‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Recap, Episodes 5 and 6: Cops, Robbers and a Serial Killer

We're midway through Daredevil: Born Again season 1, and the masked vigilante is finally doing the thing we all want him to do. Daredevil is back! Episode 5, "With Interest," is a contained episode in which Matt Murdock dons a different kind of mask to stop a bank robbery on St. Patrick's Day, and episode 6, "Excessive Force," gives him the final nudge necessary to get him to be the crimson superhero we know and love.

The two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again that dropped on Disney+ this week also contain cameos from characters who were introduced on two other MCU series, Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye. And in the parallel villain storyline, Mayor Wilson Fisk got the nudge he needed to embrace his inner "Kingpin" violence as well.

EPISODE 5

How does Matt end up in the middle of a bank robbery in episode 5?

Episode 5 takes place primarily in a single location. But this is not what I would call a filler episode. For four episodes now, Matt Murdock has been edging towards putting on his Daredevil suit. He's watched several miscarriages of justice happen before his eyes. He's gotten into physical scrapes and worked outside of his beloved legal system. But he needed a high stress environment with innocent lives on the line to be pushed into action. Like, for example, a hostage situation at a bank robbery.

The ordeal starts when Matt goes to New York Mutual bank to try and get a loan for his law firm. He is kindly denied by none other than Jersey City's Yusuf Khan, Kamala Khan a.k.a. the superhero Ms. Marvel's father. (In conversation, Mr. Khan mentions that this daughter is in Los Angeles visiting some friends... which could be a Young Avengers or even a Runaways tease.) After Matt leaves, he overhears Devlin–the Irish leader of one of the Five Families that used to report to the Fisks–and a group of masked robbers take over the bank. On St. Patricks's Day, no less! Devlin is a protestant from Belfast, however, so the holiday means nothing to him.

So Matt sneaks back inside using his blindness as a cover to pretend he's unaware of the robbery in process. He even whistles as he casually walks back in the door, really overselling his feigned ignorance. The robbers add him to the hostages, and he starts to assess the situation. When Devlin sends Yusuf with his associate to unlock the bank vault, Matt whispers to Yusuf to stall them.

Our hero waits a few minutes, pretends he has to go to the bathroom and knocks out both his and Yusuf's masked "escorts" in the bowels of the bank. Matt cracks the vault with his super-hearing skills. Better to buy the hostages time by temporarily giving the men with guns what they want, he says. They open the safety deposit box that the robbers were after and find a large yellow-orange diamond. (No, I don't think it's an Infinity Stone.)

Meanwhile, outside on the street, active deputy hostage negotiator Detective Angie Kim, who you may remember from episode 1 as a friend of Cherry's, starts talking Devlin down. The two of them maintain a good level of banter. But it takes too long. Just as Matt and Yusuf return upstairs with the diamond, the cops storm in with smoke bombs to break everything up. In the chaos, Devlin puts on a cop uniform and escapes. He hands off the diamond to one of the hostages, revealing that she was in on it the whole time. "Give this to Luca," another one of the Five Families leaders, he says.

The luck of the Irish is not with him, however. Matt puts the red ski mask on to obscure his identity (still using his cane, so the effectiveness of the mask is dubious) and attacks Devlin on the sidewalk. He breaks his leg fully in half. And the girlie didn't manage to get the diamond to Luca, either, because it was a fake. Matt pocketed it behind the robbers' backs and covertly slips it back to Yusuf while visiting the bank the next day for a follow-up appointment. His new buddy offers to help him brainstorm ways to make the firm profitable over family dinner in Jersey City. The Daredevil/Ms. Marvel meeting of the minds is imminent!

EPISODE 6

What's the deal with this serial killer named Muse?

After episode 5 was all Matt Murdock, episode 6 kind of felt like an avalanche of every other Daredevil: Born Again storyline. Let's start with Muse, who we learn in this episode is not just a mural *artiste* but a serial killer with upwards of sixty victims who mixes paint with human blood and epoxy (a durable adhesive that makes the paintings nearly impossible to remove). Like... what do you mean??

The first person to flag this situation to Mayor Fisk is a guy from the Department of Sanitation. This totally tracks. His job is to remove street art, and since Muse's paintings are particularly difficult his team would want to look into the materials. His chemical analysis reveals the blood ingredient. The NYPD takes over the investigation and identifies the DNA and other evidence that estimates Muse has killed five dozen victims. We also see, at night, two fangirls come up to Muse while he's painting. He attacks, and not only do they become his next two victims but he leaves their bodies in front of his masterpiece. Whoever this guy is, he's getting bold!

In response to this, Fisk puts together an Anti-Vigilante Task Force of dirty cops, including Powell. He grants them overtime and does not require them to wear body cameras. He plans to oversee the squad himself. Ironically these are the same cops who look up to the Punisher, a vigilante. "This city is yours," he says to rev them up, "And you're not gonna let some masked criminals take it away from you!" He's using a dangerous masked vigilante as an excuse to go after all vigilantes, including the good guys.

How does Daredevil learn about Muse?

At the beginning of episode 6, Hector Ayala's niece Angela comes to visit Matt Murdock at his law firm office. She tells him that her uncle was investigating something happening in the neighborhood that she thinks has to do with an abandoned subway tunnel. She urges him to finish what White Tiger started, and shames him for refusing to do anything about it. "I'm just a lawyer," he lies to her.

She's not going to the cops, for obvious reasons, so Angela takes to the underground herself and finds herself right in Muse's lair. (Bet you thought we were done with lairs, huh??) That same night, Cherry finds Matt working late and lets him know that the NYPD are investigating a prolific serial killer. He urges Matt to let this one go and let the cops handle it. In my humble opinion, if he really didn't want Matt to go after this guy he wouldn't have briefed him about after hours. But what do I know?

Later that night, while researching the subway tunnels Angela thought were connected to whatever Hector was investigating, he gets a call from Angela's mom Soledad. Her daughter is missing. He has to make a decision now and fast. Let the cops handle it, or swoop in before someone he cares about gets hurt. He starts to call 9-1-1, and then with an iconic "fuck it," hangs up and puts on his Daredevil suit. He finds the underground subway lair and gets into an action-packed fight with Muse. While the superhero gets away, he manages to save Angela from Muse's creepy AF blood-extracting machine.

Is Heather going to find out that Matt Murdock is Daredevil?

At the beginning of the episode, Matt's girlfriend is worried about him surviving a traumatic incident at the bank, unaware that that was light work for him. She also reveals to him that she wants to interview vigilantes for her next book and suggests Frank Castle as a potential subject. Matt low-key laughs in her face at the suggestion. Then she asks if he can link her up with Daredevil. Oh, I'm sure he can.

This relationship is so, so, so doomed! It's hard to even root for it at all. The lies they're both telling (Matt moonlights as a vigilante and Heather's helping his nemesis with therapy) plus the way Heather talks about vigilantism releasing animal instincts is a major red flag that they are not as compatible as they may think they are. She clearly doesn't respect the superhero lifestyle–and while I'm not saying that makes her a bad person, or even necessarily wrong, it does mean that she shouldn't be dating one. She also scoffs at the fact that her devout Catholic boyfriend "still" prays. Yeesh!

What about Fisk's... other problems?

Luca, one of the aforementioned leaders of the Five Families, comes to visit Fisk in his office. He refuses to pay the debt Buck Cashman demanded of him. As Fisk tells Vanessa later, he added a few million dollars to his tax bill for that stunt. Luca openly mocks Fisk for masquerading as mayor. This won't end well for him.

At a black tie fundraiser, Mayor Fisk clashes with several dissatisfied wealthy donors including Jacques Duquesne, a.k.a. The Swordsman, stepfather to Kate Bishop from Hawkeye and a vigilante in his own right. Manhattan's elite don't like the way he's running things and want to assert their own supremacy. He says that Fisk's anti-vigilante agenda doesn't align with their interests and threatens to buy him out. And none of them support his Red Hook port project... rude!!

Fisk is not doing well with everyone pushing him around. He's also getting too big for his suits, which can be a pain especially when you're already in a bad mood. Creating a task force against the NYPD's wishes was not enough for him to feel like he accomplished something, however. At the end of the episode he goes to visit Adam, who he locked in a basement for sleeping with Vanessa, with an ax in hand. He unlocks the cage and throws the ax towards Adam. The desperate man attacks Fisk, who fights back with his bare hands and knocks him unconscious. This is happening while Matt is fighting Muse, by the way, really underlining the parallels between superhero and supervillain here.

As you may remember, in Daredevil: Born Again episode 1, they promised each other that there would be trouble if either of them did exactly what they just did. Let's see how this shakes out next week!