Dangerous Universe

I hate to say this, but most action-adventure TV series just aren’t that good. They tend to concentrate on the action first and the characters second, and to be honest these days I find most action scenes pretty boring. They’re so highly choreographed to be almost like a dance, everything’s so controlled it’s too ridged to be realistic.

And that’s where I thought the Netflix TV series Daredevil was headed. I figured that it would devolve into a traditional action show after a couple of seasons where there are lots of punches and not a lot of real character development, mostly because where else is there to go with a character like Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Charlie Cox) after 20+ hours of story? Which is the time when most similar shows start repeating themselves, treading over story ground they already went over before since they can’t find anywhere else to go.

Yet somehow the latest third season of Daredevil was the best yet, and I think part of the reason for that was the writers of the show decided to push back the character of Daredevil a bit and bring forward the show’s strong supporting cast.

In any other similar show characters like Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) would simply exist to keep the main story moving along. In the third season of Daredevil they were very important and had entire episodes dedicated to them.

I think I learned more about Foggy and Karen in the third season of Daredevil than the two previous ones combined.

And let’s not forget about the bad-guys either.

This season marked the return of Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) as the main baddie with new character Benjamin ‘Dex’ Poindexter/Bullseye (Wilson Bethel). While we didn’t get a deep a dive into the character of Kingpin as everyone else this season, admittedly there was a lot of backstory for his character in the first, we did get a surprising amount of development for Bullseye.

In most shows a villain like Bullseye would show up now and then, cause chaos until he disappeared for a while before popping up again. Those characters exist simply to shake things up — they’re not developed, they’re devices to move the plot forward. Not on the third season of Daredevil where Bullseye was a fully fleshed character, with a backstory and even an episode of his own. He had so much backstory that he seemed less like a traditional villain and more of a tragic figure bent to Fisk’s will in doing bad.

Which was pretty cool. On the one hand Bullseye is murderer who’s trying to destroy Matt Murdock/Daredevil. On the other hand he’s mentally disturbed and is being turned by Fisk into this assassin.

The absolute worst part about the third season of Daredevil was that a few weeks ago Netflix announced they were cancelling it and that this third season would be Daredevil’s last outing on the service.