I liked the first three seasons of Daredevil, but this fourth season was mainly boring for me. I’m stunned, really.
Next season starts march 26 of next year.
Well, at least there’s that.
So this season was kind of a shit sandwich. Bad first episode and terrible finale.
Why shoot Daredevil only to almost entirely ignore it in the next episode?
Why capture the Punisher (in the dumbest way possible) only to have him escape a scene later?
Why is Matt’s Army a cop he never met on screen and his favorite bartender? Is that supposed to make us pump our fist in the air?
Just a bad finale.
At least they didn’t try to interject She-Hulk.
That is about the best I can offer. Such a waste of talent.
Stranger
I wish they had. The interconnectivity of this shows loses meaning when people who should be there are not. Spiderman’s ass should be there too.
Daredevil was fine being a lone hero in the original Netflix show. Adding in Punisher and Jessica Jones wasn’t bad (and I wish they’d given Luke Cage better storylines) but the Defenders saga ended up being really weak because there really wasn’t any pressing need for it other than to give the regrettable Iron Fist some reason for existence and a team-up that really didn’t serve any of the individual characters. Matt Murdock dealing with street level crime and a corrupt city crime boss-cum-mayor kind of loses significance in the context of repeated alien invasions, superintelligent robot uprisings, a reality-changing wizard, et cetera. Doing a big combined team up was fine for the larger MCU because it was designed from the ground up to be an overarching storyline, but we can see how flat that approach has become once that story was completed.
Anyway, nobody wants or needs more She-Hulk. That show was just so unnecessary and pointless, essentially completely retooling characters to make them fit into the cringeworthy jokiness of that show. Which is kind of a shame because if the show hadn’t made such an effort into integrating everything else from the MCU and then trying to tie it all up with a metatextural ending, it could have been its own thing with a more focused and coherent storyline. It certainly didn’t need to bring in Daredevil (completely out of context and with no real story need whatsoever) just to connect that into the rest of the MCU when it has always been peripheral and had a completely different sensibility and gritty style.
Stranger
That is ridiculous.
It didn’t have to be She Hulk and I know why Spider-Man and Young Hawkeye wouldn’t show up but how about one second string costumed vigilante as an Easter egg? Anything to make the scene more interesting.
Stranger
I’ve been to so many clubs where guys were apparently cosplaying as him.
The correct statement would be ‘nobody wants or needs more Defenders’, since it preceded She-Hulk by five years.
Which I would agree with, since I overall disliked Defenders (I was a fan of the comic book as a kid, but that was a very different beast). Can’t speak to She-Hulk, though. I think Tatiana Maslany is great, but haven’t gotten around to trying it after all the mixed reviews.
The problem wasn’t with the performance of Tatiana Maslany (she was great in Orphan Black even as the plot got more ridiculous, and I thought her turn in Perry Mason deserved more story) but rather that She-Hulk was trying to be too many different types of story to be good at anything in particular, and also altered the basic personalities and motivations of other characters to conform to the satirical ‘wink & nod’ tone of the show. It also so clearly just jammed the Daredevil scenes in just as a kind of stealth pilot for the then-planned rebooting of the character that the entire side plot made no sense and went nowhere.
If it had just stuck with one central theme—say, being a show about a female superhero lawyer who is still disregarded by her male colleagues but also has to deal with superhero-type threats—that could have been an interesting way to challenge and develop the character through an arc to some conclusion. But it was basically a different show every episode, and not in an intentional Wandavision way; it just felt like someone collected a hatful of spitballed ideas from the writers room and assigned each writer to write an episode without collaborating with the others, and many of them weren’t even ideas that could fill an entire episode, so there is copious filler. It was pretty clear from the way it ended that they ran out of ideas, and without spoiling anything just grasped for a metatextual ‘twist’ to say, “See, it was all just a joke!”
Also, if your main character is an attorney…at least try to get some of the basic procedural stuff and legal jargon vaguely correct, especially where it is as easy to do it correctly as it is to whiff it in terms of the story. At least in Daredevil we get something that at least looks like a struggling practice of two enthusiastic but inexperienced law school grads, and they get enough the court proceedings to be reasonably believable (even if they do skip through a lot of basic procedure in favor of drama) that you accept that Matt Murdock is a sharp-witted attorney at least in the same way that Tony Stark is a genius who whips together flying armored suits and particle accelerators in his home workshop. In She-Hulk, characters in the show tell us multiple times what a great and unappreciated legal mind Jennifer Walters is and then demonstrates to the viewers that she’s actually a terrible lawyer in essentially every possible way, and so is every other lawyer in the show. That is probably only of concern to lawyers but it just illustrates how lazy the writing was to not even make the effort. But don’t take my word for it:
Stranger
She Hulk in the comics breaks the fourth wall the way that Deadpool does. I think it would have been disappointing to fans of the character if they didn’t have that aspect. Just like how Deadpool was handled in his first appearance in Wolverine Origins was super disappointing.
You can break the fourth wall and still tell a good story. The Deadpool movies succeed at that, mostly; She-Hulk doesn’t.
shrug I enjoyed She-Hulk.
Sometimes a comic book show is just a comic book show. Not every show or movie is intended to be, or needs to be, the subject of an art criticism thesis.
I gave up on this season of Daredevil early on. Came back here to see if final reviews were good enough to have me revisit the decision. Thankfully reassured I made a good choice.
OTOH I also enjoyed She Hulk. It was fluff. Goofy fun. Mostly. The end got too stupid even for that but overall a fine way to waste a bit of time.