Daredevil Battles Authoritarian Violence in Born Again Season 2

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Episodes 2 and 3 of Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, "Shoot the Moon" and "The Scales & the Sword."]

Daredevil: Born Again reimagines mob boss Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) as a noticeably Trumpian figure, making this one of the MCU's more successful attempts at tackling contemporary politics. After the last couple of Captain America projects struggled to critique the U.S. military while hyping up their Air Force hero, Born Again follows a more straightforward path. By connecting organized crime to government corruption, it can stay relevant without leaving Daredevil's comfort zone. 

Wilson Fisk embodies a familiar type of authoritarian leadership: a capricious narcissist who is never satisfied by any level of success. Exhibiting no real interest in the minutiae of governance, he's also a single-issue mayor. All he wants is to wreak vengeance on his mortal enemy Daredevil, a personal vendetta that fueled his election campaign last season. Branding masked vigilantes as a terrorist threat, he unleashes a specialized police squad to enforce his Safer Streets Act — an ironically named piece of legislation that sparks a wave of brutality across the city.

This season, Fisk's Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF) is an obvious stand-in for ICE. Led by a sadistic former NYPD officer, they report directly to the mayor and are given free rein to be as violent as they wish. Anyone suspected of vigilantism (or, let's face it, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time) gets rounded up and locked away in a secret warehouse prison.

Building on the law and order themes of earlier seasons, this leaves Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) with a more urgent moral conundrum than before: What do you do when the people writing and enforcing the laws are unequivocally evil? Is there any point in even trying to respect the system?

Some superhero stories use this kind of framework as a direct allegory for real-world discrimination, but Born Again goes a slightly different route. Rather than casting vigilantes as an oppressed minority like the X-Men, we see how one man's rage can infect an entire city, facilitated by propaganda, corruption, and a robust support network of unprincipled underlings.

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Within the mayor's office, Fisk's closest lieutenants are Buck Cashman (Arty Froushan) and Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini). One is a cold-blooded killer, while the other is a pathetic Gen Z sycophant, bringing to mind the first wave of unqualified young staffers in the Trump administration. These two men earned their place through devotion and amorality, accepting that no order is too evil or impractical to disobey. Further down the food chain, the AVTF's foot soldiers are recruited based on their propensity for violence, leading to a predictable wave of civilian casualties. Meanwhile, Fisk's glamorous wife, Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), smooths things over with New York's elite, providing a socially acceptable facade for his cruelty.

One of the early targets of Fisk's anti-vigilante agenda was Hector Ayala/White Tiger (played by the late Kamar de los Reyes), who was murdered by the AVTF last season. In Season 2, his widow and niece return for the show's most explicit nod toward ICE.

While visiting a convenience store, Hector's widow, Soledad (Ashley Marie Ortiz), a Puerto Rican nurse, gets into an argument with some local teens, who are trying to shoplift booze. The storekeeper pulls a gun on them, and while Soledad is trying to cool things down, a group of AVTF guys burst in. They arrest the storekeeper for "taking the law into his own hands" and Soledad for "assaulting an officer" (i.e. briefly grabbing his arm when he was trying to beat up a kid), dragging them out into an armored van while a crowd of furious bystanders scream their disapproval. Soledad's teenage niece is left behind, aware that she may never see her aunt again. So in one five-minute scene, we witness police brutality, implicit racism, family separation, and an unspoken assumption that Soledad will end up in a detention center with no legal protections.

Wilson Fisk doesn't know about this particular arrest, but there's a clear through line between his obsession with "order" and the AVTF's habit of violent escalation — a habit that's already inspiring New Yorkers to strike back against their new mayor. His anti-vigilante platform might have been popular during election seasons, but his tactics are not exactly winning hearts and minds.

Daredevil: Born Again isn't operating on the same level as Andor, a show that mined Star Wars lore for some genuinely thought-provoking political storytelling, but this creative team has figured out exactly the right way to elevate Daredevil's crime drama format. Already established as a murderous control freak, Fisk follows a recognizable blueprint for tyrants, motivated more by greed and personal bias than by any particular belief system. Matt Murdock, meanwhile, represents a different perspective in 2026 than he did in the 2010s.

As a lawyer turned vigilante, Daredevil's schtick was always rooted in a conflicted relationship between morality and the law. Back in the Netflix era, he was an angry young man who resorted to violence because police and prosecutors failed to bring bad guys to justice. Now that he's living as an outlaw, this approach to vigilante justice has shifted. Instead of plugging the holes in an imperfect system, Daredevil is battling purposeful acts of injustice from his own government, in a setting where cops behave like an invading army. Defeating Wilson Fisk is step one in a quest to reinstate a functioning legal infrastructure. 

By Episode 3, Matt is torn between two approaches to his role as a vigilante. In the short term, he can fight Fisk by breaking people out of the AVTF detention center, an act that is technically illegal but morally correct. Then in the long term, he hopes to find enough evidence to prove Fisk's guilt to a higher authority. That would be the classic crime TV solution — a guilty person winding up in prison — but Born Again has already made it clear that imprisonment isn't always fair, and that America's higher authorities can't necessarily be trusted.

Matt's plan currently hinges on proving that Fisk is smuggling weapons through his Red Hook port. However, we now know that those weapons are being transported on behalf of the CIA. If a federal agency is invested in keeping Fisk in power, then this complicates Matt's hope that state officials will intervene. In fact, when New York's attorney general tried to stand up to Fisk in the season premiere, it only took one phone call from Fisk's CIA allies to shut him up.

Moving beyond Netflix's retro image of costumed crime fighting, Born Again has become a story about everyday citizens at war with their government. New Yorkers are living in fear while edging toward open rebellion, whether they're protesting AVTF raids, spraying anti-Fisk graffiti, or trying to hide vulnerable people from arrest. This show is engaging with reality in a way we just haven't seen from recent MCU spin-offs — and it's doing so by exploring what happens when a supervillain comes to power.

New episodes of Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 premiere Tuesdays on Disney+.