By all accounts, Marvel Studios has been working overtime to bring Daredevil: Born Again in line with its Netflix predecessor since overhauling the production. That’s undeniably great news – but now Born Again needs to go a step further and fix the Netflix Daredevil’s biggest problem: his powers.
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In fairness, the original Daredevil TV show mostly got its hero’s superhuman abilities right. Matt Murdock’s enhanced hearing, touch, taste, and smell? Present and accounted for. The same goes for his freakishly good reflexes, agility, and balance – you’ll find examples of all three in Daredevil. The show even nodded to the Man Without Fear’s low-level, mediation-based healing factor.
Yet Daredevil also undersold what is arguably hornhead’s coolest power: his radar sense. Fortunately, Born Again is uniquely positioned to put this right.
Daredevil’s Radar Sense, Explained
But first, what exactly is Daredevil’s radar sense? While the specifics have varied over the years, Marvel’s comics canon is pretty clear on what this superpower is and how it works. Matt Murdock’s brain emits high-frequency radio waves (or similar) that relay a silhouetted image of whatever they make contact with to Murdock’s mind’s eye. The upshot of this is that our guy can detect the people, objects, and spaces around him, despite being blind. He can even “see” behind him!
Daredevil’s radar sense has its shortcomings, though. For starters, as noted above, Hell’s Kitchen’s resident vigilante only really gets an outline of what’s around him (although some comic book artists depict his radar sense’s output as more detailed). Then there’s the issue of color and text – or rather, the lack of them. As established in numerous Marvel comics over the years, Daredevil’s radar sense can’t pick up clothing colors, computer screen readouts, or anything like that.
Fortunately, Matt Murdock’s other abilities help him overcome some of his radar sense’s limits while in his Daredevil persona. Still, these weaknesses are handy from a dramatic perspective, as they prevent Daredevil from becoming overpowered (and therefore boring).
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Did Netflix’s Daredevil Depict Matt Murdock’s Radar Sense?
The relatively restrained nature of Daredevil’s radar sense still wasn’t enough to secure it a proper run on the Netflix show, though. Season 1 showrunner Steven S. DeKnight and his successors Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez (Season 2), and Erik Oleson (Season 3) only showcased the ability very sparingly across Daredevil‘s 39 episodes.
Easily the most prominent example was in Season 1, during a scene between Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock/Daredevil and Rosario Dawson’s Claire Temple. Here, Murdock explains how his enhanced senses and (conspicuously unnamed) radar sense map what’s around him. “I can’t see, not like everyone else, but I can feel,” he says. “Things like balance and direction. Micro changes in air density, vibrations, blankets of temperature variations. Mix all that with what I hear, subtle smells. All of the fragments form a sort of… impressionistic painting.”
Pressed further by Temple, Murdock describes what he “sees” as “A world on fire.” He’s not being entirely metaphorical, either. We get a brief glimpse at Matt’s point of view, and his impression of Claire – with its flickering reds and yellows – is distinctly fiery. It’s striking stuff, if not a bit of a departure from the comics’ silhouette concept. But it’s never really revisited again, with Daredevil placing a greater emphasis on Matt’s other senses (particularly his hearing), instead.
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Why Born Again Is the Perfect Show to Spotlight Daredevil’s Radar Sense
Of course, radar sense’s relative absence from Netflix’s Daredevil – disappointing as it – makes sense. That show (along with the rest of the so-called “Defenders Saga”) was set in a gritty, street-level corner of the MCU effectively walled off from the wider shared universe. It had to ration out its overtly comic book-y elements. But the same doesn’t apply to Daredevil: Born Again.
That’s because Born Again is very much set in the MCU proper – and the MCU proper is neither gritty nor street-level. Sure, some stories are less fantastical than others. Notably, the recent Echo miniseries (which sets up Born Again) is more rooted in the everyday than, say, a Doctor Strange or Thor outing. Even so, Daredevil is now fully part of a reality full of super-soldiers and magic stones; there’s only so much Born Again can distance itself from that. Heck, Cox’s Daredevil has already teamed up with Tatiana Maslany’s She-Hulk! His days of “realistic” crime-fighting are over.
That doesn’t mean Daredevil: Born Again can’t or won’t embrace the more toned-down sensibilities that defined its Netflix progenitor, nor that it should. Part of the reason Born Again is even happening is because a lot of folks want the original Daredevil show back, just as it was. But it does mean that there’s increased latitude for more scenes that spotlight Daredevil’s radar sense. It’d only be a small improvement on Netflix’s established Daredevil formula – but then the devil’s in the details.
Daredevil: Born Again premieres on Disney+ in March 2025.
Published: Jun 15, 2024 08:00 pm