I also found it odd. I thought the Punisher, at least on this show, wouldn’t risk killing a bunch of innocents, many of whom have a family like he had. Clearly, he ran a high risk of murdering some innocent person.
I binge-watched it over three days and finished yesterday evening. I really enjoyed it, better than Season 1 I think (although I could have done with more Vincent D’Onofrio as Fisk, since he’s awesome). One thing I really like about Daredevil is that the fights are much better than, say, Agents of SHIELD. I usually don’t care much for fights anyway, except for what’s going on with the characters involved. IMO, AoS is plagued with an endless parade of uninteresting, boilerplate fights with guns and martial arts. I tend to tune out during those parts. But Daredevil generally has such well choreographed fights that I find myself enjoying them even if there’s no interpersonal hook underneath.
Yeah, that was lazy writing. They had already established that the pawn broker was smart enough to not talk about a stolen police radio unless he was explicitly asked. You’d think he’d have been smart enough to keep his mouth shut, but they decided they needed to illustrate how The Punisher’s code works right then. I think they could have gotten away with truncating that scene just fine.
End-season spoilers:
[SPOILER]I found myself hoping that the gang was going to get back together, but I knew that in doing so, I was part of the problem. In retrospect, I’m glad that they didn’t have some silly reset to zero at the end. Everyone is moving on and discovering that they can’t have everything that they want. The characters are maturing as they go through their respective arcs, and I like it.
I thought Hogarth’s fawning over Foggy was a little overdone. It’s hard to believe that a prestigious firm like Hogarth’s would be suggesting that Foggy was so close to named partner. It felt similar to if Captain America had been so impressed at Jessica Jones that he offered her a spot on The Avengers at the end of Season 1.
Surely Foggy will have a bit of a shock once he’s working in the big, fancy firm. He’ll probably have to take cases that force him to compromise his ethics, and they’ll make a big thing about his decision to go with the firm or his conscience.[/SPOILER]
I’ll read and respond more when I’m done the series but the ep9 cell block fight beat the stairway fight imho. Goddamn savage.
I’m going to assume all your questions refer to the classic comics continuity rather than the show, because if it ain’t onscreen, it’s guesswork.
Stick is the leader of the Chaste, a secret order opposed to the Hand. MM didn’t find out about the Chaste (or the Hand) until he’d been Daredevil for several years.
More or less, yeah. It’s been subject to a little retconning, here and there, but they met in college, had a relationship, were basically sparring partners. She left after her dad was killed by kidnapper/terrorists, and this started her on her downspiral into the Dark Side. As for “not a random meeting,” beats me.
After college, she sought out Stick and the Chaste, trained with them for a while. He recognized her natural talent, but also saw she was carrying a lot of inner baggage. He couldn’t let their order be corrupted, so he dismissed her. After that, she got recruited by the Hand.
So far, at least of the type of shows I’m into, I have yet to be disappointed in a Netflix show, I think this is the first 2nd season for me (didn’t watch OITNB), and it’s great. Unbreakable Kimmy is renewed, which is hilarious, and all of the Marvel shows are good. Between Amazon and Netflix (ok, 11/22/63 is good, so Hulu too) I think the typical studios are sweating bullets.
I’m not even a huge comic book nerd or a Film nerd, and I’m loving both aspects of this Netflix universe so far.
They do great work. However, I think House of Cards blows.
Haven’t watched that one either, though it does get good reviews. Not my cup of tea though.
I was halfway through watching the fight scene and I thought that I had it figured it out. I thought that it was filmed with a camera on the top of a long extension pole or arm and that they were slowly lowering by releasing the hydraulic pressure to get that smooth downward flow flight after flight after flight of the fight as they descended around that the stairwell.
It wasn’t until 4 flights down into the single shot scene that I saw the choreography of the brawl move between the camera and banister, proving that there was no camera pole there! My best guess is that the camera was being lowered by cables from a pully-system with control arms on a camera case-frame with some sort of limited hinge arms for the cameramen to use keep the camera level, steady but on point all the way down that stairwell. I didn’t count (I should have) but I’m guessing that the fight went down 9-10 flights of stairs non-stop. I didn’t see any missed punches or missteps either.
Sure it was down the staircase, but with continuous fight movement performed flawlessly. I’d like you to imagine running up 10 flights of steps and still being as fresh at the top as you were when you started. The physical exertion and demands on each actor in just that one marathon scene is unbelievable. How Cox didn’t end up with rubber legs before the end is mind boggling.
Also, I admit that I didn’t want to like Bernthal in that role and that I thought that the duct taped revolver was a cheesy gimmick. He slowly grew into the role (for me) however… and by the time he is on his back in episode 9 (You’ll know what I’m talking about when you see the scene; I’m not sure if I can talk about that yet) he had clearly earned the title of Punisher.
When a story is done well the genre is less important - this narrative is done well enough that it engages people who are not normally interested in the subject matter. To their credit.
That scene with:
Murdock and Fisk in the prison
::eek::
(Open spoilers through the end of the season)
Watched it over the weekend. I enjoyed it well enough, but not without reservations.
Shared universes like the MCU are a tricky thing. I have a very hard time accepting that all these different conflicts can be so completely separate from each other. Okay, so maybe the Avengers don’t have time to deal with low level organized crime and that could allow someone like Fisk to come to power, but it seems pretty damn unlikely that none of the other power players would take notice of a group like the Hand and frigging immortality. I enjoyed Jessica Jones, but it was particularly bizarre that seemingly no other heroes or villains cared about the existence of Kilgrave and his powers. It seems like the writers and producers want the benefit of being able to call in whoever they want for cameos, but don’t want to put in the effort of designing a coherent world. Oh well, that’s a problem with comics in general, isn’t it?
It was interesting that over the course of the season Matt seemed to become more and more okay with lethal violence. Earlier on, he went out of his way in fights to stop Frank and Elektra from killing enemies, but by the end he seemed pretty resigned to it. He might not of approved of it, but he stopped trying to protect the enemies from his allies.
We never found out who killed Reyes and the ME, right? We know someone was trying to make it look like Frank did it, but we never actually found out who it was. Fisk being behind it makes the most sense, but do we have any motive? I was getting the feeling that the editor guy was involved somehow, but nothing came of it.
Frank’s witness stand implosion was a little strange as well. So, Fisk sent him a message that he needed to sabotage his own trial to meet with him to get information on who killed his family? And Frank just went along with it? That’s kinda absurd, isn’t it? Am I missing something?
Anyways, I enjoyed the series well enough.
*Note: I’ve only watched about half of the season so far…
Well, remember when Karen went to speak with Ben Urich’s editor, and he lead her into the storeroom with all of the papers? He made the comment that the event/happening/pulse/whatever had fried their computers, so they kept everything in a hard file, too. That was a reference to the Avengers movie.
Someone mentioned Jessica Jones in at least one episode, and her series made references to the Hulk and Captain America, and the first Avengers movie.
Thanks for all of that! Very helpful. I have been able to see it all, and given some of the major plot twists, it is clear they are not following comic-book canon. I know this thread has spoilers, but I still want to wait a week out for the big ones.
Entertainment Weekly rated DD Season 2 a “C” - apparently, we watched a very different set of episodes - I really, really enjoyed it and thought it was a step up from S1:
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Deborah Ann Woll positively radiates the role of Karen. I normally hate that kind of character, but man you can see the gears working inside her head and the choices Karen is making. Central to the success of the season. Oh, and ETA: her newspaper boss is an excellent small part. That actor does a great job of getting inside Karen’s head and pointing her in the right direction - exposition for us that is delivered in a really effective way.
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So - what the heck was the purpose of the deep pit? Sorry if I missed some obvious thing.
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Garula - yes, the way Frank and Fisk connect is waaay over the top. But given the story, kinda fun. Men who are outside the law manipulating the petty bureaucracy to communicate. “My being guilty or not in your system is less important to me than having a parlay with my boy Fisk.”
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Castle’s slow reveal, with the new vest with the skull seams, then the full reveal on the rooftop - oh man, fanboy squee. That was so cool.
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Clancy Brown always delivers. Go Mr. Krabs!!
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Is it me, or does Charlie Cox sound just like Neil Patrick Harris???
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Didn’t buy Trinity loving Foggy that much - but, if it was a con that gets set up for S3 - e.g., Hogarth is using Foggy for something - then maybe. Not sure what the status of N&M is; need to watch those parts again.
That’s all for now - that was really entertaining. Amazing to see how this new binge form replicates the experience of reading a comic book so well. Going back to the Ep3 Stairwell Fight (!!!), it really had a “panel to panel unfolding” feel to it. So satisfying.
My assumption is that the Blacksmith (Colonel Schoonover) did that to (try to) get rid off the Punisher (Frank Castle) after he broke out of prison.
I assume Fisk would not want to take him out until he killed the Blacksmith (which assumes Fisk knew about him, but didn’t tell Frank because he wanted him to kill Dutton to get that information).
It could be that Fisk somehow let the Blacksmith know Frank would be coming for him, since I don’t think the Blacksmith was trying to kill Frank before his trail - although the alarm system in Frank’s house might have been his and not from Reyes (some men shows up when Karen is in his house, but it leads to nothing I think)? That assumes Reyes ordered the ‘do not resusitate’ on her own to cover for her mistake, and not prompted by the Blacksmith to do that.
Another reason might be to clean up the witnesses of the carrousel massacre (or though covering up waht really happened there). I wonder if Castle’s family getting killed there was an accident or done on purpose because Frank didn’t join in the Colonels drug trade (or because whatever really happened on that mission).
The Blacksmith plot could have been better worked out, for example I had no idea who Karen was recognizing in the photo at the Colonels house or why that should alarm her. Afterward you kinda piece it together that it is the guy opening fire on the Blacksmith ship, who Karen saw as a corpse, is one in the squad photo and why he says something like ‘long time since we last met’ to Frank at the ship.
IIRC, in the first season of DD, Fisk’s lieutenant says “Maybe if he had an iron suit or a magic hammer it would explain why you keep getting your asses kicked”.
Why does that need to be more worked out? The Blacksmith’s crew were former soldiers who were under his command and knew Punisher. What are we missing? I guess it was kind of dropped in our laps at the end and an odd coincidence but there aren’t really any missing pieces.
So I just finished the season.
Quick verdict: I still love this show, but they botched the ending.
Episode 12’s quasi-reveal of Black Sky was a huge let-down — even disregarding the fact that it turned out to be Elektra. All this buildup from last year, when Stick made it sound like a Black Sky was like an atom bomb in human form, and we find out at it’s just someone who fights really well? So what the hell was the deal with the 40-story pit? And the blood-donor zombie kids?
And the reveal that the Blacksmith was Punisher’s old CO, apart from being predictable (hint: if you want to hide who the villain is, don’t cast Clancy Brown), hadn’t had enough buildup in the preceding episodes to pay off well. I pretty much think I get what went down in Central Park between Reyes’ ass-covering and Blacksmith’s ex-military crew of drug smugglers, but it felt like energy wasted on people and events we never saw and that didn’t mean anything to Matt or anyone else we cared about.
As for the finale, again, Nobu wasn’t a central enough villain to make the final confrontation with him entirely satisfying. We still don’t know what the Hand was aiming to do and thus what Matt and Elektra were working to stop them from achieving. Stick blathered so much about “the war” to so little effect even Matt was sick of it. And Matt and Elektra’s “let’s run away together” speech … well, on the one hand, it was actually pretty well done. When Matt admits he needs to be Daredevil in order to feel alive, it’s really kind of tragic. But at the same time I thought they might as well have hung a sign on Elektra saying ABOUT TO BE KILLED.
OK, got that off my chest. I still enjoyed the season overall, in fact I think in some ways it surpassed the first season. Foggy is a much improved character, still a lovable dork but a guy who’s also pretty smart and brave when it comes to it. (It helps that Elden Henson feels much more comfortable in the role.) Karen remains a tough, independent woman but always believable. The action choreography was more varied and exciting. Claire remains awesome. And after being skeptical last year, I now think DD’s suit kicks ass.
One thing I like about this show that I don’t think gets enough notice: the writers aren’t afraid to let the story go in some unexpected, organic-feeling directions. Karen becoming a de facto reporter (in effect, carrying on the work of Ben Urich) is an example. Most shows would have tried to salvage Nelson & Murdock by the end, to try to end on a less-bleak note; here, it’s over and done with, and Foggy’s moving on to a new job, just as a real person would do.
Oh, and apropos of nothing, but I loved that the last words of the season are Matt saying, “I’m Daredevil.”
No idea what the 40 story pit is yet, but the donor kids blood is what brings back the dead, I believe (the autopsied ninja and Nobu’s ability to fall, apparently die, and get back up). My guess is the pod in conjunction with the blood will be used to supercharge Elektra on top of bringing her back to life.
I agree, the pit and super Elektra/dark sky are left for next season not abandoned story lines.
Did you catch the gay reference? In episode 2 he says “you’ll be able to hear the mayor banging his boyfriend”. I’ve seen gays referenced but never like that.