A lot has happened to Daredevil in the first season of Born Again. Foggy died; his nemesis ran for mayor of New York and won; his attempts to go straight have hit some roadblocks; he dealt with a serial killer who targeted two people he knew personally. Also, he got a girlfriend.
The fact that Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) has found some happiness amid all this drudgery should seem like a bigger deal, particularly when his girlfriend is more or less the most stable part of his whole life. Heather (Margarita Levieva) and Matt have been together for eight episodes now. There’s not a ton of clarity in the timeline of the show, but given that they were together when Fisk got elected mayor (which would’ve been around November) and a recent St. Patrick’s Day episode, they’ve been together for at least five months.
But as the end of the season looms and Heather’s plotlines are finally foregrounding her importance to the story, Born Again has given Daredevil a completely different problem: His girlfriend is really poorly written in a way that feels like an unwelcome throwback to a bygone era of nondescript superhero girlfriends.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers through episode 8 of Daredevil: Born Again season 1.]
Photo: Giovanni Rufino/Marvel
We’re to understand there’s a level of deep familiarity with Heather and Matt: She has a key to his place; even when he comes home late after some Daredeviling, she is in bed at his apartment.
And yet, Born Again can’t muster the same enthusiasm for her character. Part of this is just a problem of split focus. With just nine episodes in the season, Born Again has to make every installment count toward Matt hearing the siren’s call to go back to vigilantism. Heather has her own work across town, meaning their plotlines for the bulk of the season don’t intersect. And by the time they do, with the reveal that serial killer Muse has her intended as his grand final target, it feels all just a bit too little, too late.
In contrast to most people around her, Heather feels like a nothing character. Outside of “Matt’s girlfriend” and “therapist,” Heather doesn’t have a lot of defining characteristics. When we see her in action, she’s mostly in service of someone else’s storyline: Matt having a sounding board when he returns home late; Vanessa and Wilson working through their marital issues; Muse’s identity being revealed. What time we do get to spend with Matt and Heather together is geared toward painting their relationship as a healthy, loving one — at least, right up until it’s not.
By episode 8, Matt and Heather are fighting, with her having been through a traumatic experience that solidified her support of Mayor Fisk, and him being an in-the-closet masked vigilante who would like everyone to be aware that he’s doing the right thing. But apparently this isn’t their first fight; when he shows up to the gala Heather honestly thought he was bailing on, she alludes to there having been problems for a while now. She says he’s been “checking out” on the relationship for a little bit, and “disappearing physically and emotionally.”
That makes sense, given what we know of Matt. But it isn’t true to what we see of Matt, which is Daredevil’s whole problem. It’s not that we can’t infer that Matt’s attentions have been divided and he’s been a bad boyfriend. Rather, it feels like Daredevil: Born Again is taking the old-school way of writing a hero’s girlfriend: there when she needs to be, in alternating currents of sympathetic sweetheart and neglected partner. It’s kind of shocking to see how ancillary she is to the whole thing; these days MCU women aren’t well drawn, but they typically feel either a little more relevant or (as Pepper Potts does several times) excuse themselves early on in the film.
Perhaps nothing better represents how little the story cares about Heather than when she finally confronts Matt at the gala about his distance: when he hears some shit going down with Fisk behind closed doors, he zones out and listens to that instead.
The entire conversation between Fisk and Hawkeye’s Jack Duquesne (Tony Dalton) is almost exactly two minutes long. That’s a long time for Heather to be monologuing to a guy who’s clearly not listening! But, even when we return to the sparring couple, it seems nothing has really changed about their situation, for better or (as Matt deserves) worse. In fact, nothing about the way she’s written even seems to suggest to us that Matt missed out on anything; his zoning out doesn’t seem to be an issue at all. Instead, Born Again has tripped into the perfect metaphor for a half-assed girlfriend character: Our hero is distracted by plot for two minutes, and she just holds still until he comes back.
Daredevil: Born Again’s season finale drops on Disney Plus next Tuesday at 6 p.m. PDT/9 p.m. EDT.
