Spoiler tags apparently don't like it when you nest other tags inside them, so consider this your
Marvel's Daredevil (Season 2)
It was kind of predictable that this wouldn't live up to the first season. I mean, it does a good job, but it feels comparatively lightweight. Whether that's because of the writing, some of the sillier elements of the plot, or the simple fact that Wilson Fisk isn't beheading people with car doors... Well, as it turns out, when you take a scene like that and turn it into fifty guys getting sliced, diced, having their heads blown off with shotguns, and saying the words "shit" and "asshole" every other line, you kind of lose a bit of the shock. It doesn't help that the gore is mostly pretty obvious CGI. While there is some spectacular action with Daredevil himself, such as the fight with the biker gang in the apartment building, the fight scenes with other vigilantes get to be bloodbaths very quickly, and all too often the CGI just can't quite keep up. The show does occasionally manage to recapture some of the impact of Fisk's outbursts, mostly with the more up close and personal moments of Punisher's grizzly revenge scenes, but it's too often drowned out by the massive carnage in each episode.
The shit-and-asshole salsa that serves as the main condiment for this thirteen course meal gets to be a bit much, but with the writers having had previously to write "I'll flip you up, you flipping motherflipper" every time a scene called for salty language, it's understandable why they would want to let loose, let the audience know that they're more x-treme this time around. I specifically recall a scene in the first episode in which two cops at a crime scene keep saying "shit look at what they did to these assholes" and then the black one looks at a kevlar vest on a dead body, shakes his head and says "this shit is thicker than my dick," then he looks around some more and says "shit" twenty more times. I swear like a sailor, so this is not a matter of having my quaint little church-going old woman ears assailed by rudeness, but there's an art to writing good sweary dialogue. The Coen brothers can do it, David Mamet can do it, Quentin Tarantino can do it when he's actually trying — the writers of this show could probably do it if they weren't so keen to show off the fact that they're allowed to do it, but unfortunately that phase hadn't passed by the time they wrote the final draft of the script.
It's not all bad, in fact where this season doesn't do worse than its predecessor it generally surpasses it. The trio of protagonists have plenty to do and they do it well, and it's well written — I feel like I believe in those characters of Murdock, Nelson, and Page, probably more so than I did last time around. The Punisher is a really cool addition, I like how much care and attention they give to his background and his psychology, and just all around they manage to make a character that could easily have been a Rambo into a three-dimensional, complex, interesting person. I was really into his side of the story in general, Elektrik Nachos, on the other hand, wasn't so fun to be around. I understand her relevance to Daredevil and why she's there, but I just find her general demeanour annoying and every time she's on screen I spend more time trying to figure out what the fuck is up with her English-Chinese-German-Australian accent than what's going on with her as a character ─ not to mention her costume makes her look like she just walked out of
Mortal Kombat: Conquest, which I guess is kind of relevant given the cheesy ninja bad guys. All in all Ms Chips 'n' Cheese just doesn't quite work for me as the conflicted femme fatale of the piece.
This season has more tonal problems than the first, and a lot of that has to do with the silly mystical ninja things, particularly how that doesn't really contrast well with the straight-faced crime drama feel of the show. I understand that it's Marvel, and some amount of silliness is to be taken for granted ─ the first season had stuff like Kung-Fu Grandma, after all ─ but now the show feels like it's trying to be darker than it has been in the past, and that is upset to some extent by stuff like this: "Hey Stick I'm being followed and attacked by ninjas literally all the time, what's up with that?" / "haha matt lemme tell u about this
awesome godfrey ho movie i watched last night :^)" / "God damn it Stick!" and then it turns out to be true. I know the whole Black Sky thing was brought up in the previous season, I just wasn't expecting the next stage of that story to be quite so amazingly goofy. Like, I can get behind goofy, but this is all a bit much.
Despite my problems with this season,
Daredevil is still a really cool show, and shows that you can indeed do dark and gritty capeshit without being awful like Snack Zyder. Overall I think it's not as good as it used to be, mainly because it's less grounded than it used to be, which I guess is to be expected, but it still works, in some ways better than ever, and it remains probably the best thing I've seen from Marvel so far.