As much as I've enjoyed most post-INFINITY WAR shows and movies, the lack of direction is glaring. We still have aimless chatter about re-assembling the Avengers; the supposed Disney+/feature integration has been a false promise with SECRET INVASION and THE MARVELS ignoring each other and DAREDEVIL's New York City being anti-superhero completely ignored by THUNDERBOLTS. The lack of connection between all these disparate projects has meant a lack of clear direction.

I note that AVENGERS was the end goal of IRON MAN, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, IRON MAN II, THOR and CAPTAIN AMERICA. Five movies leading into a sixth film teamup. Somehow, we've had so much more volume for so much less in results.

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- I liked that the characters felt evolved.  I like that Ben seemed like he had come to peace with what had happened to him.  He's not yearning to go back to the way things were, at least outwardly.  I liked the Chiklis version, but this one felt like a matured version of that.  I like that Johnny got his own little side quest where he can show that he's also really smart.  I liked everything about Sue.  I liked that Reed was very smart but also cautious and anxious.  I think a scene with him and Tony Stark would be interesting because they're both smart leaders, but they approach things very differently.  I think he'll make a good Avenger.

- I liked that the movie was its own thing.  I think previous versions were supposed to include Kang in some way, and as far as I know, there are no references to any future crossover in this.  I was sorta blown away that the movie didn't end with them crossing over into the main marvel universe.  I wonder if that will even be a permanent thing, now.  Like will Fantastic Four: Second Steps (fake title) be in this universe or will they be crossed over?  Or will the multiverse be gone by that point and there will just be one universe?

- I understand all the reasons.  Covid.  Jonathan Majors.  Shakeups at Marvel.  But we've had 29 movies and TV shows in Phases 4 and 5, and the main villain for the next two Avengers movies has barely appeared.  Now I know that Thanos barely appeared before Infinity War, but we at least understood who he was and what he wanted to do.  Doomsday is going to have to do a ton of work in the first 30 minutes to get us up to speed.  Maybe it'll be great - the Russo Brothers know how to make that work.  But it just makes me nervous that we've had so much runway and haven't done a ton with it.

FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS is terrific. I was really impressed by how it has a massive scale for its events, but the emotional tone is always low key and subtle. Vanessa Kirby is a revelation as Sue Storm. The movie uses a gorgeous neo-60s retro design. The Thing looks amazing. I'm sad to see such a massive second week dropoff in ticket sales. I went to see it today and there weren't any IMAX screenings.

But I have been watching Eyes of Wakanda.  I think it's...fine?  I think it adds a little to the intrigue of Wakanda and their relation to the rest of the world.  But I had one thing that I wasn't sure about.

So the episodes I've seen (2.5 of the 4) all take place 3,000+ years in the past.  But the Wakandans essentially have the same technology in these episodes (cloaking tech, supersonic jets, holograms, etc) that they have in the present day.  They aren't just slightly ahead of Western tech, they're thousands of years ahead.

So what happened?  Is the show saying that there's some sort of flattening of technological advancements once you get to a certain place?  Did Wakandan technology stop progressing?  Did they have some sort of dark ages?  I get that they want the Wakandans to be cool and futuristic, but I also think showing them to be advanced (but not modern-tech advanced) would have still been cool.  Otherwise, the implication is that the Wakandans jumped straight to 2100-level tech and then did nothing else.

It just feels weird.  The outside world has had flying machines for a couple thousand years and airplanes for a little over a hundred.  This show states that Wakandans have had supersonic jets for 3500+ years, but while they're still more advanced than the rest of the world, they're not leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else still.

I know it doesn't matter.  It just feels weird to me.

One review I read described it as being, "aggressively average." I liked it a little better than that, but it wasn't the homerun I'd hoped it would be. Answers came a little too easily. Reed was a bit too whiny. Galactus seemed a bit nerfed. There was at least one sequence that felt genuinely intense, but most were not. The sense of scale seemed off, too, in that things happened offscreen really fast, then really slow. If you can tell me how large Galactus is from watching the film, I'm impressed.

It doesn't sound like it from the above, but I did enjoy the film. I was entertained. I thought it worlds better than, say, The Marvels or The Eternals. Still, I saw it with my son and afterwards he said he liked it, but it made him want to see Superman again.

I'm glad that Marvel is trying to focus on making their movies better because there's no question that the Phase 4/5 movies weren't as good as the Phase 3 movies.  But I think completely moving away from the Disney+ shows is a mistake.  You can understand from stuff like The Marvels and Brave New World that the movies have a little bit of a hard time with the Disney+ shows because they have to rehash some stuff because not every movie-going audience member will have seen 6-10 episodes of a Disney+ show.  Cool.

I think the solution is somewhere in the middle.  Because I think the shows have value, and I think the shows should continue to be made.  But I would use the Disney+ shows the way I thought they were originally designed to be: a bridge between movies.  One of my favorite things about Agents of Shield was the fact that we were living in this MCU world in between movies.  I know some people hated it, but I loved when we had the cleanup from Thor: The Dark World or the big reaction to the Winter Soldier twist.  And while I think the show got better year after year, the fact that it felt less and less a part of the MCU was to the detriment of the universe.

So when we got the announcement of WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki, it seemed like we were doing that.  Doing side adventures for key MCU characters that moved the story along without having to do an entire movie.  I don't think we need 10 shows a year, but I would like to see shows that fill in the gaps and get us from Point A to Point B where the next movie picks up. 

And that takes skill and luck and planning, but I think Marvel is perfectly capable of that barring no more strikes or pandemics.

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I like the idea of taking secondary characters and making a team out of them, particularly when it's a group that needs redemption like they do. I'm guessing the immediate downgrading of the "New Avengers" is setting up a situation where Earth has no cohesive set of protectors at the start of Avengers Doomsday. Also, given their background, it shouldn't be a surprise that they wouldn't immediately be embraced as worth successors to Iron Man, Captain America, etc. Sam was asked to assemble a new team of Avengers by President Red Hulk, so I'm also not surprised to see him be a bit put off by having a criminal like de Fontaine pull that out from under him.

I'm looking forward to seeing how they handle Bob/Sentry in the future. My guess is they're going to need him. Also interesting to see how the F4 end up in our universe. That's probably going to be revealed in the F4 Frist Steps, but it doesn't bode well for the fate of their universe if they've left it for ours.

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I really liked Thunderbolts*.  I think the movie was a lot of fun, and I think the characters were really good.  I agree that Pullman's Bob is really good, and he did a good job of both being very scary and intimidating and being really vulnerable.  It's pretty incredible that Marvel was able to get all these huge stars to play, essentially, second-level characters and for a movie about them to be really fun.

We got a movie of:

- Captain America's Friend
- Three characters from the Black Widow movie
- The villain from a forgettable Ant-Man movie
- The secondary villain from the Falcon and the Winter Soldier streaming show

Some of that is a little reductive, but it's all true.  And it's a pretty great movie that I think will do well financially.

I would like to focus on a couple of things I didn't really like, though:

- The New Avengers.  I know it's played like it's a joke, but it bothered me for two reasons.  One, it's not a joke.  They are the Avengers, enough for it to really bother Sam Wilson.  I understand why Red Guardian would do this, and I think it makes a lot of sense for Yelena, Walker, and maybe Ava.  But what is Bucky doing?  He was already an Avenger, technically, and it doesn't seem like he ever wanted to be in the spotlight like this.  I think it would've been a better character move for him to turn it down.

And it shines a light on the fact that the Avengers are gone...for no reason?  I was about to write about how there are a handful of Avengers that are still active, but I guess that's not necessarily true.  In fact, I guess Phases 4-6 haven't done a terrible job at explaining where each of the Avengers is:

- Iron Man (Dead)
- Captain America (Retired)
- Hulk (Off world with his son?)
- Thor (Off world with his adopted daughter)
- Hawkeye (Retired?)
- War Machine (Replaced by a Skrull, Retired?)
- Falcon (now Captain America, working solo)
- Spider-Man (forgotten by the Avengers, working solo)
- Captain Marvel (off world)
- Black Panther (T'Challa is dead, Shuri is in Wakanda)
- Ant-Man (Not sure)
- Vison (dead)
- Black Widow (dead)
- Wanda (dead)
- Guardians (not really Avengers, off world)

Every one of those appeared in phases 4-6 or was dead in Endgame.  So they've actually done a better job than I thought at referencing why the Avengers aren't around, but they really haven't directly referenced it.  It's unclear to me if Hawkeye is actually retired, what the status is of War Machine and Ant-Man, and why none of the new characters have been recruited.  It's unclear to me why the Avengers were allowed to be over, even if I understand why individuals aren't active Avengers anymore.

And I think it all links to that scene at the end of Shang-Chi.  It seemed like Shang-Chi was in the fold, and it seemed like the Avengers existed in some form at that time.  I know Carol has space stuff to do, and Bruce was still around.  So when Bruce did his stuff from She-Hulk...did he just leave and the Avengers building was just empty?

I get that we're going to get a lot of this in Avengers: Doomsday, but it just feels super disorganized that it hasn't been referenced.  Why all these characters felt comfortable leaving the Earth defenseless, and no one thought that was a problem.  I think they've done an okay job of answering the job piecemeal, but like a lot of phases 4-6, it just doesn't feel cohesive.  And this random team being introduced as the New Avengers and then that just being okay just feels weird to me.

I also wish they'd gotten Sam to show up in the post-credits.  In fact, I wish Brave New World was more about this than what it was actually about.

We have a serious continuity problem here. In DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, Mayor Wilson Fisk declares war on all New York City superheroes (whom he refers to as vigilantes), dispatching a task force of corrupt cops to shoot any superheroes like Daredevil on sight. Fisk won his mayorality with a huge swell of support. Superheroes are not wanted or needed, it seems.

But CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD has Captain America invited to the White House. The president asks Sam to create and lead a new team of Avengers. And then in THUNDERBOLTS, CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine assembles the press to proudly reveal a new team of superheroes, the New Avengers, to joyful relief and applause on the street before Avengers Tower.

The discontinuity between Mayor Fisk declaring all superheroes to be criminals and Director de Fontaine unveiling the New Avengers is glaring: de Fontaine and the Thunderbolts/New Avengers make no reference to superheroes being unwelcome in New York and Fisk having superheroes hunted down with municipal authority makes no sense when the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency is sponsoring superhero teams.

It's pretty obvious that Marvel liked Dario Scardapane's storyline of Fisk hunting superheroes wtih police and simultaneously liked Jake Schreier's delightful and hilarious THUNDERBOLTS ending where the team prepare to take down the corrupt CIA director who tried to kill them only for her to abruptly declare them to the press as the New Avengers, preventing them from attacking her as she's now positioned herself as their benefactor and sponsor and given them a global level of validation and admiration.

Scardapane clearly had no idea what was going on in THUNDERBOLTS and couldn't address it; Schreier clearly had no idea what was happening in BORN AGAIN and couldn't accommodate it.

I have a writing mentor, Joe, who has described situations like this as trivial and irrelevant. He once said to me, "Continuity is a tool, but all too often, it's a trap. It doesn't matter if Laurie Strode died in 2002 movie if a 2018 movie wants to show her alive and kicking. It doesn't matter of the X-Men are hated and feared in the same universe where the Avengers are praised and admired. And no, there is no comic book or novel that explains how Xander Cage came back to life in the third XXX movie and it doesn't matter. Screw continuity. Tell a good story first."

I agree with maybe half of that. My view is: continuity errors can distract someone from appreciating a story, so rather than dismiss continuity issues as irrelevant, it would be better to identify them and smooth them out. To address and defuse the trap rather than avoiding it.

I believe that if Scardapane had been aware of THUNDERBOLTS, he would have rewritten Fisk's dialogue a little. "We don't need a gun-toting vigilante who wears a skull mask on his chest, or a man who dresses in a spider outfit, or a guy who wears devil horns to save us! These are not CIA operatives protecting our shores! Or US Army officers who answer to the chain of command! Or refugees from other realms contributing to their communities. These street vigilantes have no sanction! No oversight! They are thugs! Violent offenders! They attack our homes and places of work and worship! They will not be tolerated! They will be stopped!"

So why didn't Marvel make him aware?

It seems to me that Marvel's attitude is to approve of a TV show's plotline... and then inform the team if there's a tie-in they want to make, such as Kamala Khan's father. TV is flying blind and has no awareness of the movies. And Scardapane doesn't get to suggest crossovers; the system is that Marvel imposes or gifts them.

The issue may also be that BORN AGAIN's first season was finished filming before THUNDERBOLTS' ending was finalized, and it was too late to go back and make adjustments to BORN AGAIN.

It is amusing, however: for so long, AGENTS OF SHIELD and the Netflix and Hulu shows seemed so separated from the feature films, because Marvel Studios was separate from Marvel Entertainment. Now they are all under one banner... and the disconnect remains pretty much the same.

I saw THUNDERBOLTS and it was good. It starts out a bit dark and bleak, almost like a Jason Bourne movie, but of course shifts into a more joking, lighthearted, AVENGERS-style comedy to offset the grimness. Despite that, the film has some surprisingly meaningful explorations of depression, trauma, loss and mental health. It's highly enjoyable with some fantastic action sequences.

I did feel the sense that the budget of the film trapped the movie on certain sets and locations. The Thunderbolts spend a large portion of the first third of the film in a secret government bunker of shadowy hallways that looks like every other secret government bunker of shadowy hallways in Season 5 of AGENTS OF SHIELD. They emerge from the bunker and spend the middle of the film running about back highways of Utah. The action then takes them to the former Avengers Tower and then the street in front of the Tower.

There is the sense of going to the theatre to watch a TV show where every episode/segment is written with the story confined to a specific set or location, and in a feature film, this can make the world outside the bunker or the highways or the general city block of Avengers tower seem vague, undefined, or even non-existent. Obviously, Ross being jailed and the lack of Avengers is why a black ops team like the Thunderbolts finds itself coming to the forefront of superhero missions, but the state of the larger universe is not really this movie's concern.

THUNDERBOLTS has a lot of fun interactions between Yelena and Bob, Yelena and Red Guardian, Red Guardian and Bucky, Yelena and USAgent, and USAgent and Bob (Ghost is kind of a non-entity), but we don't really get a sense of how the Marvel Cinematic Universe is doing without an active Avengers team and with President Ross in prison/isolation. THUNDERBOLTS exists largely in terms of enjoyable character banter and comedic action. The film does a great job of making the cast feel like an ensemble even though Yelena is the main character and the other characters pass in and out of focus as needed.

The dysfunctional nature and second-rate status of each cast member is played for laughs beautifully, whether it's Red Guardian as a Russian knockoff of Captain America, USAgent as the failed Captain America, Bob as a blundering civilian who stumbled into a group of superheroes, and Bucky as a former enemy of the state... although, I confess, at times, I forgot that Ghost was in the movie.

Bob is the standout of the film. Actor Lewis Pullman has a mild, gentle screen presence as the civilian Bob, a man inexplicably in a secret vault of dangerous weapons. The film initially misleads Marvel Comics fans into thinking he must be Bob, Agent of HYDRA, a hapless sidekick of Deadpool, but Bob is revealed as the Sentry, an ordinary man with addiction issues who was accidentally transformed into a godlike superhero.

Bob's grief over his horrific childhood of abuse and helplessness is the crux of the film, and Pullman excels in portraying a sad, lost, lonely man whose agony and drug use to blot out his pain has created an alternate persona, a bleak personification of emptiness and nothingness whom Bob calls the Void. The Thunderbolts' passage through the netherworld of the Void is a journey of torment and regret, and while it's never darker than you'd expect a Marvel film to be, the darkness is used effectively and evocatively and is surprisingly rich and moving.

The ending has the Thunderbolts team declared the new Avengers... which the credits immediately undermine with a series of newspaper headlines where the Thunderbolts are regarded as having no genuine claim to the name, challenged by Captain America (Sam Wilson) for the title, and generally viewed as undeserving pretenders. I'm not sure if this immediate undercutting was necessary as there currently are no Avengers and the MCU could do worse than this team, but I understand if there's a different cast in mind for the upcoming AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY and if Marvel didn't want to mislead.

A very enjoyable TV movie... which is confusing, because on actual TV, in DAREDEVIL, Mayor Fisk is declaring all vigilantes in New York City to be criminals whom police will hunt down. This is a stark mismatch with the head of the CIA assembling a press conference in New York City in front of the Avengers Tower to declare Yelena, Bucky, Red Guardian, Ghost and Bob to be "the New Avengers." One must, for now, assume that the anti-superhero municipal rule of DAREDEVIL is taking place in the Avengerless-vacuum before THUNDERBOLTS and is presumably resolved before this junket.

These narratives have a tendency to take time to cohere, if they ever do at all.

This question has no definitive answer, and to me, this is why Kevin Feige's "We'll decide it in post" attitude is maybe fine for feature films but a problem with a TV show. It's clear to me that Marvel was undecided on whether or not the Netflix shows were in continuity and declining to make a decision until forced had then hedging their bets. They wrote and filmed the show so that it could be edited both ways: as a rebooted Daredevil who just happened to have the previous actor (in the way J. Jonah Jameson remained JK Simmons in the Sony and MCU Spider-Man films) or as a sequel to the Netflix show (with explicit references to Ben Urich and Foggy that could be cut). They also planned that their reboot could conceivably go from vaguely related to the Netflix show to explicitly connected in later episodes. They simply did not decide.

Feige and Marvel also took the view that the TV shows whether on ABC and Netflix had a much smaller audience than the MCU films, and they treated all the Disney+ shows as films that just happened to stream in shorter installments and across longer spans. Their view may have been that the Disney+ DAREDEVIL audience was conceivably the mass MCU audience that might not be familiar with the Netflix show, and they wanted to market their DAREDEVIL as the first season of a new show, not the fourth season of an old show. Dispensing with Foggy and Karen was a path to that; killing Foggy was to declare a break with the original series.

But why? Why not bring Karen and Foggy back for the soft reboot, given that they were already keeping Cox and D'Onofrio and bringing in Jon Bernthal?

My opinion: it was to save money. Disney is notoriously tightfisted with pay. One common Disney practice is to change the title of a show to avoid paying royalties or salary increases. The show is called DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN to avoid having to pay royalties to the Netflix DAREDEVIL showrunners, Drew Goddard and Steven S. DeKnight, whose development work would have entitled them to payment for each new episode of DAREDEVIL even if they'd moved onto other projects. There is no series-royalty payment for them if the show were called DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, saving Disney money.

Another way they may have wanted to save money: minimizing the number of returning actors from the Netflix show. Naturally, every actor asked to return would be able to demand an increase on their Season 3 Netflix pay. Marvel negotiated with Cox, with D'Onofrio, with Bernthal -- but seemed to avoid opening that discussion with Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson. Their atittude may have been: Daredevil, Kingpin and the Punisher will have action figures. It's unlikely that there will ever be a merchandising line for Foggy and Karen. Marvel didn't see the value of negotiating with actors who wouldn't serve as the basis for toys, who wouldn't accept a low, starter-scale rate of pay. They decided they wanted a largely new cast who would accept lower starting salaries.

It seems to me that their tightfisted attitudes led to a series that slipped from their grasp: Bernthal walked, Cox and D'Onofrio regretted signing up. With one key actor ripcording out and the other two displeased, Marvel decided to rethink the project. They approached Dario Scardapane, observing that he could get Bernthal back on board.

It looks to me like Scardapane argued to Marvel that trying to soft-reboot Charlie Cox's Daredevil with no connection to his three seasons on Netflix was futile as the established history was impossible to cast away; that any losing some projected profit by rehiring Woll and Henson was preferable to losing everything they'd already invested in the project; that the series being shut down was already bad publicity piled atop the already negative reaction to Woll and Henson not being rehired in the first place and the impending PR body blow of Bernthal ejecting himself out of the show. Scardapane admitted that his firmness that Karen and Foggy had to come back could have made Marvel decide not to hire him.

And then, with Scardapane aboard, why did Foggy stay dead? Foggy's death was built into the narrative of the White Tiger trial (with Matt having quit as Daredevil after failing Foggy and trying to convince Hector Ayala that his life doesn't lose meaning without the White Tiger identity), Matt's grief over Hector and Foggy's deaths leading him to Frank Castle, Matt's increasingly fractured relationship with Heather Glenn -- and it seems to me that they were simply unable to refilm or rewrite Episodes 2 - 7 (originally 1 - 6) to remove Foggy's death from the storyline, nor did Scardapane have the option of scrapping those six episodes entirely. His argument was, after all, that he was making changes to save Marvel's deficit financing of the series, not to write it off.

Will Foggy be back? Elden Henson is booked for Season 2, but it's not clear if he'll return in flashbacks or as a hallucination. And the comics are not necessarily helpful in predicting the future of the TV show: Karen Page has been dead in the Marvel comic book line since 1999. Foggy died in DAREDEVIL #82 (February 2006), stabbed to death when visiting Matt in jail after Matt was arrested after being unmasked by FBI and police. Foggy returned in DAREDEVIL #88 (August 2006), shown to be in witness protection. I'm actually a bit surprised that Karen Page hasn't been resurrected, but her character in the comics wasn't nearly as vivid as Deborah Ann Woll and a lot of writers have preferred to have Karen haunt the book without being in it.

The odds are good that Foggy will return alive in BORN AGAIN because, from a production standpoint, if they've come to a deal with Elden Henson, they want to get as much use out of him as they can. But it's not a guarantee: Ben Urich is alive and well in the comics and dead in the Netflix show.

I'll post tomorrow about the continuity, and yes, I agree it's become a problem.

I guess the last question is: why kill Foggy?  There are (unsubstantiated?) rumors that Foggy will come back.  Maybe he faked his death or maybe he comes back with MCU nonsense, but if you're going to bring him back why kill him?  I understand he was dead in the original vision, but Foggy's death doesn't really play a part in episodes 2-7.  Karen moved to San Francisco.  Couldn't Foggy have moved away too?  I saw an interview with Cox and D'Onofrio where they talked about needing to jolt the series (I think Cox referred to Foggy as "the heartbeat of the MCU" which is pretty crazy for a character who technically was only in the MCU for 10 minutes?).  But I think you could've accomplished that with Foggy and Matt having a falling out or something like that.

The other question that I have is about continuity.  If Born Again originally had a loose connection to the Netflix seasons but also had a loose connection to the MCU (the strongest tie was Kamala's dad?)....then what is it?  Deadpool, I think, did a great job of connecting to both the MCU and the existing continuity.  We all thought that Deadpool would live in his own space, but this is literally Daredevil living in his own space.  No past and no future.

And, again, I don't think we needed Captain America to beat up Fisk or for the Chitauri to be involved.  But I think Born Again could cover some really interesting material.  Captain America and Iron Man were seemingly beloved by everyone, but would people differentiate between Daredevil and Captain America?  Would street-level superheroes be seen differently than Avengers?

What's crazy is that they had all the pieces to do this.  You're in the MCU - so just a couple of years ago, in universe, half the population disappeared and reappeared because of a purple alien fighting a bunch of superheroes.  New York City, where this is set, was the location of an alien attack.  This is the same universe where a giant hand is sticking out of the earth and Captain America just fought the president.  And you have, built into the show, these "man on the street interviews."

"I loved Tony Stark, but these street-level superheroes are nothing but criminals to me."

"If these guys were dangerous, the Avengers would've stopped them.  I think they're helping."

"Superheroes saved by Grandma in the blip.  I'll never see any of them as criminals."

And Fisk would have to fight this in his smear campaign.  I would assume all the Avengers have a 90+% approval rating.  He would need to make a clear case that Daredevil and White Tiger are different than Captain America.

And I don't think the show did any of that.  And it's just bizarre because it's staring right at their faces.  It's a show that doesn't seem to want to be in the MCU because it hurts its own argument.  Nolan's Dark Knight series is probably hurt if Superman is out there somewhere, and I think Born Again is a little hurt by the idea that incredibly-popular superheroes exist.

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I think it all sorta ties to the idea that these MCU shows could've been a really cool street-level look into how the Avengers' actions impacted people.  It started really promising with Falcon and the Winter Soldier having the government react to the Snap/Blip.  But all that seems to have washed over.  Despite all the crazy stuff that's happened in the MCU, their world and our world are pretty much the same.  Which is bonkers.

I know that they can't have the worlds diverge too much because they still need to film in our world.  But you wouldn't need to pay Robert Downey Jr. to be in these movies to make them feel cohesive.  Dialogue is basically free, right?

I think Daredevil was pretty solid.  And when you understand the behind the scenes hodgepodge that it was, I think it's amazing that it's anywhere near as good as it was.  I'm still unsure of what the show as going to be, though.  If we basically got episodes 1-6 of the original concept as episodes 2-7, what was the real difference?  Would the original season, minus missing out on Foggy and Karen (which I know is important to ireactions) really have been so bad that they needed to overhaul it?  Unless they made changes, those shows were pretty good.  I didn't think there was an obvious jump in quality.

I understand they didn't have the Punisher right, and they needed Foggy and Karen to make the whole show feel more cohesive.  But I guess it didn't feel like a dumpster fire that had to be rewritten.

I was going to write a full review, but Slider_Quinn21's interesting question seemed more pressing.

I've learned a bit more about the pre-overhauled version of DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN and they hit a serious production issue after filming the first six episodes: Jon Bernthal quit after what seems to have been one day of filming, rendering the season impossible to complete and therefore unreleasable under the original circumstances.

What I've heard through my grapevine (and since my grapevine is not nearly as impressive as Temporal Flux's network for SLIDERS, take all of this with a grain of salt): the original plan for BORN AGAIN was that it had a very vague and distant relationship with the Netflix continuity, avoiding explicit tie-in but also avoiding outright contradictions.

Feige and Marvel weren't sure if the hypothetical Disney+ audience for BORN AGAIN would have even seen the Netflix shows. Feige's approach of "We'll decide in post" was highly present: they filmed scenes where Kingpin is clearly thinking about Ben Urich and mention of Foggy having died off-camera, murdered by a rogue police officer; they made no mention of Karen Page; they filmed Matt uneasy with Mayor Wilson Fisk but didn't show Matt declaring war on the mayor (and Matt's inaction towards a Fisk mayorship is, without explanation, truly bizarre in the context of Season 3 of the Netflix show). They were undecided.

One area where they were decisive: the Punisher as played by Jon Bernthal was a big part of the storyline. BORN AGAIN was to feature police officers with Punisher tattoos who were using lethal force like the Punisher but far less discriminately, shooting civilians and superheroes and calling it self-defense, and one of them had shot Foggy (off camera) when Foggy had tried to protect a client. These corrupt police officers would seem like a background element that would eventually step to the forefront of the show.

The plan was -- and this is the part where I suggest many grains of salt -- for Frank to show up in the middle of BORN AGAIN's first run of episodes and call Matt out for having retired from his Daredevil role, for not exacting vengeance on Foggy's murderer and every corrupt cop wearing the Punisher's tattoo. Matt would decide to become Daredevil again; Frank Castle would then return a few episodes later and, appalled by the murderous police officers killing in his name, adopt a less lethal approach alongside Daredevil.

Apparently, Bernthal signed on as a guest-star without having seen the scripts. He filmed his first scene in his bunker (which we saw, albeit with some revisions to alter the references to Foggy's murder to being Poindexter instead of a corrupt cop). Bernthal then read the subsequent scripts where Frank would step back from his lethal approach -- and he informed Marvel that he would not perform these scripts, that he would not participate in a softened and lightened portrayal of the Punisher, and he quit.

(This seems to have been misunderstood in the press with reporters saying Bernthal only filmed on BORN AGAIN after the strike and overhaul, but this is not the case: Bernthal's return was announced before the strike, and his first scene in BORN AGAIN was filmed before the reshoots. We can tell because all references to Bullseye from Frank are added via ADR and when Bernthal is off-camera. Some fans and reporters were confused because the post-strike directors have spoken of filming this scene; I think this must be referring to how Matt's side of the conversation was partially refilmed to refer to Bullseye and sections of Frank's dialogue have been added in post.)

I am not sure how Bernthal was able to quit in the way that he did: one would think that he would have been contracted to be available for the whole of the BORN AGAIN shoot, given Feige's then-approach to treating TV like an extended film shoot rather than episode to episode.

Marvel TV may have booked him to film as-available without locking him into a first-position/availability-secured contract, thinking his schedule was open, only to learn that available or not, Bernthal was refusing to return after filming one scene and accepting the financial hit.

Alternatively, Bernthal may have spotted the impending writers strike would necesstiate that his contract be extended, and told Marvel that he would not be extending his availability past the strike because he wasn't happy with the scripts.

Regardless, Bernthal was out.

This meant that the six episodes filmed had set up the Punisher's return, hinted at from the corrupt police officers wearing his symbol as a tattoo, and established the Punisher's reputation and character as critical and central to the first season -- but they had only one actual scene with Bernthal, the scene where Frank and Matt argue over Matt's reaction to Foggy's death -- and they had no further footage of Frank and no way to address the Punisher arc now that they'd lost their Punisher.

These six episodes were now unusable and the season was unfinishable.

It wasn't the only reason for the overhaul. BORN AGAIN was also facing a lot of negative publicity where the pre-existing audience, the Netflix fans, were unhappy that the show wouldn't include Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson. I've heard that actors Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio were also unhappy, and while they didn't quit like Bernthal did, they were expressing a marked lack of enthusiasm for resuming post-strike, especially as the delay meant they could renegotiate. The project was in serious trouble: unreleasable because they couldn't complete what they'd filmed; unmarketable with a key actor walking out and two leads looking at the exits.

Feige and Marvel's solution: they hired Dario Scardapane to overhaul the show. Scardapane had been a producer (but not the showrunner) on the Netflix PUNISHER series. He had a good relationship with Bernthal, and was authorized to treat Bernthal as a creative partner in writing Frank Castle, which made Bernthal agree to return. They also hired Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson, which placated Cox and D'Onofrio, and enabled the show to resume filming and make use of the original six episodes filmed, albeit with reshoots and reworkings.

Without the overhaul, the six episodes as originally filmed would been an incomplete story, unreleasable, and a medium-sized writeoff for the company.

**

To me, doing DAREDEVIL with Charlie Cox but not Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson is like firing John Rhys-Davies from SLIDERS or doing AIRWOLF without the helicopter or SCREAM without Neve Campbell or COMMUNITY without Dan Harmon or a Venom movie without Spider-Man or serving a hot dog without the bun. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's clearly not, but it's like deliberately breaking your own ankle before a marathon.

Why would you do that? Who would want you to?