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I've finished the first nine episodes, so a few things I like (from tumblr):
* Starting off at the shallow end: Matt Murdock's voice. Charlie Cox changes tone and tempo and timbre and pitch when he speaks as Matt as opposed to in his native speech – slower, lower, a bit of a rumble. It’s not Christian Bale’s Batman voice; he doesn’t sound like he’s being strangled and it’s not meant to menace. It’s not his Daredevil voice, it’s Matt’s voice. It may not have any more intent than just what Cox needs to do to sound American. But it’s pretty nice to listen to.
* The women. Karen, Claire, Vanessa, Mrs. Cardenas, Madame Gao, even Marci. They’re not all good, they don’t all survive, but they all have their own agency and own their own choices and they’re not standing around waiting for Matt or Fisk, the two kings, to move them on the chessboard. Claire and Karen become victims, but don’t stay victims. And Vanessa, whose presence in this world is entirely voluntary, walks forward with her eyes open and full understanding of what she’s doing and what the consequences of those actions will be. (Ayelet Zurer is killing it.)
* Matt’s lack of understanding. His inability to grasp the larger picture – to grasp that there is a larger picture – is wonderful because it’s truer to life than him having all of the answers and merely needing to figure out how to implement the solution. He’s a working class kid who has pulled himself up to the professional class through education and opportunity; his father might have dealt with criminals, but Matt was shielded from that as a child and has no intimate exposure to it until he puts on a mask to go beat them up. But even then, he’s beating up low-level hoods, muggers and rapists and drug dealers, street criminals of a timeless and predictable sort. It’s low-hanging fruit, but he mistakes his success for accomplishment and then is out of his league when he starts going after bigger fish. He’s a neophyte crimefighter and that constantly bites him in the ass and that’s much more refreshing than a Batman who knows everything because he spent years apprenticing as an East Asian gangster before moving on to studying under other criminal masterminds. Matt spends a lot of time flailing, literally and figuratively, as he learns that his gifts are necessary but not sufficient to complete his self-appointed task.
* Matt’s Catholicism. His faith ebbs and flows and stretches to the breaking point, but it explicitly informs his actions in a cultural as well as doctrinal way. He’s not worried about what the law will do to him, but he is worried about what God will, even as you get the sense that he doesn’t much care about what the RCC has to say about any particular contemporary issue. And this is played out with surprising delicacy, especially considering some of the ham-handed treatments in the comics or the way Hollywood tends to view faith of any stripe. New York City is a Catholic (and Jewish) city and Matt is a believable product of it; he might not be sitting in Mass on Sunday mornings, but he carries it with him nonetheless.
* Starting off at the shallow end: Matt Murdock's voice. Charlie Cox changes tone and tempo and timbre and pitch when he speaks as Matt as opposed to in his native speech – slower, lower, a bit of a rumble. It’s not Christian Bale’s Batman voice; he doesn’t sound like he’s being strangled and it’s not meant to menace. It’s not his Daredevil voice, it’s Matt’s voice. It may not have any more intent than just what Cox needs to do to sound American. But it’s pretty nice to listen to.
* The women. Karen, Claire, Vanessa, Mrs. Cardenas, Madame Gao, even Marci. They’re not all good, they don’t all survive, but they all have their own agency and own their own choices and they’re not standing around waiting for Matt or Fisk, the two kings, to move them on the chessboard. Claire and Karen become victims, but don’t stay victims. And Vanessa, whose presence in this world is entirely voluntary, walks forward with her eyes open and full understanding of what she’s doing and what the consequences of those actions will be. (Ayelet Zurer is killing it.)
* Matt’s lack of understanding. His inability to grasp the larger picture – to grasp that there is a larger picture – is wonderful because it’s truer to life than him having all of the answers and merely needing to figure out how to implement the solution. He’s a working class kid who has pulled himself up to the professional class through education and opportunity; his father might have dealt with criminals, but Matt was shielded from that as a child and has no intimate exposure to it until he puts on a mask to go beat them up. But even then, he’s beating up low-level hoods, muggers and rapists and drug dealers, street criminals of a timeless and predictable sort. It’s low-hanging fruit, but he mistakes his success for accomplishment and then is out of his league when he starts going after bigger fish. He’s a neophyte crimefighter and that constantly bites him in the ass and that’s much more refreshing than a Batman who knows everything because he spent years apprenticing as an East Asian gangster before moving on to studying under other criminal masterminds. Matt spends a lot of time flailing, literally and figuratively, as he learns that his gifts are necessary but not sufficient to complete his self-appointed task.
* Matt’s Catholicism. His faith ebbs and flows and stretches to the breaking point, but it explicitly informs his actions in a cultural as well as doctrinal way. He’s not worried about what the law will do to him, but he is worried about what God will, even as you get the sense that he doesn’t much care about what the RCC has to say about any particular contemporary issue. And this is played out with surprising delicacy, especially considering some of the ham-handed treatments in the comics or the way Hollywood tends to view faith of any stripe. New York City is a Catholic (and Jewish) city and Matt is a believable product of it; he might not be sitting in Mass on Sunday mornings, but he carries it with him nonetheless.
