Daredevil: Born Again: Gloves Off

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STV004: The gloves are off — and everything changes.

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, Episode 4 (“Gloves Off”) is the turning point the season has been building toward, and Jeff Haecker, Rob Leonardi, and Patrick Mason break it all down in this week’s Secrets of Television.

The episode opens with one of the season’s most striking sequences: Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter / Bullseye ordering a milkshake while Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” plays — a bluesy, uplifting jazz track set against a brutally precise anti-vigilante task force massacre. The panel digs into the music vignette’s deliberate tonal mismatch, the Dutch-angle camera work signaling Bullseye’s ordered-yet-unhinged state, and what Wilson Bethel revealed on the official Born Again podcast about how he played Poindexter’s flat, unconvincing police call.

Matt Murdock tracks Bullseye to his old church, where he recites a partial prayer to St. Lucia — conspicuously cutting off the petition for restored vision. Was it a secular production making a quiet omission, or something more telling about where Matt’s faith actually stands? The panel weighs in. They also debate whether Bullseye deliberately left the trail that led Matt there — and why Matt still won’t let anyone kill Wilson Fisk.

Meanwhile, Wilson Fisk stages a charity boxing match as a fundraiser for the “New York Born Again” initiative — a title drop that invites obvious comparisons to the Thomas Wayne Foundation. Vanessa Fisk defies his attempts to send her away, arriving just in time to be hit by a shard of glass when Bullseye’s throw goes wrong. The panel debates whether she survives, and what her fate means for Buck Cashman, the governor (Marge McCaffrey), and a Kingpin with nothing left to temper him.

The resistance subplot continues to grow: Kirsten McDuffie takes statements, Soledad Ayala goes on record about AVTF abuses, Jack Duquesne blesses Matt as a symbol before leaving New York, and Angela del Toro runs her first active mission — edging ever closer to becoming the White Tiger.

And one more thing: is that the Watcher watching from a broken window? Marvel TV head Brad Winderbaum’s cryptic post has the internet talking.

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