After two breathless installments in a row – “Stick” and “Shadows in the Glass” – Daredevil had to ease off the throttle just a little bit, to allow it and the viewers some breathing room. (Of course, Daredevil being the master of the cold open, “Speak of the Devil” still managed to start out with a vicious brawl between Daredevil and a mysterious hooded figure, which we’ll get to in time.) That said, “Speak of the Devil” still managed to squeeze in some more origin story – tactfully, though, like this show often does. “Devil” spent a lot of its running time exploring Matt Murdock’s Catholicism, which so richly informs the comic book character, but has been mostly absent in the show, save for Matt’s confession to Father Layton in the first episode.
With the exception of the aforementioned fight, “Devil” played like an adaptation of a crime novel by Lawrence Block or Michael Connelly. It was aggressively grim, and trained its eye on heavy, Catholic themes like guilt and rage, both of which coalesce to make Daredevil such an effective crime fighter. Matt and Father Layton talk about the existence of the devil, and Layton lays out the show’s central ethos regarding the same subject: as a physical being, the devil’s existence is debatable, but as a concept, able to be embodied by anyone of the right mood or temperament, well, the devil is very much alive in Hell’s Kitchen.
The devil has long been renowned for his sinister machinations, and in “Devil,” Wilson Fisk shows how far he’s willing to go to lure Daredevil into his clutches. He pays a junkie to rob and kill Ms. Cardenas, and while Foggy is stunned and Karen weeps into his suit jacket, Matt’s only reaction is tightening his knuckles around his cane. He goes on a rampage tracking down Cardenas’s killer, finally finding him in a heroin den. After beating the shit out of him (I think my Daredevil reviews cause me to use the phrase “beating the shit out of” way more than I thought I would), Matt gets a location: a warehouse on the waterfront. Blinded by rage – ugh, sorry, no pun intended – Matt goes, and it’s there that he meets Nobu, the man in red.
It’s good that Daredevil finally gave Nobu something to do, because as Fisk points out several times, he’s become extraneous. Leland handles the numbers, Gao handles the product, the Russians handle(d) distribution, and Nobu handles…what, exactly? Well, I can tell you one thing, he certainly handles himself well in a fight. (Nailed it.)
Once again, the pain inflicted on characters in Daredevil – especially on the title character, whom the show never sees fit to spare – is visceral and hard to watch. As Nobu strikes out at Daredevil with a blade on a chain, the cuts he inflicts look like nothing less than the wounds of Christ. It’s a brutal, vicious fight, and the show dares you to look away as Nobu drags Daredevil by the blade secured in his stomach. The violence on this show never feels pulpy or gratuitous, which is amazing considering the sheer intensity of it. Rather it feels like an extension of the world; Matt Murdock lives in a city that hits as hard as he does.
Ultimately, Daredevil dispatches Nobu by setting him on fire, just in time for Fisk to enter. There’s another fight, but DD isn’t at the top of his game, obviously, and Fisk beats him half to death before ordering Wesley to kill him. (That’s a pretty good example of movie logic: if Fisk wanted Daredevil dead, which he clearly does, why deny himself the satisfaction of finishing him off?) DD is able to escape and makes it back to his apartment, which is where shit truly hits the fan.
It was just a matter of time before one of Matt’s core group of friends discovered his secret (my money was on Karen). So when Foggy drunkenly stumbles into Matt’s apartment, you know what’s coming. (Side note: why does Foggy always go to Matt’s when he’s drunk? He treats his friend like a booty call who he doesn’t respect. If Matt could see, he’d probably have several 3 AM texts from Foggy reading “You up?”) Foggy unmasks Daredevil, and Eldon Henson does his best facial acting of the entire season, as he has to immediately reconcile his friend and the man he denounced as a “terrorist cop-killer” as one and the same. It’s a solid ending to a great episode that gets better and better the more you think about it.
A Few Thoughts
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Look, I realize that all my Daredevil reviews have been four or four and a half stars, but in my defense, this show is really fucking good.
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Karen can drink.
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Nice touch: Matt pretending to be blinder than he is when meeting Urich and Fisk.
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Speaking of Matt’s meeting with Fisk, I thought it was incredibly well-done. Mercifully bereft of the ham-handed subtext that most shows would inject into a scene like this. Fisk looked askance at Matt, but there was none of that bullshit “Are you sure we haven’t me?” that lesser shows would utilize.
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