Urich’s death was a necessity. Fisk needed a win to make him feel threatening and he needed to kill someone the audience cared about to make us want Daredevil to take Fisk down.
But I’ve never read the comics so I don’t know if Urich is a super interesting character in the books. In the show he’s a pretty cliche sacrificial lion. Coincidentally, both actors who portrayed Urich on the screen worked on The Sopranos.
Yeah, I said the same thing about fifteen pages back. Still didn’t like it. 
He’s not super interesting - mostly, he’s the guy at the Bugle who likes Peter Parker and maybe knows that he’s Spider-Man. But he’s a perennial part of the background to the Marvel comic universe, and I was looking forward to seeing the same thing with the movie/TV version of him. I thought it would be cool to see him pop up in the other TV shows that are coming out, they same way they’re planning to do with Rosario Dawson’s character.
Also, he’s primarily a Spider-Man character, so killing him in a Daredevil show feels a bit like breaking somebody else’s toys to me.
I didn’t realize Dawson’s character had an actual name. She’s pretty cool without a name.
I really, really liked Ben Urich. I was really sorry to see him die. I liked him better than Karen, though I like her too.
Ben Kinglsey is half Asian, identifies as an English actor, and is totally the bone thrown at us. 
He is a great actor! Don’t get me wrong. But it’s just like calling Freddie Mercury Indian - he is, nominally, but it sure would be nice if he identified more with it.
I would love to be able to claim those two but they don’t really claim their Indian heritage very much. Also they are old. Well not Mercury I suppose. Where are the young Asian/Indian actors???
As for what I am giving you. Here, have a cookie.
I thought Freddy Mercury was Iranian.
He’s Farsi, but he spent several years in India, too. I just want to claim him cause he’s hella cool. Who wouldn’t want him? I’m tired of our stereotype being geeky IT guys, let’s get some rock and roll up in this bitch!
The guy who has an Oscar for playing Gandhi isn’t embracing his Indian heritage enough?
Right.
But I hear on-line bitching about Dawson’s character being a “victim” and thus she’s another helpless black victim… What? She rescues the damn hero out of a dumpster in one episode, she’s always stitching him back up, yes, she does get kidnapped in one episode but it doesn’t break her. Yes, she gets rescued, she’s NOT a superhero, that’s what the superheros are for - do people whine Owlsley the powerful white guy killed by Fisk is a victim? Claire Temple is a strong, smart, independent, and skilled woman in her own right.
Look, I get that people of color are woefully under-represented in comic book hero line-ups. Marvel should be encouraged to cast more non-white folks in leading roles, but to do that people need to stop complaining that it’s “just” the supporting cast (Which is not to say **Anaamika **does that - quite the contrary. I’m just saying some people do that). That’s where it starts, with major supporting cast it allows actors of color to shine, and the more positive feedback Marvel gets on that the more likely they are to re-cast a major role. Sure, keep suggesting a major hero gets a change like that, but also keep cheering the supporting cast choices. The more the studios hear that people like and accept non-white major characters the more you’ll get.
For those not familiar with The Night Nurse, the 1960’s book featured a blond-haired blue-eyed white woman as the lead. If Rosario Dawson’s character is truly intended as the cinematic Marvel Night Nurse then that is a race change. I also think it would make sense to cast an Asian in the Iron Fist role, too, but it looks like that isn’t going to happen.
Yes, some bigots do believe that. You know what? F*ck 'em. Ever since the revised Battlestar Galactica it’s been painfully obvious you can replace a white guy with a Mexican (Commander Adama), a man with a woman (Starbuck), and a black man with an Asian woman (Boomer) and no one would give a flip. Maybe a blink or two, but a lot of people think the new version is superior to the old and don’t care about the race/gender changes, they care about a good story and good acting.
Bottom line - I think the general public is ready for it, but the people plunking down tens of millions of dollars to back these movies are more conservative still fear that much change.
Ben Urich played some major parts in the Daredevil comic book, including deducing that Daredevil was Matt Murdock and occasionally helping the hero out with research and investigations that require actually being able to see. He wasn’t/isn’t a constant character but he’s been recurring for several decades now. A lot of us long-term book fans were sorry to see him die, but the TV/movie Marvel universe and the comic book universe are alternate versions of each other, not the same thing. I’m OK with that, not everyone else is.
Strictly speaking, Freddie Mercury was Zoroastrian. Granted, that is also a group from Persia but it’s a slightly different group than the majority. I think he may have actually been born in India, though.
I thought Zoroastrianism was a religion, not an ethnic group.
Born in Zanzibar, to parents from Gujarat. Spent most of his childhood in India.
One could say the same thing about Judaism, couldn’t one?
It’s got a 3,000 year history, most groups tend to marry within the group, and some of the more conservative elements won’t accept converts so I’d consider them slightly apart from, say, Muslim Iranians or Hindu or Muslim Indians (and Indians themselves are arguably sub-divided into more than one ethnic group as well).
How about that time that D’Onofrio played Thor?
So, wait. Ben Kingsley was cast as the Asian character The Hood for the 2004 Thunderbirds movie. Now he’s playing the Asian character The Mandarin in the MCU. Is he getting typecast as the Yellowish Peril?
He wasn’t all that perilous in Iron Man 3.
Also, possibly two instances in a decade don’t make a trend.
I’m always interested in how new uses of our adventure story tradition manage to deal with the problems of racism that it can’t quite shake off. The Buck Rogers TV Show got rid of The Han altogether. Then the roleplaying game replaced them with capitalist russians. Then the other Buck Rogers roleplaying game brought The Han back, but made a big deal about The Good Ones, the Golden Dragons. The Flash Gordon movie put Max Von Sydow, hereditarily as white as you can get, in the role of Ming the Merciless. Star Wars made the clearly Asian fish-headed people not very inscrutable. That sort of counts, I guess.
In the new Thunderbirds show, The Hood is pretty damn white looking with a villainous British accent, though his niece is now of an indeterminate brown ethnicity with a British accent.
Ebony White was sort of evolved into a bad-ass himself. Too little, too late in my opinion, but Eisner at least seemed to be self-conscious about how his work was starting to look. In the movies, Ebony White appears to have been left out entirely.
In Daredevil, Ben Urich worked because for one thing the actor playing him was great. And also, I didn’t remember that Ben Urich wasn’t black to begin with. I didn’t get him mixed up with Robbie Robertson or anything, I just wondered if black reporters was kind of a trope at Marvel for a while.
I know nothing of Night Nurse, but Rosario Dawson worked in that role because she was believably tough.
Given how many variations in interpreting various characters there were in the comics themselves, I find if absurd to act as though casting what is currently a minority in an originally white role is a deal-breaker. But… if, say, Ororo Munroe was suddenly cast as white, I must say I would not see that as an equivalent move at all.
I’m not familiar with the comics at all. Who is the character The mandarin in this show? And who is Iron Fist?
Is this the person Stick talked to in his last scene? What is the war that Stick and the other guy (Iron Fist) were talking about? Civil War? Inhumans?
Was the kid Stick wanted to kill an Inhuman?
Actually Ben Kingsley is Asian, though I’m not sure if his character supposed be a White Briton or an Asian Briton.
The Mandarin isn’t in Daredevil. He was the villain in Iron Man 3. Iron Fist is going to be one of the other three Marvel TV shows that’s going to be on Netflix, along with AKA: Jessica Drew and Luke Cage. He also wasn’t in Daredevil, but will be crossing over with it when his show finally comes out.
Neither were in this season of Daredevil. The Mandarin appeared other movies in the MCU, those with Iron Man.
Iron Fist is another “street level” hero like Daredevil, martial arts expert from/trained in K’un L’un, believed to be where Madame Gao is from. He teams up a lot with Luke Cage/Power Man.
That is believed to be another student of Stick, who goes by the name Stone.
Dunno.
Dunno
Mandarin wasn’t in the Daredevil show. He’s been an enemy of Iron Man for quite a while, though.
I agree with everyone on Urich. It would have been nice to see him pop up in some the movies and shows, or even just mentioned in them. I understand why he had to die, but he could have really helped establish that everything’s connected, like Nick Fury did in the various movies.
Apparently Rosario Dawson’s character will be playing that role.
