I enjoyed the first season of Daredevil. Check out that description! Blind lawyer by day, vigilante by night. What’s not to love? In season one we got to meet Matt Murdoch, learn how he developed his awesome fighting skills, and watch him start up the little-lawfirm-that-could. Over the course of that initial season, Murdoch/Daredevil took on the suave-but-crazy Wilson Fisk, risking everything to stand up against corruption. It was a pretty good baker’s dozen of episodes and I queued up each one with a reasonable amount of interest. Then, they offered up season two.
Now, season two had some of the makings of a good story. An old flame, a new villain, an office romance, conflict with the partner of the promising law firm…but those elements were only included like spices thrown in with a main ingredient. And what was that main ingredient? Ninja fighting. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of ninja fighting. I think if you removed all the jumping, flipping, kicking, slashing and running around in the shadows, the thirteen hours of season two would be reduced to maybe four hours of story telling. I’m not saying ninja stuff isn’t cool. I’m just saying that nine hours of martial arts choreography isn’t a story. Not too far into it, whenever the combat started up, I’d hear the Itchy and Scratchy theme song in my head and tune out until the next scene started. Halfway through the list of episodes, I stopped really watching and just played them as a backdrop to whatever household chore or internet surfing I had to do. At some point Foggy Nelson got hired by Jeri Hogarth – that was the most intriguing thing to happen and I can only hope that Elden Henson joins the cast of Jessica Jones. In the last episode, secretary-turned-journalist Karen Page ended up on a kidnap-bus and probably there was an interesting reason why but I wasn’t about to scroll back through the last seventeen bouts of face-kicking to figure out how she got there.
I probably won’t watch season three unless I hear that there was a marked reduction in the ninja department. I think if they had even just used two hours of kick-fight filler and made it six episodes, it probably would have been worth watching. As it was, Daredevil’s season two was entirely too much fight-fight-fight for a character I Â never thought was in any real danger. The only thing I really cared about was whether or not Matt would really abandon the office of Murdoch and Nelson, and once it looked like Foggy had another job lined up, I didn’t even care about that any more.
Kelly Horn 