Welcome to the world of “Daredevil,” where Catholic guilt, hallway fights and philosophical pondering reign supreme and the parallel journeys of Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk unfold, leading one to become the red-suited hero known as Daredevil and the other to shed his heroic aspirations and embrace the dark mantle as the Kingpin.
The first season charts those journeys in tandem, introducing us to Charlie Cox’s Murdock, an up-and-coming lawyer who was blinded as a child in an accident. But that accident also gifted him with super-sensory powers that allow Murdock to take justice into his own hands outside the law after working hours. Though he will become Marvel’s horned hero Daredevil, the Man Without Fear, he spends most of the first season as “The Man in the Mask,” donning a pedestrian black outfit including a black mask pulled over his eyes.
Murdock works with his best friend and fellow lawyer, Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), who does not know about his partner’s after-hours activities. Together, they take on the case of Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), who is framed for murder after discovering corruption at her job and subsequently becomes a close friend and colleague. As a team, the three of them launch the scrappy law firm Nelson & Murdock — and get entangled in a massive conspiracy threatening all of Hell’s Kitchen.
At the center of that conspiracy is Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), a rich and powerful magnate who is also the heart of a criminal cabal that includes The Hand co-founder and Hell’s Kitchen drug lord Madame Gao (Wai Ching Ho); another high-ranking Hand member, Nobu (Peter Shinkoda); financier and Fisk moneyman Leland Owlsley (Bob Gunton); and Russian mafiosos and human traffickers Anatoly and Vladimir Ranskahov (Gideon Emery and Nikolai Nikolaeff).
Set in the aftermath of “The Avengers,” which wreaked destruction on New York City, “Daredevil” Season 1 finds Fisk and his cabal looking to get rich off of the city’s reconstruction. They’re also pushing out any so-called undesirables in a sweeping gentrification that will remake Hell’s Kitchen in Fisk’s vision. He wants to tear it all down to build a better tomorrow, no matter who gets hurt. At the start of the season, he thinks of himself as a ruthless hero willing to do what it takes to save the city, a dark mirror of Murdock’s fight to root out the elements dragging Hell’s Kitchen down. But by season’s end, he sheds his aspirations of heroism and embraces his violent streak, while Matt suits up and becomes the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.
But that’s the short version. If you’re looking for the details, read on!
The Battlin’, Martyr’n Murdocks
The first few episodes, especially Episode 101, “Into the Ring,” heavily focus on Matt’s backstory; particularly as it relates to his father, faith and his deep-seeded need to keep swinging no matter how many hits he takes. Matt was nine years old when he saved an old man’s life and wound up blinded in an accident that spilled toxic chemicals on his eyes — it also granted him tremendously powerful other senses. After he learns to hone it, he can hear a heartbeat across a room, smell chemical changes in your body and basically sonar detect the world around him, thanks to general super-sensitive senses — and bad sheets “feel like sandpaper,” poor thing.
Back to his father: Jack Murdock was a boxer called “Battlin’ Jack Murdock,” who was known for never giving up no matter how much he got knocked down. He didn’t win very often, but he sure could take a punch. In fact, he was a pro at taking Ls — Jack would take money from a criminal, Roscoe Sweeney, to fix matches and lose his fights, and Matt would stitch him up after. Not too long after Matt lost his sight, Jack lost his life when he refused to go down for a paycheck. “Just once I want Matty to hear people cheer for his old man. Just once,” he explained. In fact, he had a friend place a massive bet the other way and put all the winnings in an account for Matt, making plans for the boy to be taken in at a church, knowing he would likely die.
Indeed, Jack was beaten and killed after the match, and Matt was subsequently raised in a Catholic orphanage (where it’s hinted that Matt’s long-gone absentee mother resides), setting him up with a thorny savior complex and a lifetime of his own martyrdom and self-flagellating on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. Matt used the funds from his dad to go to law school, and he used his heightened senses to become an absolute badass under the tutelage of a real grumpy mentor, but we’ll get to that.
The Man in the Mask Hunts The Boogeyman of Hell’s Kitchen
In the present, Matt works at his nascent law firm Nelson & Murdock by day, while fisticuffs-ing his way through the criminal element of Hell’s Kitchen at night. These are some of Matt’s earliest and messiest vigilante moments — he doesn’t even have his signature Daredevil suit yet, just a signature black mask pulled over his eyes.
Matt discovers a human-trafficking operation at the docks and beats his way through the criminal element to set the women free. Naturally, that means he just interfered with a pretty serious criminal organization. Specifically, he impaired the business of the Russian brothers in Fisk’s cabal, Anatoly and Vladimir, creating a rift between them and the Kingpin-to-be while bringing Matt closer to discovering his true nemesis.
In Episode 102, “Cut Man,” Matt rescues a kidnapped boy who was to be sold to the highest bidder. Local nurse Claire Temple fishes him out of a dumpster and tends to his injuries after he falls for a trap the Russians set up for him. When a man comes looking for him, Matt tortures him for information about the boy’s location, eventually with Claire’s help — something that shocks her almost as much as Matt’s claim that he does all this, including the violence, because he enjoys it. The pair do strike up a connection that briefly turns romantic, but Claire never really moves past that confession, and when she says she can’t fall for someone who’s so close to becoming what he hates, he tells her she shouldn’t.
But they make an effective duo and Matt gets the location and goes to rescue to boy, leading to the first of the Hallway fights that would become a signature of the series — and the one that was most challenging to shoot as a true oner, shot in a single take without editing tricks, making clever use of doorways and camera turns to switch between Cox and his stunt double. (You can watch the whole scene for yourself in the video above.) The more criminals Matt busts up, the closer he gets to finding the mysterious man behind it all — a man with a secret identity of his own, who no one dares mention by name.
Karen Page’s Deadly Paper Trail
Meanwhile, Matt’s day job also brings him closer to Fisk. Karen Page is a secretary at Union Allied Construction, Wilson Fisk’s construction firm, where he seizes the opportunity to get a piece of the money flooding into the rebuilding of NYC after the events of “The Avengers.” Fisk also used Union Allied to launder money from his criminal enterprises, and Karen unwittingly becomes a target for Fisk after she discovers flagrant, massive sum discrepancies in the company pension fun.
After her manager laughs it off, she tries to talk to someone from the legal department about what she found, but no sooner do the two meet up for drinks than she wakes up back in her apartment, standing over his dead body, covered in his blood, with no idea of what happened. Fisk — and his trusty and ever-loyal assistant James Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore) — frame her for the murder to silence her. But when Nelson & Murdock take her case, Matt listens to her heartbeat and knows she’s telling the truth. He also knows she’s lying when she says she didn’t keep a copy of the pension fund, both of which help lead him ever closer to finding out Fisk’s identity.
After her arrest, Fisk threatens a guard’s family to compel him to stage Karen’s suicide in the jail cell, but he fails. After she returns home, Fisk sends an assassin, who Matt fights, beats and delivers to the steps of the New York Bulletin, along with Karen’s copy of the pension files. Once esteemed journalist Ben Urich (Vondie Curtis-Hall) writes a piece with the findings, exposing Union Allied, but not Fisk, thanks to the handiwork of Wesley, who sprinkles some mega-corporation fairy dust on the crisis (liquidations, acquisitions, etc., etc.) and re-directs the assets.
Now, that everything Karen knows is already public, she’s no longer a target (though she and the widow of her dead colleague are required to sign NDAs) and she starts working for Nelson & Murdock as their secretary.
Art, Romance and The Kingpin’s Queen
Meanwhile, we get to know Fisk a little more, and he is a surprisingly soft-spoken, reclusive man compared to his flamboyantly criminal counterpart in the comics. But, like Matt is still the Man in the Mask and not quite Daredevil, Fisk hasn’t fully become the Kingpin yet. We see his softest side when he meets an elegant, assertive gallery owner, Vanessa Marianna (Ayelet Zurer), who sells him a painting (“Rabbit in a Snowstorm” — the name of Episode 203 that introduces her, and an item that returns throughout the series).
She also seemingly wins his heart before the sale is even closed, and the pair spark up an initially unsteady romance that grows into a candid, committed partnership. Vanessa is no fool, she sees Wilson for what he is and seems, in fact, to admire him for it, the same way she admires the complexities in the pieces she sells at the gallery. She believes him when he tells her that by his side is “the safest place you could ever be” and watches in awe when he launches a multi-target bombing that leaves Hell’s kitchen quaking in the aftermath.
Goodnight, You Princes of Moscow
Conflict between Wilson and the Russian brothers in his employ simmers throughout the first third of Season 1 and boils over in Episodes 4 and 5. In Episode 104, “In the Blood,” we glimpse the backstory of the pair, who escaped from a torturous prison by crafting shivs out of a dead cellmate’s bones and left to live the high life in America. That’s where they got into business with Fisk, and unknowingly sealed their fate. In need of Fisk’s assistance to deal with Murdock’s continued attacks on their criminal business, Anatoly goes to prostrate himself before the criminal kingpin on their behalf, while his prouder, more volatile brother stays behind.
Unfortunately, he arrives in the middle of Fisk’s date with Vanessa, an intrusion Fisk greets with staggering violence. In one of the show’s trademark scenes that established the uniquely dark tone of Netflix’s street-level corner of the MCU, Fisk smashes Anatoly’s head in a car door in a graphic sequence that left blood, brains and ultimately a headless stump seared into the minds of viewers. Not to mention the so-quotable sound of D’Onofrio bellowing, “YOU EMBARRASSED ME IN FRONT OF VANESSA.”
It’s the first glimpse we get of the true Wilson Fisk to be, the blood-thirsty and shockingly volatile big bad who will take it all over and become the Kingpin of Hell’s Kitchen. Fisk has Wesley frame the Man in the Mask for Anatoly’s death and deliver what remains of his body to Vladimir, who plots to go to war against the masked vigilante. While Vladimir is distracted, Fisk plots his true attack — targeting the entire Russian enterprise with four bombs throughout Hell’s Kitchen. The whole city is rattled, including Foggy and Karen, the former of which is wounded (non-critically) in the blast.
He also tasks all his in-pocket cops on the force with finding and killing Dimitri, but Matt arrives on the scene in his mask first, ready to fight. In episode 105, “World on Fire” Fisk launches the attack. explores the aftermath of the bombing and finds Matt dragging Vladimir to a building, cauterizing his wounds and eventually getting Leland Owlsley’s name before Vladimir’s death.
But not before Fisk makes the Man in the Mask Public Enemy No. 1. In Episode 106, “Condemned,” the vigilante is once again framed by Fisk, this time for the bombings, as well as an attack on the cops. Vladimir also becomes one of the many people who challenge Matt’s belief that he can be the Man in the Mask and fight evil without resorting to killing someone, telling him, “The moment you put on the mask you got into cage with animals.” It’s a refrain we’ll hear over and over again throughout “Daredevil’s” run, the core moral struggle at the center of the series.
I Can’t Be Your Father Figure
Before driving the main plot to its conclusion in the final stretch of episodes, the first season of “Daredevil” spends some time ruminating on that moral struggle, and no one has been telling Matt to toughen up and climb off of his high horse longer than Stick.
A not-so-friendly face from Matt’s past, he returns to Hell’s Kitchen in Episode 107, “Stick,” titled after the hard-ass former mentor (played by Scott Glenn). Stick, who is also blind and able to kick a phenomenal amount of ass, arrived in Matt’s life shortly after his father’s death, when he was struggling to adjust to his blindness and the increasing intensity of his other senses. A glimpse at that past shows us that Stick briefly trained Matt to become a hardened fighter when he was a child, but cut him off after Matt made him a sentimental gift from the paper on the first ice cream cones they shared.
“I needed a soldier. You wanted a father,” Stick growls in the present day, where he and Matt fight and bicker, and he says he’s come to save New York from an ugly death. He brings Matt with him on a mission to destroy “the Black Sky” before it’s unleashed on the city, promising to help take out Fisk if Matt assists him. Matt agrees on one condition — no killing — and Stick agrees … Or at least he pretends to. Because when the Black Sky turns out to be a human child, Stick doesn’t hesitate to kill him despite Matt’s best efforts, sparking a knockdown-dragout between the two where Matt gets the upper hand over his mentor.
At the end of the episode, Stick returns to the Chaste (though we don’t know that’s what it’s called or any of the context yet) and assures Stone that the Black Sky is no longer a threat. Stone says Matt needs to be ready when the “doors open.” So yeah, Stick is a bit of a detour and a lot of Season 2 set-up, but he also hammers home the harsh realities with which Vladimir so viscerally prodded Matt. Or, as Stick succinctly puts it, “Someday, it’s gonna come down to you or the other guy.”
On the flipside, we get some insight into the internal hellscape of Wilson Fisk when Episode 108, “Shadows in the Glass,” takes us back to Fisk’s childhood. Like Matt, Fisk’s father died when he was young, leaving behind a thorny legacy of violence and throwing punches — but it’s all dark and poisoned with the critical difference that Fisk killed his own father, bashing his head in with a hammer to protect his mother.
Mrs. Cardenas and the Limits of the Law
One of the other core sticky questions that “Daredevil” always grapples with is just how much justice can be served through the justice system. Nobody demonstrates that better in Season 1 than Elena Cardenas (Judith Delgado), the kindly tenant of a rent-controlled building that winds up in Wilson Fisk’s crosshairs.
A beloved longtime resident in her building, Mrs. Cardenas comes to Nelson & Murdock seeking legal help after her landlord, who wants to evict his tenants illegally, sent “repair men” into the building who were actually there to destroy the water, gas, walls and general livability of the premises. Foggy and Karen get particularly close to Mrs. Cardenas, helping her rebuild as best they can while the case takes its time. However, Wilson Fisk is the one who wants the apartment building, as a part of his plan to reinvent Hell’s Kitchen (Karen was even on the right track, trying to find a connection between Mrs. Cardenas’ landlord and Union Allied). When Mrs. Cardenas continues to push back, rallying the community to refuse a proposed buyout, Fisk pays a drug dealer to stab her to death in Episode 109, “Speak of the Devil.”
It’s a heartbreaking blow to the Nelson & Murdock team on a personal level, but Mrs. Cardenas’ death fundamentally underscores the limits of what Matt can accomplish with his public-facing pursuit of justice — and intimately re-frames the stakes of continuing to let Fisk live.
Kill or Be Killed: Matt’s Ideals Meet Nobu’s Steel
In “Speak of the Devil,” Matt’s commitment to his no-kill policy is also put to the ultimate test in a no-holds-barred deathmatch against Nobu, the extremely lethal high-ranking Hand member who works with Fisk. One of the finest episodes in the series, much of it is spent on a sprawling discourse of faith and philosophy between Matt and Rev. Father Paul Lantom (Peter McRobbie), his trusted confidant.
Matt has a lot of devils on his shoulder in the no-kill debate, but Father Lantom is one of the few angels, and a powerfully eloquent one at that, telling Matt about the horrors he witnessed during the genocide in Darfur. He essentially states the thesis for Matt Murdock’s character, telling him:
“Another man’s evil does not make you good. Men have used the atrocities of their enemies to justify their own throughout history. So the question you have to ask yourself is, are you struggling with the fact that you don’t wanna kill this man but have to — Or that you don’t have to kill him but want to?”
Matt’s commitment is once again tested in his brutal fight with Nobu, which leaves him critically cut up, leading him to accidentally light Nobu on fire when a misdirected blow from his baton sends sparks flying into spilled gasoline. It’s a long, bloody fight scene that stitches through the whole episode. It’s also a total set up by Fisk, who shows up as Nobu burns, revealing he was hoping they would take each other out. At least the Man in the Mask handled his next target for him, claiming another piece of the Hell’s Kitchen pie for himself and further clearing his route to unquestioned power. Fisk beats on the already wounded vigilante, but Matt dives out of a window before he can kill him.
Avocados at Odds: Foggy Finds Out
There’s yet another major revelation in “Speak of the Devil’ (I did mention that it’s one of the best!), right at the tail end of the episode — Foggy finally learns that Matt is the Man in the Mask, who he firmly believed was a terrorist.
The real fallout from the long-awaited revelation comes in Episode 110, “Nelson v. Murdock,” which both takes viewers back to the best friends’ origins in college and finds Foggy learning the full extent of all the secrets Matt’s been keeping from him all these years.
Foggy basically cross-examines his friend, who lays it all bare for the first time, from the extent of his sensory powers (Foggy is understandably horrified to realize Matt has known every time he’s ever lied) to a confession that he went to the docs to kill Fisk, he just didn’t succeed.
Foggy breaks off their friendship, Matt is devastated and a beloved reaction gif is born.
Vanessa Gets Poisoned, Karen Kills Wesley and Kingpin’s Fury Is Unleashed
While Matt wages his internal battle to hold onto his soul, Fisk also gets shaken to his foundations by two devastating occurrences in Episode 111, “The Path of the Righteous.” First, Vanessa is rushed to the hospital after being poisoned and almost killed at a Gala. While he’s tending to her in the hospital, unwilling to leave her bedside, Wesley receives a call from Fisk’s mother and learns that Karen and Ben Urich paid her a visit. He kidnaps Karen and “offers” her a job at gunpoint, threatening to kill everyone she’s ever cared about if she doesn’t comply and convince Ben Urich to stop digging on Fisk.
When he gets a call from Fisk, dutiful Wesley, of course, immediately reaches to answer, giving Karen the opportunity to take the gun. He tries to bluff that it’s unloaded, but Karen asks, “Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?” and unloads the cartridge into his chest, killing him and raising some real questions about her past.
Already flustered by the attack on Vanessa, Fisk is wholly undone when he finds Wesley’s body, mourning the loss of his friend and determined to go on the war path. Enraged and distraught, an increasingly unhinged Fisk emerges, far from the gentle giant image he projects in his newly launched public persona. He lashes out more violently and uncontrolled than ever. Adding to the whirlwind, Fisk learns that Wesley’s last call was to Fisk’s hidden-away mother, suggesting she’s been compromised.
When Fisk discovers that Leland and Madame Gao are responsible for Vanessa’s poisoning, he spirals further, fully unmoored from the last of his powerful co-conspirators who might have constrained him. Gao is already on the run, but when Leland adds insult to injury by trying to extort him, Fisk kills another one of the big fish in Hell’s Kitchen’s criminal pond, throwing Leland down an elevator shaft.
Ben Urich and the Limits of the Truth
As Mrs. Cardenas’ story represented the limits of the law in the pursuit of justice, so does Ben Urich’s depict another institution failing under the pressure of Fisk’s corruption — the power of the free press and the truth.
A veteran journalist, Urich spends most of the season investigating Fisk in one way or another, whether he’s digging for the new top boss with his old crime contacts, working with Karen on the Union Allied case or listening to the masked vigilante’s perspective when no one else will. He almost gets a story up revealing Fisk’s identity, but Fisk beats him to the punch with his public debut as a the benefactor of Hell’s Kitchen.
That failure is echoed in the second half of the season when Urich fails to finish writing his story and publish it to the internet before Fisk comes knocking at his door. Urich wanted to write his story for his outlet, The New York Bulletin, but his editor-in-chief squashed it. When Urich accuses him of being on Fisk’s payroll, he gets fired on the spot. Unfortunately, there was indeed a Fisk plant in the office who knows everything Urich was working on and sends Fisk straight to him.
Urich also spends the season trying to care for his wife, with the walls closing in around him when she loses her space and the hospital and the paper fires him. But as his wife reminds him during one of her lucid moments, you can reach a lot of people on the internet. However, Urich and Karen crossed a line by tracking down and talking to Fisk’s mother, learning that he killed his father as a young boy. Before Urich can publish his expose, Fisk comes to his home and strangles Ben Urich to death at the end of Episode 112, “The Ones We Leave Behind.”
It’s also another devasting blow to Matt, Karen and Foggy — and another player pulled off the board in Fisk’s big power grab, leaving Matt with one less above-board avenue in his fight against Fisk.
The Devil Gets His Suit
As the season comes to a close, Matt hunts down the man making Fisk’s bulletproof suits — Melvin Potter, a good-natured gifted inventor who Matt quickly realizes is only helping Fisk to protect his beloved, Betsy. Matt convinces Melvin to make him the Daredevil suit, which he believes will become a symbol to the city.
He also sets into motion his final play against Fisk, with some help from Foggy, who implores him to use the law and not just his fists to bring him down. Working together in Episode 113, “Daredevil,” they find one of Fisk’s corrupt cops before the nascent Kingpin can have him killed and turn him over to law enforcement to testify. That leads to the arrest of Fisk’s criminal cabal, including Fisk himself, who proposes to a recovering Vanessa as he’s being dragged out the door.
However, as Mrs. Cardenas taught us, there are limits to the law when dealing with a man like Fisk and it’s not long before a troupe of armed mercenaries break Fisk out of FBI custody. But Matt is ready. He sees the news, suits up and heads up to stop Fisk himself. They have a big showdown in the streets, each becoming the figures they’ve been building to all season, but Matt wins the fight in the end, turning Fisk over to the cops. In the end, the press comes up with a new name for the suited savior of Hell’s Kitchen: Daredevil.
