It’s become moderately popular in certain online circles to claim to miss the “filler episode.” In this age of short streaming-TV seasons that often arrive years apart from one another, the thinking goes, writers can’t afford to pause the overarching story to do something different and low-stakes for an hour. A 22-episode season, by contrast, has room for all those great little side quests and hang-outs and diversions and distractions that can come when, y’know, the characters all go on a road trip, or they get snowed in, or they have to spend Halloween in a haunted house, or Hurley and Sawyer and Charlie and Jin fix the van on Lost or whatever.
Sure, sometimes this feels like pointless wheel-spinning, or the pejorative term “filler episode” wouldn’t have been devised in the first place. The aforementioned Lost made television history by bargaining with the network to shorten their seasons and end their overall run in order to avoid making more filler episodes.But the idea is that since they can give you the chance to get to know the characters better by seeing them cut loose from the norm a bit, the tradeoff is worth it.
I have one question for people who think this way: Where’s your God now, Moses?
Daredevil: Born Again’s fifth episode is a goofy detour that exists, as best I can tell, to tie the show into the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe by featuring an extended cameo by a C-list superhero’s dad. I don’t mean to be unkind to Ms. Marvel with that letter grade, by the way, but let’s face it: Ol’ Horn-head himself is B-list at best.
Anyway, yeah, that’s mainly the deal: Matt Murdock meets Yusuf Khan (Mohan Kapur), the father of Kamala “Ms. Marvel” Khan — star of her own Disney+ show and The Marvels, one of the more recent MCU flops — when they’re both held hostage during a robbery at the bank where Yusuf works. Both Matt and the bank robbers are there because of throwaway conversations from earlier in the season: Matt’s applying for a loan because his firm keeps taking on clients who can’t pay, the robbers are there to help the leader of the Irish mob pay a fine to a rival on the orders of the Fisks.
If you’re thinking “Huh, those plot threads don’t seem to warrant an episode all of their own,” I’d be tempted to agree with you under normal circumstances. But this is Daredevil: Born Again, which in just four episodes established itself as one of most vital live-action superhero projects I, at least, have ever seen. It’s the heir to the Netflix Daredevil and Punisher shows, also excellent.
So when I figured out that this was gonna be a standalone situation with Matt caught in the middle of a Protestant Irish mob’s robbery of a bank on St. Patrick’s Day, I thought “Hey, alright, the show’s gonna flex its muscles a bit! Maybe it’ll be a oner, or there’ll be a really long take to capture some incredible hallway fight in its entirety, or there’ll be a shootout like that one scene from the first season of True Detective where McConaughey shot his way through like six blocks of houses during a single seven-minute shot. Something we can sink our teeth into. Something that warrants breaking this out into an episode of its own.”
Nope!
What we get instead is the definition of a filler episode — the real definition, not the definition you made up because you miss a show you were watching when you were eleven and we didn’t have a fascist dictatorship yet. Much of it is just extremely awkward, there’s no other way to put it, product placement for Ms. Marvel. This comes both via Yusuf, a comic-relief capital-D Dad character, who does not fit into the DD:BA vibe at all, and a custom-made Ms. Marvel Funko Pop figurine, complete with a mention of the brand name. Watching Charlie Cox grin his way through this shit feels like watching the teen actors on River Mountain High listen to the principal monologue about shirts from TC Tuggers.
The ostensible plot of this thing is that members of the Irish mob are breaking in to a bank to steal an expensive diamond from the safety deposit boxes in the vault so they can use it to pay off what they owe to a rival outfit over that botched hijacking a few episodes back. Now you’d think this would give the show an excuse to have Matt really go to town on some multicolored balaclava-wearing sons of UDF members, but you’d be wrong. There are moments of memorable action — an admittedly cool but brief tussle during which Matt has to take a gunman out without raising a racket and catches his shotgun in midair to keep it from going off, Matt snapping the ringleader’s leg in half when he catches up with him after the robbery — but that’s all, just moments. They lack the visceral exhaustion of the franchise’s best fights.
Even the resolution is goofy as hell. Matt somehow switches out the diamond for a butterscotch candy from Yusuf’s desk, then returns the diamond to the candy dish days later. The episode ends with Yusuf staring at the diamond in wide-eyed wonderment — like one of those sitcom Christmas episodes that ends with the gang hearing the sound of sleigh bells in the air and realizing none of them put the presents under the tree, and you don’t think…could it be…?
It’s corny as shit, is what I’m saying. Which is fine, as far as sitcom Christmas episodes go, and most of the time it’s part of the deal for superheroes as well. It’s just not been part of the deal on this show, and it’s been awkwardly jammed into it. Other than the cops’ hostage negotiator telling an obscene joke about leprechauns, there’s precious little in these 40 or so minutes that has the they’re getting away with this??? feeling that has characterized this show so far. Let’s hope that this filler episode is just that — filler, surrounded by something much more substantial.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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