Daredevil recap: everything you need to know before Born Again

Ash Walker • 04 Mar 2025 Features

Watch without fear… of forgetting important things.

Marvel’s Man Without Fear returns this March in Daredevil: Born Again - a brand new Disney+ series that promises to evolve the character, while continuing where the critically acclaimed Netflix series left off.

It’s an exciting time to be a fan of Ol’ Horn Head… but it has been a while since he last graced our screens. The final season of Netflix’s Daredevil aired way back in 2018, so you’d be forgiven for forgetting everything that’s happened up to now.

That’s where our guide comes in! Read on for a reminder of everything you need to know before diving into Daredevil: Born Again.

Daredevil Season 1

Idealistic young lawyer Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), fresh out of law school, sets up a small firm in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen with his best friend and law partner Franklin ‘Foggy’ Nelson (Elden Henson). They take the cases that no other law firm will touch, regularly waiving their fee for their more impoverished clients.

Matt was blinded in a chemical accident when he was a child, but, unbeknownst to everyone around him, that same accident also heightened his other senses to a superhuman level. Matt secretly uses his abilities - and his ninja-like martial arts skills - to protect the innocent, and soon becomes a controversial hero dubbed The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.

Meanwhile, a shadowy figure has seemingly taken control of the Kitchen’s criminal underworld; a man so feared that no one will say his name out loud. When she unwittingly stumbles upon this conspiracy, secretary Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) is framed for murder and almost killed in her holding cell.

With nowhere else to turn, Karen hires Nelson & Murdock to defend her. The guys quickly get her charges dropped and Karen begins working for them as an office manager/legal aide/drinking buddy.

The mysterious ‘kingpin’ of crime turns out to be a wealthy guy called Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), who is attempting to rehabilitate Hell’s Kitchen by taking total control of the criminal element. He is intelligent, cultured… and savagely violent - in an unforgettable scene, Fisk decapitates a man with a car door, simply for embarrassing him in front of the woman he likes.

That woman is gallery owner Vanessa Marianna (Ayelet Zurer), with whom Fisk becomes dangerously smitten. So much so that the relationship causes fractures within Fisk’s organisation, and his partners, including money man Leland Owlsley (Bob Gunton), Yakuza don Nobu (Peter Shinkoda) and mysterious drug baroness Madame Gao (Wai Ching Ho), all turn against him.

Soon Fisk gets sloppy, his network of gangs, corrupt cops and pet politicians begins to unravel, and Matt Murdock comes after him on two fronts - through Nelson & Murdock by day, and as the brutal vigilante Daredevil by night.

In the end, Fisk’s criminal empire is dismantled, Fisk is arrested and Vanessa is whisked away to somewhere without an extradition agreement. Of course, Fisk has one more trick up his sleeve and manages to escape custody, but Matt - in brand new Daredevil duds - tracks him down and beats him up in an alleyway.

Fisk goes to jail, and Daredevil continues to protect the people of Hell’s Kitchen.

Some other things that happened:

• Foggy discovers his friend’s secret after stumbling in on him bleeding and beaten, following a savage fight against Nobu.
• Karen is kidnapped by James Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore), Fisk’s right-hand man, and ends up killing him.
• Matt’s old mentor, the crotchety blind ninja known as Stick (Scott Glenn), makes an unwelcome return to Matt’s life, trying to destroy something he calls a ‘Black Sky’. Something that turns out to be a small child.
• Grizzled old newspaper reporter Ben Urich (Vondie Curtis-Hall) helps Nelson & Murdock (and Page) investigate Fisk, and is throttled to death for his troubles. RIP Ben.
• Owlsley is thrown down an elevator shaft to his death, and Nobu is unceremoniously set on fire. The mysterious Madame Gao, meanwhile, mysteriously vanishes.

Daredevil Season 2

Matt has doubled down on his violent nocturnal activities, beating up scumbags left and right and enjoying himself immensely. That is until a new vigilante element, seemingly inspired by Daredevil’s actions, begins brutally murdering criminal gangs in Hell’s Kitchen.

The press dub this trigger-happy crusader The Punisher, and he racks up quite the body count before finally turning himself in, beaten and bloodied. Turns out he is Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), a vengeful former spec-ops soldier whose family were tragically caught in the crossfire of a gangland gunfight in Central Park.

Karen takes pity on Frank, despite his murderous ways, and convinces Franklin & Nelson to defend him when he goes on trial - something that Foggy views as a no-win situation and an all-round terrible idea.

Meanwhile, Matt’s old college girlfriend, the wealthy socialite Elektra Natchios (Elodie Yung), returns and quickly draws Matt into a series of dangerously sexy costumed escapades investigating the resurgent Yakuza. The two bicker, flirt and beat up on some ninjas, and Matt’s carefully balanced double life begins to fall apart.

Matt is so irresponsible that he completely misses the Frank Castle trial, forcing Foggy to step up and do his best to defend the unrepentant Punisher. Despite a valiant effort, Foggy loses the case, and Castle goes to jail.

But not for long.

Inside, Castle meets up with Wilson Fisk. The former Kingpin of Crime is in the middle of a prison yard power struggle, and coerces Castle into offing his rival on the promise of answers about the day Castle’s family was killed.

Castle agrees, brutally kills a bunch of guys, and escapes, finally on the tail of the group who was ultimately responsible for his grief - a group including the District Attorney.

While Castle embarks on his roaring rampage of revenge, things escalate with the Hand, a secretive ninja sect within the Yakuza. Nobu returns from the dead, convinced that Elektra - who, it turns out, was also trained by Stick - is the ‘Black Sky’ that they have been looking for all these years.

In a final showdown, Nobu kills Elektra before being thrown off a roof by a rageful Matt… and then beheaded for good measure by Stick. Matt buries his lost love, and finally confesses to Karen that he is, in fact, Daredevil.

Some other things that happened:

• Frank takes out everyone responsible for his family’s deaths - including the DA and his former commanding officer - and disappears into the night, ready to headline two seasons of his own TV show.
• Due to Matt’s ill-advised behaviour, he and Foggy have a massive falling out, and the law firm is disbanded.
• Matt and Elektra discover that the Hand have been digging an enormous hole beneath a building in Midland Circle. A hole that becomes very important in…

The Defenders

The Hand are back, this time led by a woman named Alexandra (Sigourney Weaver). She is seemingly ancient, but dying of some kind of degenerative disease, and the only way for her to get better and resume her immortality is to speed up the Hand’s plans for Hell’s Kitchen.

Those plans, it turns out, are to unearth the skeleton of an ancient dragon, buried for millennia beneath Manhattan island, and grind its bones to dust. That’s right. An actual dragon.

Madame Gao returns, along with other members of the Hand, and Alexandra uses the rest of the organisation’s resurrection juice to bring Elektra back to life. She is now the Black Sky that was prophesied, an emotionless ninja killing machine with no memories of her former life.

Meanwhile, Matt has given up his vigilante ways and hung up the cowl. But not for long. Soon he’s dragged back into a life of superheroing, teaming up with the other Netflix heroes Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and Danny Rand (Finn Jones), the Immortal Iron Fist, to save the city.

Through various escapades, the four of them end up in the bowels of the earth - down that hole in Midland Circle - fighting Hand ninjas amongst the bones of a dragon. Jessica, Luke and Danny make it out, but Matt stays behind to snap Elektra out of her Terminator-like trance.

He succeeds, and the two old lovers kiss as the excavation site crumbles around them, and they are both buried alive.

Daredevil Season 3

Surprise! Matt didn’t actually die, after all. When the Midland Circle building collapsed, he fell into some kind of underground channel and wound up shooting out of a sewer pipe into the river.

Now he’s back at the Catholic orphanage where he was raised, recovering from some pretty major injuries under the care of no-nonsense nun Sister Maggie (Joanne Whalley).

Everyone else thinks he’s dead (although Karen is still paying his rent, unable to accept that he’s truly gone), and Matt wants to keep it that way. He’s in a dark place, ready to give up on both Daredevil and Matt Murdock, and disappear forever.

Until, that is, Wilson Fisk gets out of prison.

The big man has made a deal with the FBI, informing on rival gangs in exchange for any charges against his beloved Vanessa being dropped completely. And a penthouse suite in a fancy hotel, of course.

Matt isn’t having any of it, and neither are Karen and Foggy; the three reunite in an effort to put the Kingpin of Crime back where he belongs. But it’s not going to be easy.

Fisk has been busy gathering dirt on the agents guarding him, and eventually turns the whole New York branch of the FBI into his own private army. Of particular interest to Fisk is Special Agent Ben Poindexter (Wilson Bethel), a troubled man with a remarkable talent for turning everyday objects into deadly weapons.

Fisk pushes ‘Dex’ to the dark side, forcing him to wear Daredevil’s costume and commit heinous acts, all in the name of disgracing the vigilante hero and turning the city against him.

Everything culminates in a bloody threeway fistfight in Fisk’s penthouse, between Fisk, Daredevil and Poindexter. Poindexter gets his back broken by Fisk - which is being surgically repaired in the post-credits scene - and Matt comes very close to killing Fisk.

But in the end, Matt’s morals win out, and the two come to an uneasy stalemate - Fisk will keep Matt’s identity secret, stop coming after Matt’s friends and go back to jail, or Matt will have Vanessa prosecuted for ordering the death of ill-fated FBI Agent Ray Nadeem (Jay Ali).

The series ends with our three heroes - Matt, Foggy and Karen - having a well-earned beer in Foggy’s family deli, and an idea scrawled on a napkin. A new law firm, this time called Nelson, Murdock & Page.

Some other things that happened:

• In a shock twist, it’s revealed that Sister Maggie is secretly Matt’s mum. She suffered from postpartum depression and escaped into the church, leaving baby Matt to be raised by his boxer dad.
• Foggy runs for DA, in an effort to bring the Fisk deal to the public’s attention.
• Karen reveals that she killed her brother in a car accident when she was younger, while driving drunk, high and angry. She also reveals to everyone - including Fisk - that she shot Wesley way back in Season 1.
• Fisk orchestrates a prison riot in an effort to have Matt killed, and in seeing a blind man fight like a ninja, discovers that Matt is actually Daredevil.
• Vanessa demands that Fisk share everything with her if they’re to make their relationship work - especially all of his criminal activities. Fisk agrees, and she takes to the dark stuff alarmingly quickly.

Other Appearances

Since wrapping up Season 3, Daredevil and Wilson Fisk have made a few tantalising guest appearances in various other Marvel properties, including:

• Spider-Man: No Way Home - in which Matt Murdock briefly appears as the brick-catching ‘very good’ lawyer assigned to defend Peter Parker and Happy Hogan.
• Hawkeye - in which Fisk is revealed to be the villain behind everything, and is shot in the face by Echo (he gets better).
• She-Hulk - in which Matt goes up against Hulked-out fellow lawyer Jen Walters in court, before teaming up with her as Daredevil and… spending the night at her apartment. What would Karen say?!
• Echo - in which Daredevil makes a memorably scary appearance and engages in a pretty fantastic fight with antihero Echo, and Fisk is a major player.

All of the titles mentioned here are currently available to stream on Disney+, and Daredevil: Born Again will be available from 5th March 2025, releasing one episode a week after a two-episode premiere. It’s already been renewed for a second season too, so there’s plenty more high-kicking, horn-headed action to come.