Daredevil‘s Dark Knight Syndrome: It Doesn’t Like its Hero Nearly as Much as It Loves its Villains

Daredevil was supposed to be about due process and the value of law and order, as much as it was to be about R-rated superheroics. But by Season Two, the violence has become doubly gratuitous, the lawyering side of Matt Murdock’s life is almost irrelevant (unlike in Season One, zero justice is done in Daredevil’s second season by legal means) and the show becomes markedly more exciting and focused whenever its villains are on-screen.

More than it likes the American legal system, more than it even likes its own hero, Daredevil loves characters who take the law into their own hands to maim, torture and kill. It fetishizes characters who give in to darker urges—characters like Frank Castle, Wilson Fisk and Scott Glenn’s doomy fundamentalist Stick, all of whom get the most badass lines and the swaggiest finishing moves. Facing them, you have Matt Murdock, preaching about his no-murder rule and lecturing those who disagree with him on how they ought to behave. Murdock has alone decided what justice is, and his mission in life is to stop the very stylized bloodshed that Daredevil specializes in. He is effectively the buzz kill of his own show.

It doesn’t help Murdock that Daredevil’s key rogues are played by the series’ three best actors, who add heft in a way that the likeable yet lightweight Charlie Cox can’t. But regardless, their characters have been developed with much more enthusiasm than has the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Frank Castle could be described as a better-equipped Travis Bickle; Wilson Fisk is a troubled, manic-depressive that thirsts for love and affection; while Stick is an old drifter, brainwashed by his own ideology, stuck in a war he’s resigned himself to fighting alone. Where these are well-drawn people, Matt Murdock remains after two seasons little more than a symbol. And the show doesn’t always appear to agree with what he stands for.

While Daredevil the show glamorizes vigilantism, Matt Murdock is, like Bruce Wayne, a man that considers ‘cleaning up the streets’ a duty, but not one that he necessarily enjoys. He self-flagellates and reminds those around him constantly that his actions don’t make him a good person. In effect Matt Murdock admonishes viewers for trying to take any pleasure from his story. He’s a square-jawed comic book hero, so of course he has to suffer in his guilt, in order to separate him from the bad guys. Daredevil’s villains meanwhile are free to run wild, and the show’s writers clearly have more fun exploring them than they do trying to do anything new with the virtuous superhero type. It’s a case of Dark Knight Syndrome, where the hero gets pushed to the sidelines, as the writers fail to disguise how liberating they find developing the villain.

The scribes behind Daredevil would probably prefer it if Matt Murdock could cut loose more. But he’s a good guy in a show that doesn’t have much admiration for goodness. Murdock’s flawed, but he can never be that flawed, and in a series as fond of the dark as this one, there’s little room for a classic comic book hero to prosper.

At the end of Season Two, Murdock finds himself giving his blessing to Frank Castle and his brand of ultimate vigilante justice (maybe killing big bad The Blacksmith is the right way to go, he relents), as well as fighting alongside hesitant accomplice Elektra as she embarks on a ninja murder rampage. Here we find the writers losing interest in their good guy’s principles: Murdock has become complicit in the brutality and the merciless killing, and it’s suddenly as though his code never meant anything at all. While Frank Castle at first serves as Season Two’s chief antagonist, by episode 13—after hours of bloody massacring—Castle has become the hero right alongside Murdock, with all his crimes apparently excused. It’s a peculiar message, to say the least, for a show that purports to be a champion of law and order.