Daredevil: Born Again Brings One Aspect Of The Comics The MCU Was Missing

For over 15 years, we've seen Marvel Studios adapt comic books to the screen at a scale never before imaginable, with interconnected movies and sequels, cameos, and crossovers that build a large, vast, often incoherent continuity. We've seen superhero teams form and disband, mantles passed on to the next generation, and even the actual multiverse being introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you were to tell a comic book fan in the late '90s or early '00s that we'd see the Avengers assemble and fight Thanos, three different Spider-Mans from different universes would meet, and The Illuminati would appear on screen, they wouldn't believe you.

But as much as the MCU has recreated the feeling of reading comic books, it still lacks in certain areas, like actually making its titles feel seamlessly interconnected outside of the big crossover events. (With a few exceptions, major characters don't really interact with each other.) Likewise, Marvel still hasn't fully fixed its villain problem, which is a worrying enough issue that James Gunn has promised to ensure the DC Universe will avoid that.

The villain problem has been a part of the MCU since its very beginning. Ever since the first "Iron Man" movie, most villains in Marvel movies are killed off, which takes away from the menace they are meant to evoke. There are incredibly few villains that have survived more than one encounter with the hero, and even out of those, only one villain has repeatedly gone up against the hero, lost, and been thrown in jail, only to be released later to keep wreaking havoc. I'm talking about Vincent D'Onofrio's Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin. He is not just the best part of "Daredevil: Born Again," but surprisingly, he's the answer to Marvel's villain problem.

The diner conversation between Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Wilson Fisk early in "Born Again" is terrific, because you can feel the history between the two characters. The gravitas of their meeting is not like when we first saw Christian Bale's Batman confront Heath Ledger's Joker, which was mostly about those two iconic characters coming to blows. Instead, the gravitas of this simple meeting at a diner came out of the fact that audiences understand why they interacted like old buddies, because we've seen them go through hell together.

Even outside the meeting, and even when "Daredevil: Born Again" isn't focusing on Fisk as the villain, he still feels like the biggest threat, with his presence and influence felt everywhere. That's not because we are told he is a dangerous man or because we know from the comics that he is a big villain, but because we have seen him being a big dangerous man time and time again. After all, the character appeared in three seasons of "Daredevil," as well as both "Hawkeye" and "Echo." When Fisk and Matt talk about how oddly nice it is to see each other again, you believe it, because at this point, they've known each other for years.

When Fisk gives speeches about wanting to fix New York City, we understand that he at the very least genuinely believes that's what he wants to do, because we've walked down this path with him several times before. When we see people in the streets protesting his candidacy for mayor, we know what they're angry about, because we've repeatedly seen what Fisk is capable of and the atrocities he's committed, so we're sure it's only a matter of time before he starts resorting to old habits.

This is simply something no other Marvel villain has. Sure, Michael B. Jordan's Killmonger remains one of the best villains the MCU has ever shown, but he only posed a temporary threat to Black Panther. Thanos was teased for multiple movies, but he felt more like a monumental disaster the heroes had to push back — and even then, we technically see two different versions of Thanos. The only other villain that survived to fight the hero multiple times is Loki, and he quickly changed sides.

What makes Kingpin special in the context of the MCU is that he is not just a villain or an antagonist, he is a recurring villain. And he's a nemesis. He brings to the MCU the same shared history, context, and dynamic that Magneto (both versions) brought to the "X-Men" movies. At some point, a conflict like the one between Daredevil and Kingpin becomes about more than simply wanting to see the hero beat up the villain — it's also about wanting to see what the villain will plan next time.

Having recurring villains in superhero movies isn't easy. When the villain has superpowers, how do you justify them actually being captured and kept in jail? What sort of prison could truly keep Thanos locked up? (The Raft? I don't think so.) The way this can work is with superpower-free, street-level villains. This is why Kingpin works perfectly as a recurring villain and archnemesis, because his fall always depends on the U.S. legal system, which "Daredevil" shows time and time again is far from great. With "Daredevil: Born Again," the MCU finally has the kind of recurring villains that make comic books so good, and it's all thanks to Wilson Fisk.