Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Ep7 “The Hateful Darkness” delivers a darker, gritty Netflix era with shocking returns, deaths, and major MCU Phase 6 stakes.
Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Ep7, ominously titled “The Hateful Darkness,” just dropped on Disney+, and it didn’t just shift the chess pieces on the board for next week’s blockbuster finale — it upended the whole table. Upending despairing character deaths with triumphant returns to the courtroom, this penultimate episode was essentially a love letter to the gritty Netflix era, padded out by the larger, high-stakes politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 6.
As Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) limps toward an explosive showdown with Mayor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), the showrunners packed this hour so full of lore, comic-book history and sly callbacks that you almost certainly missed a few while shouting at your tv.
Let’s dive deep into the streets of Hell’s Kitchen in Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Ep7 for a darker finale.
Let’s start with the loudest moment of Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Ep7. The final image of Matt Murdock, injured and hopeless, praying in the red-lit pews of Clinton Church was cinematic perfection. But then, Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones emerges from the darkness. It is the jaw dropping moment for everyone.
But the true Easter egg is in the dialogue at the beginning of the episode. When Mr. Charles is talking about Jessica’s case, we get explicit mention of her husband, Luke Cage, and the fact that she has to shield her daughter, Danielle.
Danielle, a daughter of Luke Cage and Jessica Jones and named in honor of his fathers’s best friend Danny aka Iron Fist. This isn’t some throwaway name-drop for laughs, it solidifies the lives of our street-level superheroes after the Defenders as canon.
It makes clear that as Matt has been struggling on his own in a one-man battle, the other members of the Defenders have been establishing families. It escalates the stakes for Jessica’ return and she’s not just battling for New York any more, now she’s fighting for her kid.
We’ve observed Matt working under the cover of darkness for nearly a full season, watching as his alter ego, the vigilante, dominated, while Matt Murdock, Attorney at Law, played second fiddle. But when Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) is tossed into the legal meat grinder by the Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF), Matt at last emerges into the light.
Making his way into the courtroom this time as co-counsel with Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James) was a huge full-circle moment. It’s a direct thematic callback to his charming, sunlit cameo in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. But here, the tone is reversed. There’s no wacky super power law puns. This is the dark, stifling legal rot in Fisk’s New York.
It perfectly echoes his defense of Frank Castle (The Punisher) in Netflix’s Season 2. Matt turns the courtroom not only to defend his client but to also use it as a platform from which to try the system itself.
Maybe the most soul-sapping sequence in “The Hateful Darkness” is Matt’s fraught chat with Benjamin Poindexter, a.k.a Bullseye (Wilson Bethel). Matt frees his mortal adversary, exhorting him to perform “one good deed” to balance the cosmic scales — by rescuing Governor McCaffrey from assassination.
In that exchange Matt specifically mentions the killings of Foggy Nelson and Father Lantom. If you saw Season 3 of the original Netflix run, Father Lantom died after he took a baton to the chest that Dex threw at Karen. And the heartbreakingly tragic death of Born Again’s Foggy is the wound that still fuels every reckless choice Matt makes.
Matt telling his arch enemy how much he hates him but a shred of his Catholic soul wants to forgive him is lifted directly from the moral ambiguity of Frank Miller’s iconic comics. It’s Matt Murdock at his most self-destructive, placing the city above his own need for vengeance.
We need to pour one out for Daniel Blake. Michael Gandolfini has been putting in incredible work this season as the ambitious, swaggering administrator who got way too deep into Fisk’s regime. But in Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Ep7, his luck finally runs out.
Daniel is savagely clubbed and then killed by the cold-blooded Buck Cashman (Arty Froushan) for deciding to shield BB Urich (Genneya Walton). BB’s last name is Urich. Like, Ben Urich — the tenacious reporter who was viciously garrotted by Wilson Fisk in Season 1 of the Netflix show.
Daniel being killed while defending an Urich from Fisk’s enforcers is a vicious rhyme in the Daredevil poetry. It is a reminder that even though the corporate branding of Fisk’s empire has changed, it still eats anyone who tries to protect the truth. The common mob-movie trope of a gangster “digging his own grave” was completely turned on its head here; Daniel got his soul back right before he lost his life.
When Cherry (Clark Johnson) discloses he has an “inside man” who is watching over Karen Page up at the precinct, fans who have been around since the beginning took a collective breath-hold. And the show delivered: it was none other than Detective Brett Mahoney (Royce Johnson).
Brett Mahoney has been the unsung hero of the street-level MCU since the beginning. He’s a repeat helper in Daredevil, Jessica Jones and The Punisher.
Watching Brett sneak Karen out the back door for a secret rendezvous with Matt reminds us that for all Fisk’s AVTF, and the pervasive corruption in the NYPD, the OG Hell’s Kitchen good cops still want to be your sweethearts. It anchors the over-the-top superhero spectacle in believable, procedural fealty.
Let’s talk about cinematography and Catholic guilt—the pillars upon which Matt Murdock’s whole being rests.
After moving vigilantly through a parking-garage slaughterhouse, Matt is shot in the leg and barely manages to crawl to Clinton Church. He pleads with the Seminarian to pray to Saint Jude for “courage in my cowardice and consolation for my tribulations.”
Saint Jude is the advocate for the hopeless and things are indeed hopeless now. You just can’t get a better metaphor for Matt’s crusade against Fisk these days.
As Matt is bowed in prayer, the shot is awash in a thick, bloody, neon red light. That’s not an accident. It’s a very visual reference to the quintessential hallway battles and shadowy lighting of the first Netflix series. It informs viewers, with no need for a word of conversation, that Matt has been driven to the ends of his bodily and soul limits.
Wilson Fisk is a man of impeccable discipline, frightening regimens and violent rages. The first few seconds of Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Ep7 depict Fisk getting dressed, and he sees that one of Vanessa’s earrings has gone missing.
It sounds like it’s just a tiny continuity nod. But for Fisk, Vanessa is his tether to his own sanity. In Netflix’s Daredevil Season 1 and 3, whenever Vanessa found herself in peril, was absent or figuratively compromised, the polished Fisk mask would crack, revealing the monstrous “Kingpin” beneath.
When the director dwells on the missing earring, it signals to the viewers that Fisk is slipping in terms of control. His later conversation with Karen in her cell where he chokes her while telling her he is “bringing back order” — establishes that the missing earring is a sign of his quickly disintegrating mind.
Daredevil: Born Again takes place on the streets of New York, but Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Ep7 made it clear we’re solidly in Phase Six of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
In a conversation, Mr. Charles drops a titanic global bomb: The U.S. government does not consider Mayor Wilson Fisk to be a “useful ally.” This clears the path for Governor McCaffrey (Lili Taylor) to come in and try to oust Fisk.
The MCU is currently navigating a fraught political climate, with actors like President Ross, the Thunderbolts, and the Department of Damage Control holding the board. In this context, it’s natural the government would view a strong, authoritarian NYC mayor who goes after vigilantes as a threat. Fisk just got over the line too much, and now these government bodies are at last getting involved.
The parking garage ambush was easily the the most exciting action set piece of the Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Ep7. The Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF) attempts to eliminate Matt and Kirsten, but are defended by Cherry and Angie Kim (Ruibo Qian), the “unspoiled” cops of the precinct.
This is more than just a neat fight scene; it’s a thematic extension of the narrative strand that began way back in 2015. Daredevil has always been intrigued by the war for the soul of the NYPD.
From Detectives Blake and Hoffman being on Fisk’s payroll in Season 1, to the FBI being completely infiltrated by Kingpin in Season 3, this franchise loves to examine systemic corruption.
The garage scuffle was raw, unrefined and intimate, and it was great to see the stunts that brought fame to this franchise in the first place.
Daredevil episodes don’t often have throwaway titles, they’re usually heavily thematic or taken directly from comic book arcs.
The ‘Hateful Darkness’ is the space Matt Murdock now finds himself in. He’s turned his friends into enemies, allied himself with his greatest enemy (Bullseye), and watched the city decay all around him. The “darkness” is not just Fisk’s regime; it is the hate that festers within Matt himself.
Kirsten McDuffie in her opening statement in court (explaining what the real definition of vigilante is to ADA Hochberg) exemplifies this perfectly. Matt is trying to battle the darkness, but his “self-defeating brand of heroism” (as critics have rightly pointed out) continues to drag his friends into the line of fire. Daniel Blake dies, Karen is beaten in a cell, and Matt bleeds in a church. The dark hatred is winning.
If Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Ep7 served as the table setting, Season 2 finale will be an absolute earth-shattering event. Now we have Matt Murdock and Jessica Jones back together and ready to go to war. We have Bullseye on the loose with a warped mission for “redemption.”
We have Kingpin pushed into a political corner, his mayoral mask slipping away to reveal the full-blown mob-boss brutality beneath. And we have Karen Page at the heart of it all, poised to see if the legal system will rescue her or destroy her.
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Daredevil: Born Again hasn’t just made it through the jump to Disney+ with episodes like “The Hateful Darkness” it has shown that it can pay homage to its Netflix roots while crafting an adult, shatteringly tragic, and deeply engrossing new narrative. With these gritty moments of Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Ep7 shows Marvel Cinematic Universe is headed to Phase 6.
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Spider Man Brand New Day settles a long-running Marvel debate, showing why Peter Parker possesses a key strength that Jean Grey never truly had.
Jean Grey almost seems to have powers, a woman who has hosted the Phoenix Force itself which has given her access to cosmic-level abilities capable of destroying entire star systems, the most powerful telepaths and telekinetics in Marvel history. Spider Man, by contrast, has proportional strength, sticky hands, and a knack for one-liners. Comparing them is impossible but Spider Man Brand New Day has quietly made the case that Peter Parker has something Jean Grey has never fully had, and probably never will.
Spider-Man’s greatest strength is not his powers, but his ability to stay in control. And in a shared universe where power without control has repeatedly ended in catastrophe, that single trait might be the most underrated superpower in the entire Marvel roster.
Jean Grey’s entire publishing history is, in some sense, a story about a woman who keeps losing herself. The Dark Phoenix Saga did not happen once. It has echoed across decades of X-Men storytelling because the underlying problem was never solved, only postponed. Jean’s power is cosmic in scale, but her ability to regulate that power has always been fragile, dependent on external safeguards: Professor X’s psychic shielding, the M’Kraan Crystal, death and resurrection cycles that reset the clock without actually fixing the wiring.
This is not a criticism of Jean as a character. It is the entire point of her tragedy. Her strength is inseparable from her vulnerability. Her challenge of controlling grows as her power grows. This tension has defined many of her most important storylines since Chris Claremont has had to grapple with the same unresolved question: what if Jean Grey won’t be able to handle the Phoenix force under control?
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Unlike Jean Grey, Spider Man’s powers are always in control by the man behind the mask. Peter Parker has fought with powerful symbiotes and villains but his core abilities of strength, agility, spider-sense, never put his senses at risk. Spider-Man’s powers have never threatened to take control of who he is.
This matters more than it sounds like it should. A huge amount of Spider Man’s appeal, and a huge amount of his narrative stability, comes from the fact that his power has a ceiling Peter himself can actually manage. He gets stronger gear, smarter tactics, better web fluid formulas, but he is never one bad day away from accidentally incinerating a solar system. His mistakes are human-scale. They cost lives sometimes, devastatingly so, but they don’t threaten cosmic annihilation.
Brand New Day leans directly into this. The new arc strips Peter back down to fundamentals: a guy with a job, a strained personal life, and a set of powers he understands inside and out after two decades of trial and error. There’s no cosmic entity riding shotgun in his nervous system. There’s no countdown clock to a forced transformation into something unrecognizable. Whatever goes wrong in his life goes wrong because of choices, not because his own biology turned against him.
Jean Grey raw power is not actually the most valuable trait in a long-running superhero but a Control over itself. A superhuman who can bend their abilities according to their morale rather than being consumed by it is structurally more stable and more heroic and easier to write more consistently for that character.
Spider Man’s advantage isn’t that he could beat Jean Grey in a fight. He almost certainly couldn’t, and no serious reading of either character pretends otherwise. The advantage is narrative and psychological. Peter Parker has never needed an entire team of telepaths standing by in case his own power turns on him. He has never needed to die and come back just to reset a corrupted internal system. His worst-case scenario has always been “Peter makes a bad call,” not “Peter becomes an extinction-level event.”
That distinction sounds abstract until you actually compare the stakes of their respective failure states. When Spider Man fails, a building falls, someone gets hurt, a relationship breaks. When Jean Grey fails at containing the Phoenix, planets have died. Those are not the same category of risk, and the gap between them is exactly what makes Peter’s failures recoverable in a way Jean’s sometimes aren’t.
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The current Brand New Day run doesn’t make this argument through a crossover fight or a direct confrontation between Peter and Jean. It makes the argument through restraint. The storyline deliberately resets Peter to a stripped-down status quo, no recent cosmic baggage, no Venom symbiote drama bleeding into every page, no marriage retcon hanging over his head. Just Peter, his powers, and his choices.
And the story works specifically because Peter’s powers don’t need a leash. There’s no subplot about him losing control of his own abilities. There’s no ticking clock toward Peter “going dark.” Every conflict in the arc comes from his decisions, his relationships, his double life catching up with him, not from some internal force threatening to hijack his body.
Compare that to how X-Men stories involving Jean almost always need a containment plan built into the premise. Cerebro shielding. Phoenix suppression tech. A team on standby specifically because Jean’s own power is treated as an ongoing risk factor, not just a tool she uses. Brand New Day never needs any equivalent safety net for Peter, because his powers were never written as a threat to himself in the first place.
It’s quite a premise that Marvel can build an entire arc around Spider-Man’s powers without once treating those powers as the danger. Try writing a major Jean Grey arc with the same constraint, and you will find it almost impossible to avoid touching the Phoenix question at all.
It’s easy to chalk this up to “Spider Man is more relatable because he’s just a regular guy.” That’s true, but it understates the point. Reliability is an advantage here rather than Relatability.
Spider Man can show up in street-level crime stories without a containment problem, that’s the type of self-control hero put into a story. His power scales to the situation because his control over it never wavers. Jean Grey, on the other hand, often has to be deliberately written around her own ceiling. Writers either avoid pushing her power to its limits, or they commit to another Phoenix arc and accept that the story is now, on some level, about her losing herself again.
Peter never forces that choice. That flexibility is the direct result of the advantage Brand New Day highlights: power that stays in proportion to the person holding it.
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A fair counterargument is that Jean Grey struggles to control her power because Phoenix is far beyond anything Spider Man has ever encountered. Spider Man’s control looks easy because he never loses himself, so comparing their situations isn’t entirely equal. That’s made the perspective more interesting as Jean’s constant battle with immense power makes her character remains one of the most compelling tragic figures in the X-Men mythos.
But that argument actually reinforces the original point rather than undercutting it. The advantage isn’t that Peter is stronger or braver. It’s that his power was built at a scale he can actually master. Jean was handed power at a scale no one, arguably not even her, can fully master. One of those setups produces a hero who can be trusted with almost any story. The other produces a recurring tragedy that has to be written carefully every single time. Both can be great storytelling. Only one of them is a genuine advantage in the practical, day-to-day sense of “can this character function without a built-in failure mode.”
Jean Grey will always be the more powerful character on a raw numbers basis, and nothing about Brand New Day changes that math. But power was never the category where Spider Man had a shot at winning this comparison. Control was. And Brand New Day proves, almost by omission, that Peter Parker’s powers have never needed a leash, a containment plan, or a reset button.
Stability is more important than strength. And in a universe built on cosmic stakes and constant escalation, a hero who never has to be the thing his own team worries about might be rarer, and more valuable, than anyone gives him credit for.
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Discover who really sent the XMen through time in XMen 97 Season 2 Episodes 1-3, Mother Askani's true identity, and what it means for Apocalypse's rise.
Season 1 of XMen 97 ended with the team getting blown apart on Asteroid M, and not in the way anyone expected. They didn’t die. They scattered across time. Some woke up centuries in the future. Others opened their eyes in ancient Egypt, thousands of years before Apocalypse became Apocalypse. For three episodes, nobody on the show, and nobody watching, knew who was pulling the strings. Xmen 97 Season 2 spends its opening act making you sit with that mystery before finally answering it.
So who actually did it? A woman named Mother Askani. And by the time episode 3 ends, you find out she’s not just some new mystic dropped into the story for convenience. She’s family.
The beginning of Episode 1 shows Forge and Storm trying to gather their missing teammates by building up a new time machine. Forge traveled into the future to bring Cyclops, Jean, Storm, Morph, and Wolverine back into the present where they’re reunited with someone they thought they’d lost: their son, Nathan. In Season 1, Scott and Jean sent baby Nathan into the future to cure him of a techno-organic virus. What they didn’t know is who raised him on the other side.
That’s Mother Askani. She’s the mysterious figure who has spent Nathan’s entire life preparing him to become Cable. Mother Askani made him a battle-hardened soldier who is ready to defeat Apocalypse. However, when news of this prophecy reaches Apocalypse, he sends four horsemen after the boy but Askani and Storm reach at the right time to save the Summers.
They crash into the Citadel and Mother Askarni reveals herself to Storm as Mother Askani, and when the hood comes off, longtime comic readers will recognize the face: Rachel Summers, daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey from another timeline entirely.
She’s the family the Summers don’t know they have yet, and she’s been rewriting the timestream on purpose, placing both halves of the team at the exact moments that could stop Apocalypse for good. On the other hand, Apocalypse gets more angry and tries to strike the X-Men at their vulnerable time.
It’s a rough, honest episode, where Scott and Jean are stuck choosing between the son they just found and the world they still have to save. And it sets the emotional stakes before the show even explains the mechanics of the time split.
Apocalypse failure angers him more and decides to strike X-Men at their vulnerable, XMen 97 Season 2 steps away from the past and future entirely and checks in on the present, where the X-Men who didn’t get pulled through time are left picking up the pieces. Two factions form: X-Force, led by a fully grown Cable, and X-Factor, a group that’s chosen to work alongside the government instead of against it. Jubilee and Sunspot get pulled into Cable’s crew, and the episode uses their recruitment to show just how much the world has changed since the team went missing.
It’s important to understand who sent X-Men in the past and future because Apocalypse is the most dangerous villain and he wants to destroy all mutants. The one who has the remote can actually help the team to fight.
Traveling roughly 5,000 years into the past, the other half of the team—Professor Xavier, Magneto, Rogue, Nightcrawler, and Beast are in ancient Egypt with a young En Sabah Nur, the mutant who eventually becomes Apocalypse. Magneto hatches a bold scheme: to raise Nur under Xavier’s ideals and not hunger for domination. Meanwhile, they intend to use the high technology of Rama-Tut to return to their time.
Nur leads his Sandstormers against Logos and his robotic army of Rama-Tut where his powers as a mutant fully emerge, enabling him to destroy the mighty machines and defeat Logos. However, he stops before blowing up entirely since he is following Magneto’s advice and spares his enemy that shocked Professor Xavier. Magneto is determined to keep believing that Nur’s future can still be changed.
That doesn’t go well until Nur finds out about X-Men’s hidden lab that made Nur lose its control with rage. Rama-Tut strikes X-Men with his army right before they prepare to escape, leaving a cliffhanger for the fans which leads to raise many questions among them. The show is stepping forward into a more darker and twisted storyline which sets the character’s emotional stakes higher.
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Because one shot wasn’t enough. Askani needed Nathan trained and ready to become Cable, and she needed someone in Nur’s life early enough to change his path before Apocalypse’s ideology ever took root. Splitting the X-Men across both timelines wasn’t an accident of the Bastion fight. It was the plan the entire time.
There’s another important comic detail to keep in mind. Rama-Tut, the pharaoh of ancient Egypt in Nur’s day, is in fact one of Kang the Conqueror’s aliases in Marvel Comics. If XMen 97 Season 2 follows that storyline, it’s possible the show could be setting up for a grander multiversal dispute — one that goes well beyond.
XMen 97 Season 2 has already answered its central mystery, but it’s opened up a dozen new ones. Can Scott and Jean actually walk away from Nathan a second time?
What happens when Magneto’s plan to “fix” Nur inevitably collides with Nur’s own free will? And how much does Askani actually know about a future she’s trying to prevent?
These three episodes of XMen 97 Season 2 are much more than explain who sent the X-Men through time. The answer is easy, Mother Askani sent X-Men in different timelines to achieve the goal: destroy Apocalypse. With one team set in the future and the other in ancient Egypt, the series converts time travel into a profoundly personal tale of family, sacrifice and the belief that even the worst evils in history can find an alternate way.
XMen 97 Season 2 promises that the battle ahead won’t just decide the fate of the X-Men, it could determine the future of the entire Marvel universe.
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