Here it was an extended origin story taking place over the course of many weeks/months and ended with Matt taking on his superhero persona and we had a glorious ending sequence with him in his final costume and being called his hero name.
Sure, but that doesn't mean there couldn't have been some improvement in the pacing. It wouldn't have violated that origin-story intent if he'd donned his final costume at the start of the final episode, or even its midway point. And it definitely would've worked better if the costume had actually
accomplished something. Okay, it kind of seemed as though it gave him a bit of extra protection against Fisk's beating, but we didn't see any of its bullet- and blade-resistant qualities that Potter mentioned.
More importantly, the emergence of Daredevil should've felt like the climax rather than an afterthought. Fisk had already been exposed and arrested, then escaped, and Daredevil just found him in an alley and beat him up. What bothers me is that a lot of people were killed in that escape and Daredevil didn't manage to prevent it. My view is that if a lot of people die and the superhero only belatedly shows up to save one person or stop the bad guy, then he's not a very good hero. What would've been better, I feel, is if DD had shown up in time to intervene in the escape, if he'd been able to use the advantages of his costume to save the lives of at least some of the guards, only for Fisk to slip away while he was at it, leading to the final confrontation. It would've made DD more effective and impressive, showcased the costume better, and made the climax feel bigger and more unified.
I suspect when we next see Fisk -likely using legal trickery to get the charges dismissed- he'll fully don the name "Kingpin." This series was as much his origin story as it was DD's.
I still say that treating "Kingpin" as a nickname in the same vein as "Daredevil" is misunderstanding the nature of the term. It's just a generic label for the head of an organization, particularly a criminal one. "Mob kingpin" or "underworld kingpin" is a pretty commonplace phrase, so it would've been the natural epithet for people like Ben Urich to apply to him even before they knew who he was. So it really didn't work for them to avoid it as self-consciously as they did. It's one of the few hero or villain nicknames in comics that you
could use in a totally natural, organic, unaffected way without needing to make excuses for it. It was their avoidance of it that came off as unnatural and forced.
Also wanted to see more of a relationship between Matt and Claudia/Night Nurse. I look forward to seeing more of her as the bridging point between the other Marvel NF series.
Her name's Claire Temple. And it's hard to say who she might end up in a relationship with. She originated as a love interest for Luke Cage, but Luke was Jessica Jones's boyfriend in
Alias, and I get the impression that
AKA Jessica Jones is adapting that series relatively faithfully.
My buddy and I were talking it over and we were kind of thinking that Fisk's killing of his father wasn't all that bad of a thing. I mean, dismembering his body and hiding the evidence? Sure.
But if he and his mom called the police and said, "yeah he was beating up on his wife and son, he attacked him in defense" the police would probably be more-or-less okay with it. Not sure his killing his asshole, abusive, father "justifies" his fall. If anything it makes him that much more sympathetic a character. Yeah, he's a giant killer, asshole but that's different from the killing of his asshole father.
Well, yes and no. Yes, you could argue that defending his mother made it justified self-defense. But even there, he went beyond that, giving in to the brutal lessons his father taught -- just keep hitting them harder, harder. So even in saving his mother, he was still succumbing to his father's violence by inheriting and embracing it. The problem isn't that he protected his mother -- the problem is that he didn't stop there, either then or later on. He just went on beating people to death for the rest of his life.
