Daredevil Recap Season 3, Episode 5: The Perfect Game

From the beginning, Daredevil 'The third season looks like a return to form, and it's amazing how literally he is pursuing that goal. Some things are obvious: Matt's return to his makeshift black suit, Wilson Fisk as the main lagoon, the brutal and ground-fighting scenes. Superficial things, especially. But what's funny is that this season is also Seeming close the structure and dynamics of the first.

Like his first season, this year Daredevil is a story of evil origin, which slowly plunges into the history of Benjamin Poindexter and shows how the world returns to the point where it becomes outwardly violent, when it collides with Matt Murdock. Likewise, Murdock – always in danger of being overshadowed by more interesting antagonists – struggles with long-standing demons in order to become a better man. We already know the outline of his story, so instead of diving into his childhood, this season examines Matt's faith by exchanging his biological father for his spiritual.

It's remarkable to see how well it all works – and Matt is hardly in this episode!

Instead, we spend most of our time getting to know the special agent Poindexter. He is a precise and meticulous man – his apartment is spartan, he leaves nothing to the place, not even a framed picture that bends slightly when he closes the door behind him. (He opens it again to reach the door and straighten it out.) It's a good rhythm.

We also learn from the story of Poindexter when Fisk, through his lawyer, receives a box of documents containing most of the psychological history of Dex, acquired during years of therapy. While Fisk studies what has been given to him, the world fades from becoming monochrome and the penthouse in which he is imprisoned becomes a palace of the spirit where small dramas of the life of Poindexter take place.

Benjamin Poindexter was an orphan, we learn. The star of his Little League baseball team, Dex, has built his sense of value on the ability to throw a ball. He puts a cap on the bull and smokes all the rappers who are getting ready. One day, he is crushed when the coach asks him to leave the field, just to give some time to the other children. Dex does not understand – he thinks that if he succeeds in a perfect match, maybe his parents will come back. The coach tells the boy a hard truth: a billion perfect games will not bring him back. Dex furiously walks over to the bench and shoots a ball from a fence post that ricochets off the coach's head and kills him.

Young Poindexter spends the next years in therapy, where her therapist writes incredibly neutral notes such as BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER and TENDENCIES PSYCHOPATHIC, while being extremely warm and caring towards Dex. She says she's going to teach him empathy, but over the years, he's only really learning to look like empathy. ("I'm sorry, it's difficult, it's really difficult," says Dex in response to an exercise in empathy, a terrifying and recurring pattern in this episode.)

Although he briefly became hostile towards her as a teenager, when his therapist was forced to retire, Dex went to a place where he could function in the real world. "Your internal compass is not broken," his therapist tells him. "It just works better when it has a North Star."

To this end, after a stint in the US Army, Dex holds a position at the Brooklyn Suicide Prevention Center, where he meets and begins to obsess with Julie. A worrisome tendency to go to the screenplay with interlocutors, wondering why one in particular has the sights on the end of one's own life when he can simply turn his impulses towards the stepfather who makes him suffer.

Through these vignettes, Fisk devised a plan to manipulate Dex further by destabilizing his fragile grip on normality and stability. He arranges for someone to offer Julie double the salary so that she leaves her bartender job and works at the hotel bar where Fisk is being held, so that Dex can find her again. and actually talk to him for the first time since he left his call center position and started to harass her secretly. And it works.

Julie recognizes him at the bar during his first shift. The two men meet for a drink later and get closer – only Dex slips and reveals that he knows much more about Julie than he should. Disturbed, she goes away, but not before Dex tries to catch her, explain her and do a little scene. Dex, already exhausted by the investigation, loses it by the time he goes home, destroying objects until he finds his recordings of past sessions with his childhood therapist and listens to them, trying to restrain himself .

In short, it is a shocking and effective portrait that finds a way to be both more subtle than the series at the time and terribly sad for others. It is also, to begin with, the most experimental and dramatic sequence of non-action ever attempted by the series. It's good!

The rest of the episode advances the plot a few notches – DaredevilStimulation is not slowbut it is never precipitate, nor dense. His enoughAlways moving enough things to interest you in the changes that occur between episodes, leaving few things between scenes. Much of this conspiracy involves the agent Nadeem deliberately playing in the hands of Wilson Fisk in his desire to score notches in his belt.

You see, Fisk knows that Murdock survived the taxi that was supposed to drown him in the river. He also knows – thanks to the security images taken from the prison riot – that Matt is far more capable than any blind man has the right to be. So he uses another way to bring down Matt: tell Nadeem that Murdock worked for him and helped him hide many crimes. Nadeem, ambitious at fault and openly greedy for more necklaces, immediately springs on the periphery, attacking Murdock's apartment (though he told Foggy later that Matt was not accused of a crime, Daredevil plays fast and smoothly) and will interview Karen and Foggy, respectively.

When Matt's old friends are able to band together, they separate each other just how badly Nadeem begins to understand that Matt is Daredevil – which potentially means a jail sentence for them, his accomplices. But that's not the only problem: Nadeem pulled the rope that led to one of the cases where Nelson and Murdock were working for James Wesley, the former Fisk lackey – the one Karen killed. If Nadeem pulls harder, he will discover the truth.

As for Matt Murdock, he is now homeless and on the run. The question now is, how long before his friends are forced to join him?