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At this point in Daredevil season 2, it’s
pretty clear what is going on: Daredevil
and Elektra are facing off against a Hand conspiracy which threatens to unleash
chaos on New York (and possibly beyond).
Punisher is trying to get to the bottom of the mystery of his family’s
murder. Matt and Foggy are having major
fights over Matt’s inability to balance his vigilantism with their law
practice. Oh, and there’s also a major
conspiracy behind the scenes which Karen is attempting to sort out.
And most of these plots continue
on through “The Man in the Box.” After
this episode there will only be three left to review. Consequently, we aren’t exactly seeing the
conclusion of any plots in this episode, but from here we can see how they
might conclude.
The episode opens with the
consequences of Daredevil’s fight against the Hand at the “Farm” when he
encountered the resurrected Nobu and freed a group of teens who were being used
as blood-and-fluid donors. The police arrive
to investigate the facility, and Daredevil speaks with Brett (his police
contact) and tells him to bring the victims to Metro General where he has a
“friend” who can tend them off the records (for their safety). Brett follows Daredevil’s instructions and
brings them to Metro General, where Claire and a few other nurses set the
victims up in a wing that is being remodeled.
I think my favorite aspect of this is that yet again we get to see how
Claire works under “unusual” circumstances, such as using cold sodas in place
of cold compresses. She also pushes Matt
and questions what he does, making him a better person and a better hero.
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While he is at the hospital, Matt
hears over Brett’s radio that Frank escaped from custody (in the previous
episode). This puts the entire city into
a panic—particularly the police and D.A. Reyes.
Reyes calls Foggy, Matt, and Karen to the courthouse with police escort
because she thinks that they might have some idea what is going on. Of course they don’t, but that doesn’t stop
Foggy from expecting that Reyes will try to blame them! This is when Matt puts the pieces together
that Frank was on the same cellblock as Fisk—there’s got to be a connection
there. Before he can act on this
information, they go to see Reyes in her office, and she finally lays out exactly
what happened. It turns out that she was
responsible for the Central Park debacle, which was a sting operation intended
to capture the “Blacksmith,” a drug kingpin.
She made the call not to clear the park before the sting because she
thought it would tip someone off. The
undercover officer who infiltrated one of the three gangs was killed in the
sting, and Reyes did indeed orchestrate a cover-up of the blown sting—covering
up both the Castle family murders and the killed officer. And now it’s all blowing up in her face.
Someone evidently placed an X-Ray
of a skull in Reyes’ daughter’s backpack, which made her panic and send her
daughter upstate to get her away from Frank.
However, the daughter is not the target:
it’s Reyes. Matt hears a gun cocking
and tackles Karen to the floor a split-second before bullets start flying
through Reyes’ office window. Foggy gets
hit by a bullet, but Reyes takes about a dozen in the chest. Foggy of course gets taken to Metro General
to recover from his gunshot, while Matt goes to start tracking down Frank since
it looks a lot like a Punisher hit.
However, before he leaves he stops to talk to A.D.A. Towers, who
suspected the cover-up, though it started before he went to work for
Reyes. He is rattled by watching his
boss murdered in front of him and is planning to skip town for a while. The attack on the courthouse was quite well
done. It answered all of our
questions—it was a ton of exposition—but it didn’t feel like a straight-up
exposition dump because Reyes actually had a compelling motivation for
revealing everything.
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Matt next goes to visit Fisk in
prison to find out what he had to do with Frank’s escape from prison. However, it doesn’t take long for Matt to
realize just how powerful Fisk really is in the prison. At first Fisk plays dumb, claiming that he
had nothing to do with Frank’s escape, but the moment Matt threatens to have
Vanessa’s visa revoked so she can never return to the city, Fisk shows his
cards by breaking his handcuffs and attacking Matt. And in so doing he reveals to Matt that he is
in the process of rebuilding his power in prison. So much for Matt’s faith in the legal system
to punish criminals like Fisk. So much
for capturing the criminal and letting the system take care of him.
This crisis of conscience really
drives Matt for the rest of the episode.
He spends the evening on the hospital roof to protect the Farm victims
in case the Hand comes and tries to finish them off. While there, Claire meets him on the roof and
again tries to convince him to stop trying to be a martyr. He’s trying to do everything on his own, and
he’s trying to push aside anything and anyone that could distract him from his
mission. He even refuses to visit Foggy,
who’s in the hospital below. That night
Matt’s vigilance finally pays off as a group of Hand ninjas attacks the
hospital, shooting grappling hooks onto the roof and climbing the walls. The episode ends with Matt gearing up to meet
the ninjas while the Farm victims stand over the dead Gibson and watch the
grappling hooks being shot past their window.
That last part is especially horrific as the five “victims” look like
zombies standing with blank expressions while the world spins around them.
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Next we turn to Karen, who has
the next major plot in the episode.
Following the attack on the courthouse, Karen immediately goes back to
the Bulletin to talk to Ellison.
Interestingly she still doesn’t think that Frank Castle was the shooter
at the courthouse (she’s pretty much alone in that), but she recognizes that if
Frank was the killer, then M.E. Tepper is probably his next target. And sure enough, when they arrive at Tepper’s
apartment they find that it is already a crime scene: someone shot it up with a high-powered rifle
and killed Tepper. Looking at the crime
scene, Karen doesn’t think that it is Frank’s “style,” but Ellison seems to
disagree. Ellison makes the decision
that they need to step back for now and let the NYPD know who else might be a
target. But first he sends Karen home
with a pair of officers to protect her.
At first she doesn’t want to accept it because it’s different treatment
than Ben Urich received, but Ellison is still feeling guilty for not doing more
to keep Ben safe when Fisk went after him in season 1.
The police officers search
Karen’s apartment, but they don’t find anything. That’s because the threat isn’t inside
the apartment but outside. Frank is in
the hallway and knocks the two officers out before entering Karen’s apartment
while she is getting together their Punisher files. When she hears Frank she pulls a .380 handgun
out of her dresser and points it at him.
He tells her that he wasn’t the one who killed Reyes and Tepper, but
she’s still not entirely convinced. That
changes pretty quickly when Frank tackles her to the ground just before someone
starts shooting into the apartment. She
now believes him, and they escape together.
I really like Karen’s plot this
season. She is not a damsel in distress
(even if both Daredevil and the Punisher pulled her out of the way of a
high-powered rifled in the same episode); she is her own person and her
investigation is actually important to the season as she is the one putting the
pieces together for Frank.
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| Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com |
The final minor plot in this
episode involves Elektra in the process of leaving the City. She is chartering a plane to leave the
country when a man strikes up a conversation with her at the airport. However, this man attempts to kill her with a
pair of sai, which she takes away from him and uses to kill him. When she asks why he did it, he tells her
that Stick sent him to kill her. Why did
Stick try to have Elektra killed? We
don’t find that out until later.
This is definitely not a bad
episode, and I really like how it messes with Matt psychologically. Not only did they discover that the D.A. has
been covering up a blown sting operation that cost lives, but they also
discover that the prison system isn’t even close to containing criminals. How can Matt claim to uphold the system when
the system itself is so flawed? If this
is the case, then it would stand to reason that the best way for Matt to ensure
that justice is in fact being served is to take matters into his own hands even
more than he already does as Daredevil.
Maybe the Punisher has the right idea.
After all, there’s no way that the criminals that Frank kills can come
back and cause more problems!
What did you think of this episode? Do you like Daredevil more when he is
balancing both sides of his life, or when it’s all in shambles? Let me know in the comments!
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