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goodhelmet

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Not sure where else they might go other than bullseye?

There's a bunch of more recent storylines they could try. The obvious one would be where Matt gets his identity doxxed, and then just flatly refuses to admit he's really Daredevil and tries to cover the whole thing up.
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I watched ep1 last night and really enjoyed it. The first 10 minutes or so felt a bit unDaredevil like to me but once the thing with the mob happened it was back to the DD I know and love.

Punisher walking through the hospital was a great visual I thought.

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We're through 5 or 6 now. I kind of love how passive aggressive and pissy Frank is relative to grim and gritty War Journal comics version. I'll believe it when you guys say that S1 was stronger (From the glimpses I've seen here), but nothing in the netflix Marvel seasons so far has been better than the Matt/Frank conversations.

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Just started last night. I dug the first episode but there is a clear step back from the previous season. It's much more obviously leaning into tropes which isn't inherently bad but feels weird after season one.

Irish gang that's past its time assembling to take over only to get shot up? Biker gang who are so tuff but have that underlying sense of loyalty? Grado or whatever the fuck makes little sense as a client too. Even Frank's "Bang." at the end was a bit on the nose, even if I think it made a great cliffhanger. It's leaning SO MUCH HARDER into tropes and it's distracting. Also as much as I get the 'It's just one man!' build and it's fine, I can't help but find it a bit extraneous given how much hype the Punisher had. Just put it out there and move on.

That said, it's not so much that it's gotten bad as it's taken a step back. Lots to like. Matt and Foggy being bros again is terrific and maybe more fun than before now that Foggy knows. The Karen romance proceeds nicely. Punisher feels like a force of nature so far. That Turk scene rules. Karen and Foggy getting their tough guy spots rules too.

I feel like if this was another show I'd be raving but the bar was stupid high. Still dug the first episode a lot and hoping to jam another one tonight.

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After finishing the much-hyped episode 8: fuckin' meh, man. This is not a great show. The FIRST season was absolutely great, but this contrived horseshit is so far below the bar they've already set for themselves.

A general thing I can say without spoiling is that the Punisher and Elektra storylines literally feel like they're happening in different universes. They're totally different genres. It's trying to mix Kung Fu with The Wire, and the contrast between the tones is just way too deep. I can't imagine Natchios and Castle even having a conversation with each other, any more than I could imagine Vic Mackey talking to Buffy Summers.

Specific gripes:

-Why did Frank even bother pleading Not Guilty? Once again, the level of arbitrary contrivance is driving me crazy. Frank wanted to plead guilty, before he entered his plea. Afterwards, in his trial, he's actively sabotaging his own defense at ALL times (and doing so long before he got whatever message from Kingpin). Why did he insist on a trial in the first place? It goes against absolutely EVERYTHING else he's ever done or said, at no point has he expressed any desire or enthusiasm to defend himself in court.

-While I appreciate Clancy Brown being there, his scene was bullshit. "I can't tell you the details about this classified mission... so now I'mma tell you every single detail about what happened, where we were, and who was there." And the idea that a one-armed man walked into the witness box and nobody NOTICED he was one-armed is so fucking insulting that it genuinely angered me.

-So, the Hand are digging a big tunnel in the middle of NYC and disposing of the loose dirt in railroad cars. One problem with that: Hell's Kitchen (and all of Manhattan) isn't built on top of loose dirt. It's built on top of a level of bedrock which is infamously hard and difficult to dig through. And for comparison's sake, a tunnel "forty stories deep" would be over twice as far underground as NYC's deepest subway tunnels.

-The Hand's ninjas are silent?! Completely dead silent, to the extent where Daredevil's "I can hear a footstep on the opposite side of a football field" hearing can't pick them up at all? (Despite the fact that he DOES later hear one of their heartbeats at his apartment; keep it fucking consistent, guys!) And then, the explanation for how he can still fight them is that he can HEAR THEIR SWORDS?!?!? Their inanimate cold dead swords were such Chatty Cathys that he could hear them?

-They come right out and tell us that Stick doesn't have Daredevil's powers, he's just an ordinary human who can't see. So how the hell is he able to be a goddamn archer? I could buy him being a Zatoichi-style swordsman; that's a stretch, but it's one I can live with. But him doing Hawkeye trick-shots from a moving car (at ninjas who are dead fucking silent, remember, and he shouldn't have any idea how to target them) is beyond ridiculous.

-Speaking of said archers and the Hand: a bunch of ninjas running around with bows and arrows in modern New York just looks ridiculous. They didn't do a good job of designing the Hand's costume, it looks like some shit from an old Sho Kosugi flick and is totally out of place in the "understated and realistic" visual style that they've otherwise tried so hard to maintain on this show.

-And back to Stick: why doesn't Daredevil believe him about the war? YOU'RE FIGHTING A HUGE ARMY OF MAGICAL GODDAMN NINJAS WITH INEXPLICABLE SUPERNATURAL POWERS. You have personally witnessed the proof of everything Stick's saying. You just watched him cure a deadly mystical poison by MacGyvering up a bunch of household products from your kitchen. That's pretty good proof that he's telling at least some truth about this shit. Listen to the man already!

-At the end: so, uh, the Hand knows where Murdock lives, and thus (logically) knows the secret identity of their enemy? Why do I get the feeling that this will be ignored in future episodes? Maybe it's because they sent one fucking guy to kill an apartment full of at least two, possibly three or four dangerous opponents. Seriously, why was there just one guy? And why wasn't his arrow coated with the same magic poison that they used on their swords to instantly incapacitate Elektra before?

-And if there's any sign of how desperately nervous this season is to follow up the first one, it's giving Kingpin an operatic entrance like a James Bond villain, using his one-line cameo to make us all go "OMG HE'S BACK~!". That's like when True Blood realized in a later season that "damn, our villains suck now" and brought back previously awesome villain Russell Edgington; and of course, his second tenure on the show was never as great as the first one. Or when Angel brought back Angelus in season 4, for a different but similar example. Daredevil's season 2 has really suffered from its incredibly weak heels, they haven't introduced ANY new villains worth a damn, to the point where it seems like bringing Fisk back was seemingly their only choice.

I'll get back to the show at some point, but for now I'mma go back to my marathon of Oz which was interrupted by Daredevil's release. Because a twenty-year-old nihilistic soap opera about assrape has felt a lot fresher and more interesting than DDs2.

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I don't think that's ever said, but it's definitely implied in the aftermath of the hospital attack. (Like pretty much everything about the Hand on this show, it's left frustratingly vague.) Which is after episode 8, I think, so that's why he doesn't know that. (Spoiler!)

That said, if they are zombies, they kinda contradict themselves on that later, because the big eureka moment is DD realizing he can hear their breathing. But if your body doesn't require circulation to function, I don't really see why it would require respiration either.

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The idea that they have no circulation or blood pressure is flatly contradicted by the Tarantino-sized geyser of blood which erupted from that one ninja who got his throat slit. Not to mention the fact that they explicitly told us that Daredevil DID hear that guy's heartbeat immediately beforehand.

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I don't hate this season as much as Jingus, but, yeah, liked S1 a lot more.  Thought the first two eps were really poor, and it does pick up from there, but there's not a lot of great writing here.  Some good moments, but generally average.  Not tightly plotted, and way too much in the way of plot and character motivations is either left to me to come up with something plausible or dismissed by muttering 'timey wimey' at it (well, not literally).  I don't need every little detail spelled out, but I dislike it when the who, what, and why is so vague that I have to fantasy book the episode to come up with something plausible.  Also, the writers need to realize that having a character say "wow, it's so unlikely that you were able to (walk around in your superhero costume without being seen/vastly overstep your authority/secure a building without checking surrounding buildings) doesn't make the thing that was just done any less implausible.

 

Still enjoying the show, but i kinda think I'll remember much of it in a few weeks.

 

Also, Frank Castle is to tactical geniuses what Homer Simpson is to Mensa.  Most of his plans seem to revolve around making himself as conspicuous as possible and drawing innocent bystanders into the scene, not away from it.  I never really though comic book Punisher was a strategist, but this version is simply a blunt instrument that plunges straight ahead.

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Also, the writers need to realize that having a character say "wow, it's so unlikely that you were able to (walk around in your superhero costume without being seen/vastly overstep your authority/secure a building without checking surrounding buildings) doesn't make the thing that was just done any less implausible.

 

Oh, god. This.

I'm generally more than willing to extend some grace to a writer who's taking a pretty big leap if he at least acknowledges that he took it...but damn, almost every episode - sometimes multiple times in a single episode - you've got characters doing this. At a certain point, you're just trying to paper over lazy plotting with cuteness.

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The big problem with the end of the season is that I was WAY more interested in seeing the Punisher series than whatever comes next in the half-assed, neverending war with the Hand. I think in season 3 they need to either shelve that stuff and focus on the grounded crime drama side of things OR fully commit to all the mystical shit and let their freak flag fly. They kinda tried to have it both ways this season, and it just didn't work.

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The big problem with the end of the season is that I was WAY more interested in seeing the Punisher series than whatever comes next in the half-assed, neverending war with the Hand. I think in season 3 they need to either shelve that stuff and focus on the grounded crime drama side of things OR fully commit to all the mystical shit and let their freak flag fly. They kinda tried to have it both ways this season, and it just didn't work.

Its a weird juxtaposition to go between the stories in the final eps. I was def ready to FF through more ninja fights.

I wonder if we will get

heroin junkie karen page

next year.

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If they ever do Born Again, I would wager they'll be much kinder to Karen. But that could come down to which of the showrunners has the most power, the Whedon disciple or the Sutter disciple. Those are two...very different ideologies when it comes to female characters.

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