ISSUE NO. 74
Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. Check out the last entry Severance Chikhai Bardo Explained: What Really Happened to Gemma?
This column contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again Episodes 1 and 2.
When Daredevil: Born Again was announced, I was excited to see the Avocados at Law back in action, but I was unsure how Disney would honor the Netflix series we all loved. With these first two episodes, it’s evident that the House of Mouse was prepared to pay homage to the oners and violence alike, but my favorite callback actually came in quite the unexpected form: BB Urich (Genneya Walton). Stick with me for a moment, because the “why” requires that we time-travel a bit.
Waaay back in 2015 — a sentence that it physically hurt to type — we watched Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) murder Ben Urich (Vondie Curtis-Hall) in his home. It was a devastating turning point in the show’s first season, successfully driving home what a threat Kingpin was in a way the mob boss’ previous murders didn’t. Ben’s death hit harder because he was important, not just to the series itself but to Daredevil (and occasionally Spider-Man) canon as a whole. It was unexpected, brutal (Fisk strangles him to death), and, unfortunately, almost entirely Karen Page’s (Deborah Ann Woll) fault.
Fisk was there to murder Urich because the reporter had brought his mother — Marlene Vistain (Phyllis Somerville) — into their little dispute by questioning her for an article. Urich lied to Fisk right before his death, insisting that he had gone to see Marlene on his own. However, seeing Marlene wasn’t Urich’s idea, but Page’s, and to make matters worse, she had burst into the elderly woman’s room in hospice against Urich’s advice.
It took me a really long time to forgive Karen Page for her role in Ben Urich’s death, with her own emotional despair being of little comfort. We were supposed to feel for her because she didn’t know any better, but I mostly just hated her because she was warned by someone who did know better and they died for it. It was also particularly frustrating because Ben was a more interesting character than Karen had been at the time.
Obviously, this changed over time. Karen grew, learned to honor Ben in her own way throughout the seasons, and eventually became a contributing member of the team instead of tears and mistakes wrapped up in a nice outfit. The first couple of episodes of Born Again reduce her to despair once more, but it’s different this time. She is rightfully devastated over Foggy’s (Elden Henson) death, but she also squares up with Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) when he begs her to talk to him. We learn in Episode 2 that Murdock disappeared after Foggy’s death, leaving her without either of her best friends, and she reasonably stands her ground against Hell’s Kitchen’s former defender.
Enter BB Urich, Ben’s niece with the same penchant for journalism as her uncle.
We meet BB in Born Again over the course of a series of clips. She’s entirely off-camera until Episode 2, interviewing various citizens of New York on their opinions on various matters like Fisk’s mayoral campaign, Daredevil’s disappearance, and more. She’s green and she’s hungry, with her ambition eventually landing her in Mayor Fisk’s office where she asks about his wife Vanessa’s (Ayelet Zurer) absence from his campaign. Fisk answers jovially, but young BB is crossing the same line that got her uncle killed in plain sight. It’s a dangerous game she’s playing, one that her uncle Ben would have undoubtedly coached her through.
Meanwhile, Deborah Ann Woll is currently billed for the rest of the season, and this series killing off both Foggy and Karen would try my patience in a way that feels difficult to articulate (I am very mad about Foggy Nelson). Daredevil: Born Again showrunner Dario Scardapane also spoke to IGN’s Scott Collura about just how important her character is to the series, saying “Karen Page is the heart and soul of this universe and of this daredevil mythology and Karen's interaction with our story and this season and beyond is huge. And I can't give too much away, but families tend to fracture when a loved one passes. And in that fracture, they can rebond in ways that are surprising and new. And that's what I think we were going for.”
With that in mind, it feels safe to say that they’re not going to keep her out of New York for the entire series either, which means she needs something to do other than pat Matt Murdock on the head until he gets his groove back. For my money, there’s no better full-circle arc for the character than to have her mentor BB in Ben’s stead, especially because young BB is skipping down the same path Karen did in 2015 with somehow even more reckless abandon and no one to advise her otherwise.
BB’s future holds two potential paths. One is filling the role of Ben Urich, a respected reporter who plays pivotal ground-level roles across many of the most crucial comic stories (Secret Invasion, Civil War, etc.). The other is a new version of Phil, which feels less likely given his deeper connection to the Spider-Verse rather than Hell’s Kitchen. Regardless of which fork the character heads down, I hope that if they’re going to tie her to an existing character, they at least make her unique in her own way. And, of equal importance, I want to see Karen Page be a part of her growth.
