What I’m Watching: Daredevil

Daredevil: Season 2, Episode 2 “Dogs to a Gunfight” (B)

I’ll be honest – I didn’t remember a thing about what happened in this show’s season premiere. This installment helped to firm things up by dwelling on the intense and frightening new villain who was only named halfway through the episode. I think that Jon Bernthal, who played Shane on “The Walking Dead,” is a great choice to play the Punisher, who barely appeared or even spoke in this hour other than to decide that he needed to take out the trash when a clerk trying to sell him child pornography. Foggy did a fine job standing up to the district attorney to protect their client, but there wasn’t much hope of saving him from the start. What was most interesting about this lengthy, relatively slow episode was the way that Karen responded to the reports of what the Punisher was doing. Calling him inevitable was particularly powerful, and saying that he could be any one of them was haunting and true. Matt knows that Daredevil isn’t bad, but the way that his vigilantism was applauded did frame the notion of justice in a problematic way for villains to misuse. The knowledge that one man can take on so many police officers with no problem is not good, and the fact that Matt seems to be losing his other senses is very bad news. I’m intrigued to see where this show goes in this season, though the pacing does need to pick up a bit to keep me truly interested.