At the end of Daredevil: Born Again’s season 2 premiere, our hero is unmasked. While rescuing his ex-cop pal, Daredevil (Charlie Cox) is swarmed by the anti-vigilante task force. Normally, a handful of guys with guns would be no problem for the masked vigilante, but in a moment of distraction, the agents get the better of Daredevil. They pin him to the ground and rip his mask off, revealing Matt Murdock underneath.
A second later, knives start flying in through the window and into the heads of each of the task force agents, killing them instantly. Then one more knife lands in front of Daredevil with a note carved into it that reads “You’re welcome” along with the crosshairs symbol of Bullseye (Wilson Bethel). Then, the episode ends.
This raises a question: Is Daredevil: Born Again showrunner Dario Scardapane planning to redeem one of the superhero’s biggest arch-nemeses? This might seem absurd for a villain known mostly for killing the people closest to Daredevil, but based on some recent comments by Scardapane (and look at some of Bullseye’s comics history of the past two decades), that may be exactly what’s happening.
“I don’t look at the villains as villains. And I don’t look at the heroes as heroes,” Scardapane recently told GamesRadar+ in relation to Bullseye. He added that Bullseye is one of his favorite characters and praised the character’s introduction in the third season of the original Netflix series. While Scardapane doesn’t think Bullseye should be forgiven for killing Daredevil’s best friend Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), he did say, “There’s a lot of pain and a lot of ouch to that guy. And he gets an opportunity in this season to be a hero, at least in his own mind.”
Marvel has a long history of redeeming its villains and turning them into heroes (or at least anti-heroes) so much so that fans have often grown tired of these redemption stories. Let the bad guys actually be bad! That said, when it comes to Bullseye, while he has traditionally been one of Marvel’s most sadistic villains since he debuted 50 years ago, over the past two decades, some interesting choices have been made with the character to put him into positions where he’s not exactly good, but he’s not entirely bad either.
In 2007, Bullseye joins the Thunderbolts, which are somewhat different in the comics from what they are in the recent Thunderbolts* movie. At this point in the comics, while still a team of reformed supervillains employed by the US government, they’re under the command of Norman Osborn, who has given up being the Green Goblin. Osborn and his team are tasked with rounding up heroes who have resisted the Superhero registration act (the Captain America side of Marvel’s “Civil War” story), and Bullseye is a valuable member of the team until he gets paralyzed after just a few issues.
Bullseye recovers, which leads into his next interesting team-up as part of the Dark Avengers (just called “The Avengers” publicly), the government-sponsored version of the team put under Osborn’s command. As part of the Dark Avengers, Bullseye takes on the persona of Hawkeye, just as other villains inhabit the aliases of other heroes. While Bullseye is on the team, they help stop the Skrull invasion of Earth.
Bullseye doesn’t stay as Hawkeye for too long. By 2010 he’s back to full-time villainy, but that four-year stint as part of the Thunderbolts and then the Dark Avengers in the comic books might inform whatever arc the character takes in the MCU. After all, at the end of the Thunderbolts* movie, we learned that that the asterisk in the title was hinting at another name for the team: “The New Avengers.” And while they’re not quite as evil as Norman Osborn’s task force from the comic books, the similarities in both teams of antiheroes is clear. Perhaps this means Daredevil: Born Again is finally doing the thing that fans have been chattering about online for a few years now and setting him up to join the team with Yelena Bovola, Bucky Barnes, Red Guardian and the rest.
Even if that does happen, it’s hard to imagine he’d be a part of the team for long. Not only does it seem pretty clear that Sam Wilson’s Avengers will eventually unseat “The New Avengers” as the MCU’s official Avengers, but at some point Bullseye will have to be squaring off against Daredevil again. The people in charge of Daredevil: Born Again must know that that’s what the fans really want out of the character, even if they put Bullseye on an interesting detour before they do it.