If you watched The Defenders you might wonder exactly what Daredevil season 3 is going to consist of. After all, the team-up series ended with Matt Murdock being blown to smithereens and all his friends assuming he’s dead, only for it to be revealed that he somehow survived the explosion and has been in a coma being taken care of by a bunch of nuns.
Well, showrunner Erik Oleson has now revealed that season 3 is going to deal with the immediate consequences of the end of The Defenders. In an interview with MCU Exchange, he explained the following:
“I came in with a pitch that took pieces of some of my favorite comic book runs, that told a larger story, and I was expecting to get more pushback, but Marvel was incredibly excited about the storyline. They let me tell the story I wanted to tell.… I wasn’t sure, given the events of Defenders, how much freedom I would have, and I ended up getting complete freedom.”
That story they’re so excited about is presumably the classic Frank Miller-penned Born Again, regarded as perhaps the finest tale in Daredevil’s long comic book career. The religious aspect present in that storyline sounds as if it’s coming back in a big way in the upcoming season, too, with Erikson saying:
“Matt starts the season broken physically, broken emotionally, and broken spiritually. He’s angry at God, he’s angry at the fact that he had risked his life to do God’s work, and he’s questioning whether or not he was a fool.”
Most interestingly, the new season promises a fascinating inversion of the traditional secret identity conundrum that’s plagued many a superhero.
“Matt goes to pretty much the darkest place you can. When he realizes that he’s incapable of being Daredevil, he would rather just end it than go forward in his life without abilities. He’s decided to set aside his Matt Murdock persona and just be the Devil, to isolate the lighter part of himself.”
Usually, the hero decides to give up adventuring for the sake of his sanity or loved ones, but it seems that Murdock is set to go completely the other way and become a full-time Devil and suicidally throw himself into crime-fighting. With advance notice on the third season sounding very positive – some say it’s the best season of any MCU show ever – hopes are high for Daredevil‘s third run, which will hit Netflix on October 19th.
