DAREDEVIL Season 1 Episode 2
Episode Title: “Cut Man”
Writer: Drew Goddard
Director: Phil Abraham
Previously on Daredevil:
Two episodes in, I’m really enjoying the way that Daredevil takes place at its own deliberate pace. The screenwriter (Drew Goddard) gets away with spending most of the episode in the apartment of a woman (whom we haven’t met before this episode) and about half of the episode takes in Josie’s Bar, a location that is well known to hardcore Daredevil comic book fans.
If not for a few outdoor sequences and the insane fight at the end, this could have been a bottle episode of Daredevil. And it still would have been a great episode even if just focused on Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Rosario Dawson’s Claire Temple. Dawson was really compelling in her role, and Goddard’s script did an excellent job of bringing her into this world.
From this point on, there are full spoilers for Daredevil episode 2!
Aside from Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), Claire is actually the most normal person in Daredevil. She doesn’t seem to be hiding anything like Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and she’s not as driven as Matt. But she emphasizes with Matt’s mission even if she thinks he’s a little crazy.
The closing moments of Daredevil episode 1 introduced the subplot of a kidnapped boy… which was apparently a trap for Matt. Goddard has enough restraint that we never see Matt fall into the trap, we only catch its aftermath when Claire’s neighbor finds a bleeding and broken Matt in the dumpster.
It takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to keep the audience (and Claire herself) from wondering why she didn’t just call the cops when she found Matt. It takes most of the episode to get to the point where Claire reveals why she’s helping Matt and I thought it was a very satisfying reason. Even at this point in his career, the people of New York are noticing “the man in the black mask.”
This wouldn’t have worked if Dawson and Cox didn’t have great chemistry while playing off of each other. Most of the episode hinges on their interactions and they were really entertaining. The other duo of the episode also had their moments. Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy go on a bar crawl that seemingly had no purpose. But it did. This was the first time that Karen or Foggy have had a chance to demonstrate a life outside of their interactions with Matt. That went a long way towards fleshing them out.
For all of Foggy’s protests that he wasn’t actually trying to date Karen, there was a definite flirtatious vibe between them. I also bought into the idea that Karen was traumatized from the two attempts on her life in the previous episode. Foggy’s attempt to help her get past that was pretty noble. Their subplot got progressively funnier as they tried to track down Matt and bring him in on their night out.
Back at Claire’s apartment, Matt ended up roping Claire into helping him interrogate one of the Russians who was looking for him. Claire is supposedly a version of Marvel’s Night Nurse, but her makeshift costume reminded me of White Tiger. This also gave us a better idea of how far Matt is willing to go. He tortures the Russian and drops him off of the roof and into the dumpster. It seems like Matt wouldn’t have lost any sleep if the Russian hadn’t survived. Perhaps this Daredevil is someone who could kill.
Eventually the information taken from the Russian led to the highlight of the episode: a brawl between the badly injured Matt and the Russian gangsters who had put the hurt on him before the episode began. It’s a beautifully barbaric sequence that just kept going and going. And I loved it.
In action films (and especially in superhero movies), the hero almost always wins any fight that he gets in. So far, Daredevil is giving us a hero who doesn’t always have to win. We didn’t see Matt lose the first fight, but there were several moments in the climactic fight sequence where Matt looked dead on his feet. Even knowing the likely outcome, that touch added suspense to the fight. Matt’s brutal triumph felt earned when he finally rescued the kid and walked over the unconscious bodies of his enemies.
The flashback sequences were also very powerful as we got to see Jack Murdock (John Patrick Hayden) defy a mobster who ordered him to take a dive as a way to inspire Young Matt (Skylar Gaertner) and as a way to provide for him by placing a hefty bet on himself. The earliest flashbacks in the episode suggested that Jack Murdock had taken a dive before. And it had to have stung Matt to overhear his father agreeing to go down early in the match.
Taking the moment to let Jack hear the crowd chanting his name was chilling. Even as he was racing to get out the arena, Jack had to stop and listen to the cheers as if he had never heard them for himself before. Of course, we all know how this ends. Jack subsequently gets killed by the mobsters, leaving Young Matt an orphan. It’s a pretty common comic book trope for the hero to lose a loved one to violence. This was more effective than most, because Jack had a decent amount of screen time in these two opening episodes. But I would have preferred more time with Jack before his untimely end.
However, that’s not really a complaint about this episode. This was a really well executed story that was exciting to watch. If the remaining 11 episodes are as good as the first two, I’m going to be very happy with Daredevil.
Click here to read CraveOnline’s review of Daredevil Episode 3!
