Throughout this season of Daredevil: Born Again, the political parallels seemed clear. Mayor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), as a temperamental New York businessman who rose to power through fear and intimidation, is an obvious stand-in for President Donald Trump. Despite protests from Charlie Cox that the similarities are “purely coincidental,” fans began spotting similarities during the first season of the Disney Plus series. This season, it’s only grown more obvious with Fisk’s command of his Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF), a rogue paramilitary force that is harassing both vigilantes and ordinary citizens on the streets of New York — a clear allegory for ICE.
Yet in the final moments of the season, Daredevil: Born Again takes a bizarre turn that not only undermines the message showrunner Dario Scardapane put forth all season, but seems to promote — or at the very least justifies and excuses — the attack on the Capitol incited by Donald Trump on Jan. 6th, 2021.
In the Daredevil: Born Again season finale, Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) is on trial for her vigilante acts and Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Charlie Cox) is defending her. Mayor Fisk is called to the stand and Matt sees an opportunity to take him down once and for all: He publicly announces he’s Daredevil and that Fisk is responsible for a host of crimes.
After court is adjourned and everyone is about to exit the building, Fisk’s personal assistant is shot by a sniper (Bullseye), causing everyone involved in the trial to hole up indoors. Fisk makes a brief TV appearance where he vows to stand and fight the vigilante menace. Then journalist BB Urich (Genneya Walton), who has spent the season trolling Fisk, tells her supporters to take a stand. We then see people from around the city don devil masks and other red facial coverings in support of Daredevil and in protest of Fisk and his hateful policies.
There’s a standoff between the AVTF and the protestors on the steps of the courthouse. That’s when I, and I’m sure many others watching, thought, “They’re not going to do January 6th, are they?” Sure enough, they did and the protesters storm the courthouse in a clear, unmistakable reenactment of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
To put it lightly, I have no freaking clue what Scardapane is suggesting here and every conclusion I come to feels both wrong-headed and even downright offensive.
Up until this point, Fisk and the AVTF have been clear symbols of hate and fascism against the people of New York, in a clear allegory for what Trump and ICE have been doing to American citizens and immigrants alike. Yet in the show’s final moments, Scardapane puts the citizens of New York into the shoes of the Trump supporters who attempted to overthrow our government. What side, exactly, is Daredevil: Born Again on? (And it can’t be “no side” because the show’s political messaging has been far too obvious to cop out now.)
Is Scardapane trying to say that the Jan. 6th insurrectionists are heroes? If not, it sure reads that way. In a nod to the color of Daredevil’s costume, pretty much all the protesters wear red. Mostly we see red devil masks and some wear red handkerchiefs over their faces (not unlike the way ICE officers have hid their faces). The strangest choice though is that a good many protesters wear bright red baseball caps, the symbol of MAGA for a decade now. Granted, the fact that the good guys usually wear masks in superhero stories and that ICE agents are conducting their raids in masks was always going to make any superhero commentary on ICE muddled on this particular matter, but masks are far from the only issue being dealt with here.
Perhaps Scardapane is trying to say that even ordinary people can go too far, but then the message would be to have compassion for the Jan. 6th insurrectionists. If that’s it, it’s a pretty bizarre non-sequitur when taken with the anti-Trump messages that preceded it.
At worst, the insurrectionists on Jan. 6th were trying to overthrow the government and literally hang the vice president. At best, they were violent dupes that were lied to by their president. So which one of these are the New Yorkers supposed to be in the Born Again finale? Either way, it insults the people of New York that have been cast as victims of Kingpin all season.
On top of the overall message, smaller details in the sequence cause only further issues.
Right before the building is stormed by the Daredevil supporters, the officers of the AVTF undergo a change of command. The really bad commander (Hamish Allan Headley) is replaced by a more moderate one (Jeremy Isaiah Earl) who then welcomes the people into the building. To me, this reads like an endorsement of the disproven myth that Capitol police officers welcomed in the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Also, shortly after this scene, Daredevil and Jessica Jones are fighting AVTF agents. So I guess they’re bad again?
The grossest moments of the courthouse invasion come from Fisk. When he exits the courtroom, he shouts “Boo!” and punches a protester in the face, possibly killing him. He then attacks a variety of other protesters, punching them, throwing them around and breaking their backs. With the entire season positioning Fisk as Trump, this reads like some bizarre Trump revenge fantasy, which is especially ironic since, on Jan. 6, Trump merely coerced his supporters into storming the Capitol before he spent several hours perversely watching the insurrection on the news from the safety of the Oval Office.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but even before the season premiered, Scardapane admitted that he was trying to evoke Jan. 6 in the finale, even if he didn’t completely spoil the ending. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Scardapane admitted that a scene from the end of the finale “looks eerily like a bit of history.” He then added, “That one we did lean into. If you’re diving into stories that are borrowing from past events, history tends to repeat itself if not learned from.”
In other words, his Jan. 6 parallels are entirely intentional. And while he chides people for potentially not learning from history, I’d argue that it’s important to understand history before it can be learned from.
At the end of the episode, when the protestors are about to kill Fisk, Daredevil stops them. He tells them “We’re better than this!” and he’s right. The ordinary citizens of New York deserve better than to be depicted as no different than the violent morons and anarchists who caused the deaths of several people on Jan. 6th in an effort to overthrow our government and hand it to Donald Trump, our own, real-life Kingpin.
