With the Muse arc having come and gone disappointingly quick, Daredevil: Born Again can go back to what it’s best at. Our penultimate episode, “Isle of Joy,” is a much more confident outing than last week, and it doesn’t hurt that it gets its main players in a single location for an impressive finish.
The way things go throughout the episode, Matt and Heather’s relationship sure has an impending expiration date, huh? Killing Muse has further affirmed her anti-vigilante stance, and to make matters worse, Matt learns Fisk is her secret client when they’re invited to the inaugural ball later that night. His secrecy really comes to bite him in the ass here, since he can only vaguely allude to Fisk being bad news without giving up their whole history, so he just comes off frighteningly paranoid in his girlfriend’s eyes. His morning gets even worse when he’s summoned to jail by Poindexter, who opens the episode being moved out of protective custody and into a pretty packed general population section that knows he used to be FBI.
Ahead of the night’s festivities, things are going well for Fisk. Since Muse’s killing was attributed to his task force thanks to BB Urich, he’s gone and brought Daniel into his inner circle while still keeping Sheila at arm’s length. He also shows Vanessa that he’s been keeping Adam in a cage, ultimately leaving the man’s fate in her hands with a key and a gun on the table. Fisk and Adam both try to sway her, but her mind was always made up: she loves her husband, so she executes Adam in his cell. As she says to Heather later in the episode, the couple’s past issues are “dead and buried,” and they’re now on the same page about everything.
The Poindexter news gets two things done. First, it brings Matt back to Josie’s, which we haven’t seen since the opening minutes of Born Again’s premiere. (Nice to have her and the bar back, even briefly.) Next, he learns Foggy spent his last night celebrating a future case, which is enough to make him go see Dex. Just two days in genpop has him ready to cut a deal with Matt so he can get out in exchange for flipping on whoever hired him to kill Foggy. Matt’s response? Smash Dex’s face into the table, the maybe the least painful way he could’ve hurt Dex. But Matt letting off some steam has consequences: next time we see Dex, he spits a tooth into a guard’s eye and takes a uniform to hitch a bus ride into the city.
Dex will have to wait, though, because it’s party time. It’s a nice shindig to the general public, but the walls are closing in around the core cast. Small asides, like BB revealing she’s sticking around Fisk to get evidence he murdered her uncle Ben, and Sheila feeling increasingly pushed out of the mayor’s inner workings, are just the start of an increasingly hostile night. (Our brief check-in with the task force has Powell sticking a journalist’s hand in a fryer, surrounded by his boys as he smugly gloats to police commissioner Gallo about how untouchable they’ve become.) Guests joining Fisk for a private conversation come out looking rattled or defeated on account of him threatening them–like say, siccing the task force onto Jack, who he knows is the Swordsman–into backing his Red Hook project. With Jack and other elites folding so easily, he’s close to achieving his goals.
Only two separate, but equally troublesome obstacles remain before Fisk can call it a win. Matt can’t touch him in public, but by abruptly taking Vanessa for a dance, he gives Fisk a perfect window of opportunity. While their respective partners are away, Fick doesn’t outright tell Heather that Matt is Daredevil, but enough breadcrumbs are provided to put some extra strain on a relationship that’s been pretty fraught the last few weeks. Meanwhile, Matt confronts Vanessa with what he knows: she hired Poindexter to kill Foggy, which she planned to tell Fisk before Matt swept her off her feet.
By the end of the episode, Dex is the bigger threat. Most of his scenes in the episode feature a filtered towards blue tones, to signify he’s becoming Bullseye again, a rebirth that’s completed by episode’s end. With a police rifle in hand, he takes aim to shoot Fisk, only for Matt to throw himself in front of the bullet. As Florida Mass Choir’s “Storm Cloud Rising” plays, the party descends into chaos while Matt bleeds out on the floor and he’s illuminated in pure red.
“Isle of Joy” was written by current Born Again showrunner Dario Scardapane and Jesse Wigutow, who came in alongside Heather Bellson—who penned the finale with Scardapane—during the creative refresh. This is one of three episodes made post-overhaul, and in addition to being one of the season’s best episodes, it’s a promising sign of where things are headed with season two. But first, we have to see how this all wraps up next week.
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