enters the office and asks to put
Nelson and Murdock on retainer. This
instantly raises Matt’s suspicions: Why
would such a powerful company (Confederated Global) be interested in hiring
their small firm? The only answer Wesley
provides is a check for a very substantial sum as payment for them to take on a
case. When Wesley leaves, Matt decides
to follow him while Foggy goes down to the precinct to talk to their new
client. By following Wesley, Matt picks
up on the sound of his pocket watch ticking, which lets him key in on who he is
for the rest of the episode, and also overhears Wesley’s conversation with
someone else in the car about having hired them for the case. Meanwhile, Foggy is at the precinct
interviewing Healy, and immediately grows suspicious when Healy tries to get
help from Foggy in crafting his statement.
Foggy is close to rejecting the case outright and leaving—after all, the
guy’s a sociopath trying to use them to get away with murder—when Matt walks in
and says that they will take the case.
We find out later that Matt only wants to take the case to use their
client to find out more about Wesley and who he works for. I really like all of the conflict this
creates between Matt and Foggy over the direction of their law firm: are they only going to defend the innocent,
or will they also defend people like Healy who are clearly guilty? Interestingly, they take the opposite stances
on the question in this episode as they took in the first episode, when Matt
was adamant that they only defend the innocent, while Foggy took the “not yet
convicted of a crime” approach to innocence.
I also enjoy the look into how Matt and Foggy operate as lawyers which
this episode provides: Running through
the facts of the case together, opening and closing arguments—the arguments
were especially interesting, particularly Matt’s closing argument in which he
states that Healy may very well be guilty, in which case justice will find him
somewhere, but that in the courtroom they can only consider the facts in
evidence. This is a fascinating
idea: Matt is essentially coming out and
saying that if the legal system cannot punish a guilty criminal, then he will
take it on himself to do so on the streets.
During the opening
argument, Matt discovers that one of the jurors is being blackmailed into
throwing the case. The night before the
closing argument, Matt follows the juror, sees her meet with the man who is
blackmailing her, and confronts him. He
forces the man to destroy everything he has on her and tell her to excuse
herself from the jury. However, we see
in a conversation between Wesley and Kingpin’s money man, Leland Owlsley, that
the blackmailed juror was only one piece of their puzzle for getting Healy out. In fact, they have more at play to get him
exonerated. That conversation is also
fascinating in that we learn that Kingpin has a limit to the number of people
he will kill—at least in such a short period of time. Because they killed so many people in the
first episode (covering up the Union Allied scandal), they need to avoid
drawing more unwanted attention by letting the legal system handle this
case. I find it interesting that Matt
refuses to let a case be decided by a partial juror—even if the juror has been
“persuaded” to decide the case in his favor.
This says something about his character:
the rule of law is far more important to him than something as selfish
as a personal legal victory.
Additionally, it shows us that the villain (Kingpin) has his
limits: He will pay a guy to bash
someone’s skull in so he can take over his company, but he doesn’t always solve
his problems with murder.
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| Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com |
After Healy is
released due to a hung jury, Matt confronts him that night to demand
information. The two of them fight—Healy
nearly succeeds in taking out Matt with a pipe—and Matt eventually subdues him
and stabs him a couple times with his own blade to force him to answer. Matt demands to know who Wesley was working
for, and Healy finally told him: “Wilson
Fisk.” When Matt instructed him to leave
town, Healy—terrified—called Matt a coward for not killing him himself and
instead sentencing him to an even worse fate at the hands of Fisk. To avoid that fate, Healy impales himself on
a fence spike, killing himself instantly.
This fight is not exactly shocking for its brutality—there are worse
fights in the earlier episodes—but the results are a shock. I like how they raise the stakes: That Healy is willing to kill himself to
avoid answering to Fisk instantly ups the stakes for the season and the coming
confrontation with Fisk because Matt is going to have to deal with Fisk, and do
so decisively, or he and everyone he cares about will be in danger of Fisk’s
retribution.
There are several
minor plots in the episode that lay the foundation for future developments. The storyline with Ben Urich expands from his
introduction by the river. We learn that
he works for the New York Bulletin as an investigative reporter looking
into the Union Allied Construction company scandal. However, his editor decides to take Ben off
that story—a decision he is unhappy about.
We next see Ben at the hospital visiting his sick wife. Unfortunately, she will need to be moved out
of the hospital, and there is little the hospital can do to keep her
there. I actually liked how these scenes
with Ben started to flesh out his character a little more. In the grand scheme of things, Ben Urich is a
minor character, but he has an important arc in this story—one which would not
be nearly as powerful if they did not take the time to introduce us to his wife
and her struggles this early in the season.
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| Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com |
The second minor plot
involves Karen and the nondisclosure agreement which Union Allied asked her to
sign. While meeting with the company
lawyer, she is concerned about signing it, and leaves, saying she will have
Matt and Foggy look it over. We next see
her visiting the widow of the man who was killed in her apartment. Karen expresses her condolences for her
husband’s death, but the wife is very short with her—we find out that she is
blaming herself for her husband’s death.
Finally, she tells Karen that she already signed the nondisclosure
agreement and suggests that Karen do the same and move on. However, this is something Karen can’t do,
leading her to go meet Ben and talk to him about it. The fact that they are laying the groundwork
for several different ways in which the heroes attempt to confront and resolve
this situation is very intriguing. It seems
like most heroes just beat up the bad guy, but the Daredevil team wants
to avoid that if they can—they will use the courts or the press if possible. I like how much this series distinguishes
itself from other superhero shows and movies.
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| Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com |
The final scene of the
episode finally introduces us to the main villain. We see Wilson Fisk standing in front of a
painting in an art gallery. A
woman—later identified as Vanessa—walks up to him to discuss it. He tells her that it makes him feel
“alone.” I love that they introduce us
to Fisk in this way: instead of
depicting him immediately as a villain, he is introduced alongside his love
interest in a non-threatening environment.
He feels “alone.” That is vastly
different from the other villains we meet.
All in all, this
episode introduces us to some new characters and furthers the plot in
meaningful ways. I think my favorite
part of the episode is how much emphasis they place on Matt’s profession as a
lawyer; so many other superheroes seem to have no other job—Cap is a
professional superhero, Iron Man blows off board meetings. Considering how important the law is to
Daredevil, it is good that we get to see him in the courtroom; I was actually a
little disappointed that this episode had the only courtroom scenes (spoiler
alert!). Perhaps in Season Two, they
will explore that aspect of the character further.
What were your
favorite parts of this episode? Do you
want to see more of Matt and Foggy’s legal practice? What are you most looking forward to from
Season Two (but avoid spoilers for the later episodes for those who haven’t
watched past episode 3)?
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