Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Review — Marvel Television Finally Remembers What It Was Good At

Daredevil: Born Again season one was a rescue operation performed in public. The show was rebuilt mid-production in 2023 and you could see the joins — a first half assembled from a different series, a second half that finally located the show it wanted to be. Season two, which premiered in March 2026 to near-perfect scores, has no such problem. It is the best live-action Marvel television since the Netflix run ended, season three is already greenlit, and it earns both of those facts.

The Verdict

What Season Two Is About

Season one ended with Wilson Fisk, the elected mayor of New York, declaring what amounts to martial law. Season two opens inside it and stays there. This is the smartest decision the show makes: it does not treat the escalation as a cliffhanger to be resolved in episode one but as the setting for the whole run. Fisk has the city. The question the season asks is what a lawyer does when the law is the weapon.

That reframing puts Matt Murdock in the position the character works best in — legally outmatched, morally cornered, and forced to choose between the courtroom and the rooftop knowing that both are compromised. Charlie Cox has never been better in the part, and the season lets him be genuinely frightening in a way the Netflix show only reached in flashes.

The most tense sequence of the season involves no fighting at all. It is a public hearing, and the show is confident enough to let it run.

Vincent D'Onofrio Is Operating At A Different Level

Fisk in political office is the version of the character with the most to say and the least room to manoeuvre, and D'Onofrio plays the constriction beautifully. He is slower, more careful, more publicly reasonable, and the moments when the mask slips are rationed with real discipline. The lunch scene that closed out season one has an answer here, and it is better.

The season also gives Vanessa material worth having. Their marriage is written as a partnership between two people who know exactly what the other is, and the sharpest scenes in the season are the ones where she is the more ruthless of the two. We go deeper on why this character works structurally in our analysis of Kingpin.

The Supporting Cast, Graded

Krysten Ritter's return as Jessica Jones is handled with more care than most legacy reintroductions. She is not there to remind you of a show you liked. She is there because a private investigator is exactly what a story about a city under surveillance needs, and her flat refusal to take any of Matt's Catholicism seriously punctures the season at the right intervals.

The Problem The Show Still Has Not Fixed

Foggy Nelson is killed in the first episode of season one, and two seasons on, the show has never adequately justified it. It was a cheap shot — a beloved character eliminated in a cold open to establish stakes and clear the board — and season two compounds it by continuing to use the loss as a source of motivation without ever reckoning with the choice. Elden Henson's absence is a hole in the show's centre and every scene between Matt and Karen makes it more obvious.

• The death establishes tone in ninety seconds and costs the series its warmest relationship permanently.
• Matt's grief is real and well played, but grief is not the same as consequence.
• The legal thread the season builds would be dramatically richer with a partner Matt actually trusts.
• It is the one decision from the 2023 rebuild that the show has not managed to absorb.

How It Compares

Season one scored 87%. Season two is a clear improvement on it and sits comfortably alongside the best of the Netflix era — better constructed than Daredevil season two from 2016, less consistently astonishing than season one from 2015, and with a far stronger political spine than either. Against Marvel's wider television output it trails only X-Men '97, which is not a fair comparison and which we cover in our season two review.

Elsewhere on Disney+, Wonder Man landed at 90% in January with a completely different set of ambitions — see our review — and Vision Quest arrives 14 October 2026 with Paul Bettany returning and James Spader confirmed back as Ultron. Between the three, Marvel Television is in considerably better shape than Marvel's film division.

The Bottom Line

Watch it. If you bounced off season one because of its uneven first half, come back — this is the show those episodes were trying to be. Season three is confirmed and, on this evidence, has the most interesting problem in the franchise to solve: what Fisk does after he has already won.