After going back to the drawing board to retool its identity, Daredevil: Born Again has yet to feel quite like its streaming predecessor, Netflix’s Daredevil. Whereas some of the 39 episodes that made up the three seasons of the Netflix series often stalled around extended and bloviated dialogue about…well, mostly nothing, the new series seems to have trimmed the majority of that narrative fat.
Episode 4 of Daredevil: Born Again, titled “Sic Semper Systema”, has plenty of dialogue but, as it turns out, not all dialogue is created equally. In what’s unquestionably one of the best scenes of the season–and quite possibly in any season of Daredevil—Jon Bernthal and Charlie Cox share an intense exchange that illuminates each of their characters’ irreparably battered psyches.
Without giving away any detailed spoilers (but if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve already figured this out anyway), each episode of the season has moved both Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk closer to breaking free of their self-imposed shackles. As Wilson’s relationship with Vanessa undergoes repairs, he moves closer and closer to being reborn as the Kingpin. Episode 4 continues the wonderful symbolism of this metamorphosis by continuing to decrease the physical space between husband and wife. Where they previously shared a meal at opposite ends of a large dining table, the couple share a much more intimate nightcap here. With Foggy dead and Karen gone, however, Matt doesn’t have an anchor to his old life and so he turns to the unlikeliest of places to get his bearings.
Nobody in his right mind, of course, would seek out someone so deranged as Frank Castle for therapy; however, Matt is not right-minded and, of course, Catholic and so he goes seeking punishment…and he gets it. In what was a verbal assault on Matt that might stand up to any of the physical beatings the man has taken over the years, Frank Castle showed no mercy on Red and gave no quarter to his still-wounded emotional state. The dialogue between the two men, which took place in Castle’s new underground lair, exposed the underpinnings that make both men tick and Bernthal and Cox put on quite a clinic. Just a couple of crazy fucks talking it out.
In digging at Murdock’s true purpose for seeking him out, Castle revealed the depth of his chaotic and tortured depravity. So thoroughly broken by trauma and tragedy, Frank’s psychotic engine continues to be revved by the belief that it is the will of his murdered son that he continue to kill all the bad guys he can lay his hands on. And while even Frank likely knows that Matt will never break as he did, he does find the breaking point of Matt’s two personalities, challenging to consider a different interpretation of the scales of justice: one that measures the court’s work against Matt’s and, in that moment, Matt gains clarity and regains purpose.
For fans of the Netflix series, this conversation between Matt and Frank should have felt incredibly familiar because it was the type of conversation that Matt used to have with Father Lantom, who was often the sounding board for Matt’s soul before being killed by Bullseye (who Frank addresses by that moniker for the first time here). “Sic Semper Systema” sees Matt walk into a new confessional and bare his soul to a new priest…and this one will hardly help him keep the devil at bay.
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