Daredevil 2015 / Tropes A to B

Main Page | Tropes A to B | Tropes C to E | Tropes F to H | Tropes I to P | Tropes Q to Z

---

A

• Abandoned Warehouse:
  • "Condemned" sees Matt holing up with Vladimir in an abandoned building to get information on Fisk. Things get complicated when a rookie police officer stumbles upon them and Matt is forced to overpower him, leading to a hostage situation drawing in the various crooked cops Matt was trying to avoid.
  • For the duration of Season 1, Fisk has meetings with other associates in a warehouse by the docks.
  • The Season 2 finale sees Karen and a bunch of other Daredevil survivors get held hostage by the Hand in one of these.
• Aborted Arc:
  • Fisk mentions the hammer he used to kill his father was saved by his mother. Then Karen also brings him killing his father as a possible case against him. But this Chekhov's Hammer hasn't hit.
  • Early in Season 3, Matt believes the key to defeating Fisk is finding out why he snitched on the Albanians specifically. During the investigation he finds another lead and doesn't look into Fisk's snitching rationale again. Matt was right to be suspicious of Fisk's target, but it plays into his long-term goals, not anything that can immediately be used against him.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • In the comics, Gladiator is a career criminal and supervillain, albeit one who attempts to mend his ways. In the show, Melvin Potter is a somewhat innocent idiot-savant who is forced to serve Fisk to protect his girlfriend, and then turns to being Matt's fulltime armorer once Fisk is arrested. Even his return to working for Fisk is against his will.
  • Karen's father was a supervillain named Death's Head in the comics, but here, he's just a diner owner who doesn't know how to be fiscally responsible with his cash.
• Adaptation Dye-Job:
  • Matt has red hair in the comics, with his fiery coloration being an intentional artistic play on the devil motif. This would look incredibly silly on Charlie Cox, so he just sports his natural brown hair color with a bit of copper-red tinting.
  • Wilson Fisk normally wears white suits in the comics. Here, he wears black in his earliest incarnation to show his transformation to his full Kingpin persona. When he takes his relationship with Vanessa to the next level, he begins to wear lighter shades. In Season 3, Fisk is seen primarily in white suits, having completely become the Kingpin.
• Adaptational Sympathy: In the comics, Bullseye was simply an Ax-Crazy Psycho for Hire whose childhood ambition was "to be the bad guy" and no clearly-defined past aside from a few confirmed details. The show not only uses his name from the Ultimate universe (Benjamin Poindexter) but has a tragic backstory of losing his parents and being sent to an orphanage, not to mention that he tries to deal with his insanity by meeting with a psychologist.
• Adapted Out:
  • The Daily Bugle, Ben Urich's employer in the comics, is not used in the series as Sony owned the rights to it, preventing Marvel from using it. Instead, he works for the New York Bulletin. The rights issues are also why Urich's boss J. Jonah Jameson was replaced with the Canon Foreigner Mitchell Ellison.
  • In the comics, Frank Castle's family was killed by thugs working for the Costas, an Italian mob family. In the show, they were instead killed during a three way shoot-out between Irish mobsters, a Mexican cartel, and the Dogs of Hell biker gang. It's ultimately revealed that the entire shootout was orchestrated by Colonel Schoonover, Frank's former commanding officer from Iraq, and in The Punisher, it's revealed that Frank was targeted because the plotters of Operation Cerberus thought Frank leaked footage of the execution of Ahmed Zubair.
  • Frank Castle's traditional sidekick David "Microchip" Lieberman doesn't appear in Season 2, instead making his debut in Castle's solo show. However, he is hinted at with a CD labeled "Micro" in Castle's house, which is revealed in the solo show to have been left by David.
  • In an inversion, characters from Garth Ennis' Kitchen Irish story arc are incorporated into the first act of Season 2, a story which, despite the Hell's Kitchen setting, did not feature Daredevil.
  • Foggy Nelson's mother in the comics is Rosalind Sharpe, another lawyer, and Anna Nelson was his stepmom. In the show, Anna Nelson is Foggy's biological mom and Rosalind is nowhere to be seen.
  • Much like the MCU films, the show was unable to use the fictional metal Adamantium due to its rights being owned by 20th Century Fox, who featured the metal in their X-Men movies. This meant that the substance Professor Oyama binds to Bullseye's spine had to be changed to Cogmium, another existing (but far less notable) fictional alloy from the Marvel comics.
• The Adjectival Man: "The masked man" is a common nickname for Matt before the papers take up using the "Devil of Hell's Kitchen" as a better nickname.
• Advertised Extra:
  • Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple only appears in five out of 13 episodes in the first season of Daredevil, and she doesn't have any big impact on the plot after Matt saves her from the Russians. She has a similarly brief run in the second season. Her role is essentially an Early-Bird Cameo for her appearances in other series associated with The Defenders, such as Jessica Jones. It wouldn't be until Luke Cage that Claire finally began to take on a more prominent role, functioning as Luke's sidekick for the second half of Season 1.
  • Stephen Rider as Blake Tower gets this a bit. He's only in seven episodes of Season 2 and primarily acts as a subordinate to Reyes. In Season 3, he has main credits billing but is only in five episodes, although he admittedly has a bigger part in the season's narrative as Foggy is encouraged by Marci to run against him for District Attorney as a way of getting Tower's refusal to go after Fisk into the spotlight.
• Affably Evil:
  • Leland Owlsley has a genial, avuncular personality in spite of being a crooked banker for organized crime.
  • Madame Gao is a kindly old lady, always smiling, ever polite, and often dispensing sage wisdom to her partners. She's also one of the Fingers that comprise the leadership of the Hand.
• Age Lift: Leland Owlsley is usually depicted as being in his late 30s or early 40s in the comics, but in the series, he is played by septuagenarian Bob Gunton. Given that he mentions his son shortly before his death, it's possible that Leland Owlsley, Jr. will appear as the MCU version of the comic book character.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Quite a number of the antagonist characters are humanized and their deaths are treated as tragic.
  • Detective Hoffman is very bitter over Fisk forcing him to kill Blake, his partner and best friend of 35 years. Hoffman even tearfully says "I'm sorry" as he's injecting the poison into Blake's IV line, and this bitterness leads him to eventually turn on Fisk.
  • Wesley's death at Karen's hands was heavily justified. But for Fisk, Wesley was his closest friend.
  • Despite Grotto being a criminal who killed people, Matt, Karen and Foggy feel guilty enough about their failure to protect him from the Punisher to hold a funeral service for him. They're also the only three who even bother to show up for the service.
• The Alcoholic: Everyone at Nelson & Murdock is a heavy drinker. They seem to spend most nights getting drunk at Josie's, to the point that they rack up a gigantic tab. Foggy explains Matt's frequent injuries to Karen as him being an alcoholic, which Karen seems to accept for a time. For himself, Foggy is such a hard drinker that Marci smuggles him a bottle of liquor while he's recuperating from getting shot during the Reyes assassination, and they both sip it straight from the bottle. Karen proves resistant to the drugs James Wesley uses to sedate her because alcoholics are resistant to sedatives, and after killing Wesley, she spends several hours drinking every piece of alcohol in her apartment. Truth in Television for Matt, Foggy, and Marci, given that in real life, there is a lot of unadmitted alcoholism in the legal community.
• All Bikers are Hells Angels: The Dogs of Hell biker gang in Season 2 are among the Punisher's targets. A different chapter of the Dogs of Hell also appeared in the MCU through a season 2 episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D..
• All for Nothing:
  • All of Nelson & Murdock's work taking down Wilson Fisk in Season 1 is rendered worthless when he regains his power through a bunch of behind the scenes plays in Season 2, and then is released early in Season 3.
  • Matt's defeat of Nobu and the Hand in Season 2 is rendered this trope by Iron Fist and The Defenders, which reveal Matt only defeated a faction of the Hand, and never got close to touching the other factions led by Bakuto, Madame Gao, Sowande, and Alexandra. Heck, he didn't even touch (or find out about) the leader of the Hand faction he spent the bulk of Season 2 fighting.
• Always Save the Girl: In the Episode 9 of Season 3, Matt has the perfect opportunity to kill Fisk, having managed to infiltrate into his suite, where there are no cameras... Then he hears that the FBI has located Karen, and Shelby informs him that Fisk wants Karen dead. He leaves the hotel immediately.
• Ambiguously Human:
  • Nobu is noted to have an unusual heartbeat, seems completely unaware of any pain or discomfort he should be experiencing, and in general creeps out everyone who meets him (in his very first scene, Owlsley says to him "Can you at least pretend to be cold? It's unsettling!"). Season 2 reveals that he regenerates after seemingly fatal injuries, and he remarks that there's "no such thing" as death. The other ninjas of the Hand make no sound and can even conceal the beating of their hearts. It's hinted that at least some of them have returned from the dead. One even has scars from an autopsy. Iron Fist and The Defenders establish that yes, the Hand can resurrect the dead.
  • Madame Gao, who claims that her homeland is not China but somewhere considerably "farther away." ^note  China is about the farthest you can get from New York City and still be on Earth. She also knocks down Matt in one hit despite being an old woman who walks with a cane, and claims to speak ALL languages. Iron Fist reveals she's from K'un L'un, she's several centuries (if not millennia) old, and her cane conceals a sword, and The Defenders ultimately reveals she's one of the Hand's founders.
  • The Black Sky that Nobu transports is meant to be a very rare and dangerous weapon, but appears to be just a young boy. Stick insists that he's not a person. Nobu also insists that Black Sky was "very valuable" and will be "difficult to replace" after Stick kills the boy, and seems upset enough to lend a lot of weight to Stick's argument. Then in Season 2, Elektra turns out to be a Black Sky.
• Amoral Attorney:
  • Matt and Foggy were offered spots at Landman & Zack, a large and prestigious law firm, but Matt did not like the type of cases and clients the firm took on, so he convinced Foggy that they could avoid this trope by starting their own business. Good thing, since they find out later that Landman and Zack handles a lot of Wilson Fisk's legal business. The Season 1 finale reveals that most of the firm's partners are arrested by the FBI due to being complicit in Fisk's illegal activities.
  • Subverted with Marci Stahl, who reveals when push comes to shove that she has a guilty conscience and ends up helping Foggy take down her Landman & Zack colleagues who are in Fisk's pockets. Her turning against her corrupt bosses gets her hired by Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz, and is able to persuade Jeri Hogarth to bring Foggy into the firm as well following Nelson & Murdock's closure. She is then a firm ally to the main trio in Season 3 when Fisk gets out of prison.
  • Introduced in Season 2, Big Ben Donovan is Fisk's defense attorney, and also has taken up the consigliere duties that had been previously handled by Wesley. He had previously been put through law school by Harlem crimelord Mama Mabel Stokes and has been handling affairs for Mama Mabel, Cottonmouth, and Mariah Dillard (Mabel's successors) for over 25 years by the time Fisk hires him.
  • Reyes, a District Attorney who will resort to illegal tactics and backstabbing to save her ass and achieve her ambitions. Even "sharks" like Marci and Jeri Hogarth are disgusted with her.
• Anachronic Order: The end of the second season overlaps significantly with Luke Cage. Claire mentions the Hand's hospital attack to her mother when she first appears in "Just to Get a Rep". Likewise, Matt revealing his secret identity to Karen in "A Cold Day in Hell's Kitchen" takes place after the police car dashcam video of Luke overpowering two police officers in "DWYCK" (the dashcam footage is stamped as taking place on December 1st, 2015, while the last scene in "A Cold Day in Hell's Kitchen" is established by preceding dialogue to take place during the week of December 20, 2015).
• And Starring: "And Vincent D'Onofrio as Wilson Fisk"
• And the Adventure Continues:
  • The Season 1 finale ends with Matt hearing a cry for help and rushing to the rescue with his escrima sticks in his hands.
  • The Season 3 finale ends with Matt, Foggy, and Karen deciding to go back into business together, this time as Nelson, Murdock, & Page. And Matt, in his black Beta Outfit, once again watching over Hell's Kitchen as Daredevil.
• …And That Little Girl Was Me: Twice in "Guilty as Sin":
  • Stick tells a story about how a child began fighting the Hand, killing them until they were driven out and this act of defiance was the origin of his organization, the Chaste. Matt assumes that Stick is talking about himself and sarcastically compliments him on keeping himself at the center. What the audience sees of the Chaste later in this show and in The Defenders indicates Stick isn't its leader, suggesting this assumption may well be wrong.
  • At Frank Castle's trial, Colonel Schoonover testifies as a character witness, and tells a story about a stupid officer who got Castle's squad into an ambush (we later see the exact details of the ambush in a flashback during The Punisher), that caused said idiot officer to lose his right arm. When Reyes claims no one can really know what happened if they weren't there, Schoonover clarifies that he was that idiot officer, completely undercutting Reyes' argument (and making her wonder how she managed to overlook his prosthetic arm in the first place).
    Blake Tower: How did you miss that in his file?
    Samantha Reyes: All the names were redacted.
    Blake Tower: Not good.
    Samantha Reyes: No shit.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!:
  • Many of the people who end up working for or helping Fisk do so because he threatens their families. Some such examples among major characters include forcing Melvin Potter to make his suits by threatening to hurt his girlfriend, Betsy, if he doesn't, and forcing Ray Nadeem to join the ranks of the corrupt FBI agents working for him partially through blackmail and partially by threatening his wife and son if he doesn't cooperate.
  • When Wesley kidnaps Karen and she realizes he knows about her visiting Fisk's mom, she is initially Defiant to the End about the fact that she's probably going to die and tells him to Get It Over With; however, Wesley tells her that first they'll kill Ben, then Foggy and Matt, then her family, and only kill her after she has "no more tears to shed". These threats against everyone she loves is what causes her to snap and kill Wesley as soon as she manages to get her hands on his gun.
  • At the end of Season 3, Matt and Fisk pull this on each other. First Fisk tries to goad Matt into killing him by promising that, as long as he lives, no prison cell will hold him, and he'll never stop targeting Foggy and Karen to get to him, and will expose Daredevil's identity to the world. However, Matt counters by promising that if Fisk ever targets Foggy, Karen, or anybody else, or outs him, he'll make sure Fisk's wife Vanessa gets thrown in prison for ordering a murder, which leaves them at a stalemate.
• Anti-Hero: Matt breaks his oath as a lawyer to be a vigilante who punishes criminals, despite that making him a criminal too. This is lampshaded by Claire at the beginning of "World on Fire", where she points out this contradiction, and he tells her that he's still "figuring it out".
• Anti-Villain: Wilson Fisk has a sympathetic backstory, a number of people he cares about, seems to legitimately believe that he's doing what's best for Hell's Kitchen, and even undergoes a bit of positive Character Development. Rather than a simple greedy mob boss, he's portrayed as a curiously vulnerable and damaged man with a misguided vision and one hell of an anger management issue.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • In Season 1, there is at least one death in every episode (when flashbacks are counted). There's Anatoly and Vladimir Ranskahov, Elena Cardenas, Nobu (who gets better), Fisk's right-hand man James Wesley, Ben Urich, and Leland Owlsley.
  • Season 2 has a great majority of the Kitchen Irish, Samantha Reyes, The Blacksmith, Nobu...again (this time permanently), and finally Elektra herself (only to be revived by the Hand for The Defenders.
  • Season 3 sees the deaths of several reporters at the New York Bulletin, Jasper Evans, Julie Barnes, Father Paul Lantom, and Agent Ray Nadeem.
• Apologetic Attacker: When Claire is kidnapped and tortured by the Russians, Sergei is uncomfortable having to rough up a woman, and begs her to just answer the questions.
• Arbitrary Skepticism:
  • Subverted in "In the Blood". When Karen tells Ben that she was saved by a man in a mask, he at first is skeptical, but concedes that a masked vigilante is not the craziest thing in the world. Ben would know a thing or two about that, as he has framed front-page articles in his office about the Harlem Terror and the Battle of New York.
  • Played with in another case from "In the Blood": Wesley questions Anatoly and Vladimir as to why their gang is having so much trouble with one man running around in a mask, then adds, "I mean, if he had an iron suit or a magic hammer, maybe that would explain why you keep getting your asses handed to you."
  • Justified with Fisk's "You really think one man in a silly little costume can make a difference?" Fisk gained his foothold in Hell's Kitchen in part because of the Chitauri invasion. From his perspective, guys like the Avengers might save the world, but they don't do shit about the crime, corruption, greed, poverty, and urban decay at street level. Until now, that is.
  • In Season 2, Matt is extremely skeptical about mysticism, even when directly confronting the Hand and seeing things that should be impossible like resurrection of the dead, even when the world has faced several alien invasions and Norse Gods walk the streets. Even Claire as a medical professional is more willing to point out the weirdness surrounding the Hand. Stick also notes that as a Catholic, Matt shouldn't have a problem with believing resurrection can happen, since his faith is based on one person doing that.
• Arcade Sounds:
  • In "Rabbit in a Snowstorm", Healy stashes a faulty pistol inside a 2014 Mustang (Stern) pinball game so the police won't find it when he's arrested. When James Wesley visits the bowling alley the next day to pick up the gun, however, it plays electro-mechanical chimes from fifty years ago.
  • A Chinese gangster's smartphone is making a bizarre combination of blooping sounds that ends with the distinctive "Game Over" noise from Pac-Man.
• Armor Is Useless: Zig-Zagged. Claire suggests multiple times that Matt should get some body armor if he's going to keep being Daredevil, but Matt insists armor would hamper his mobility and make him less effective. Wilson Fisk, however, wears a cutting-edge armor lining that's indistinguishable under his suit. It can stop knives, as first demonstrated when Anatoly swings at him with a switchblade, and later when Matt attempts to slice at him with a kusari-gama. Witnessing this, Matt wants some similar armor of his own, even getting Fisk's tailor to create the suit. It saves him in the final fight from a fractured skull when it partially deflects Fisk's head-shot with a piece of rebar. It also saves Matt's life when Frank Castle shoots him in the head, though he has a pretty serious concussion and needs a new helmet.
• Armor-Piercing Question: The end of Matt and Foggy's fight in "Nelson v. Murdock" is Foggy flipping Matt off and demanding, "How many fingers am I holding up?" Matt, of course, can tell. Earlier in the same episode, Foggy asks Matt "Are you even really blind?" The answer to that question is very complicated.
• Armor-Piercing Response: In "Nelson v. Murdock," when Foggy asks Matt if he was responsible for Fisk's bombings of the Russian hideouts or the shooting of several police officers, Matt asks if Foggy really needs to hear the answer from him. When Foggy says yes, a tear slides down Matt's cheek as he realizes just how betrayed his best friend feels.
• The Artifact: Ben Urich still works at the New York Bulletin, even though it's 2015. Ellison repeatedly points out that print is dying and how the news is becoming more about clickbait than useful information. Right up until Ben's last words, in fact. Come Season 2, Ellison, feeling guilty over not having backed Ben's investigation, has a big change of heart, and backs Karen's investigation into Frank Castle's family the whole way.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Although he's supposed to be blind, Matt's eyes look perfectly normal and show no sign of discoloration. (According to Charlie Cox, he tried for a bit to wear special contact lenses that clouded his eyes to achieve the right effect, but they made it too hard for him to find his mark while filming scenes, so he quickly ditched them)
  • Matt could have been deafened by the exploding warehouse in "World on Fire". In fact, he should be deafened whenever in a room with gunfire. It's possible that some of the training offscreen from Stick may have involved consciously inducing auditory exclusion, an 'auditory blink' typically seen in police officers under high stress situations.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • The warehouse where Matt holes up with Vladimir in "Condemned" is said to be at the northwest corner of 47th Street and 12th Avenue. That would be impossible as 12th Avenue at Hell's Kitchen is the West Side Highway, as opposed to a regular street. On the opposite side of the street from the buildings should be the USS Intrepid Museum, which is not visible in any shots. The West Side Highway is also eight lanes at this point, not a two lane road with buildings on both sides. This part of Hell's Kitchen is also primarily residential buildings, and no industrial warehouses.
  • "Bang" opens with a Walk and Talk of Matt and Foggy walking to work, ostensibly in Hell's Kitchen. However, a street sign for East 116th Street appears in the background, betraying the Upper East Side filming location.
  • The newspaper article on the death of Karen Page's brother in "Seven Minutes in Heaven" reports that he had been "heading east on Vermont Route 12 from the Hill Road exit ramp off Interstate 89". Vermont Route 12 is a north-south highway that runs parallel to Interstate 89 for much of its length, with the two highways only crossing at the state capital in Montpelier. There's also no direct off-ramp between VT-12 and I-89. There also is no Windler County in Vermont, as Montpelier is in Washington County.
  • Early in "Into the Ring," we see Foggy meet with Brett as Brett emerges from what is supposedly the 50th Street station on the IND Eighth Avenue Line. The entrance signage on the stairwell is accurate, but the landscape of the surrounding buildings isn't. The area around 50th Street and Eighth Avenue in the show is depicted as lowrises that don't exceed five stories at most. In reality, this area is primarily composed of highrises exceeding 20 stories. The scene itself was actually shot at Bedford Avenue on the BMT Canarsie Line.
• Artistic License – History:
  • After his father's death, young Matt is shown to be living in an orphanage. The United States got rid of its orphanage system in favor of foster care and group homes in the early 1980s. Matt is in his early 30s in the present day, so that system would have been well in place by the time he became a ward of the state, circa the 1990s. Additionally, season 3 (which is set circa 2016-2017) features the orphanage he grew up in as still being active and continuing to take in young children.
  • When Matt is growing up in the 1990s, Hell's Kitchen is portrayed as a lower-class neighborhood of Irish immigrants. This is based on the comics, which were created in the 1960s, when this was still true. In reality, Hell's Kitchen gentrified in the 1990s and is something of a Gayborhood now. The show justifies the neighborhood's crapsack portrayal in modern times by saying that the "Incident" caused a lot of property destruction here.
• Artistic License – Law: While the show generally does well in the first season, the second season has legal problems.
  • DA Reyes has power and influence apparently on a par with Wilson Fisk, able to make documents disappear not just from her own office, but from court filings and the U.S. Attorney's office. She got police reports falsified and shut down the press. She can get the court to start Castle's trial for 100+ felony counts next week instead of the 6+ months that would be normal. She somehow even manages to get the poor and indigent to stop turning to Nelson & Murdock for help! Some of this is demanded by plot (railroading the court to fit the timeline of the other plot arcs, putting pressure on N&M by disappearing their clients), but most of it is unrealistic.
  • Matt's supposedly an incredible lawyer. The first season was able to present this with dramatic monologues, one for an opening statement and another for a closing argument. Monologues are fine for those situations, that's what they're for. But during Castle's trial Matt goes off the rails. He puts Castle on the stand, starts questioning him in ways you're not allowed to on direct, requests to treat his client, the defendant as a hostile witness... then launches into a long monologue! Save it for closing, counselor.
• Artistic License – Military: When testifying on the stand at Frank Castle's trial, we learn that Colonel Schoonover was wounded in combat and lost his right arm. That meets the criteria for a Purple Heart. Yet when in uniform, his ribbon rack does not include the award. The first ribbon in the top row is crimson, indicating a Legion of Merit award.
• Artistic License – Religion: In "Path of the Righteous", Father Lantom tells Matt that he used to not believe in the Devil because he discovered in Seminary that the Hebrew word "satan" means "adversary", which was applied to any enemy of Israel, leading him to believe that the church invented the concept of the Devil. However, this is a massive oversimplification; while the word satan by itself simply means adversary, there are instances in the Hebrew Bible (Job and Zechariah) where it is used as a proper noun with a definite article, "Ha-Satan" ("The Adversary"), to refer to a particular entity. There are other parts in the Hebrew Bible that allude to the Devil, such a reference to "Belial" in 1 Samuel. It would be more accurate to simply say that most modern Rabbinic Jews don't believe in the Devil as defined by the church.
• Artistic License – Sports: No boxer of any repute has a losing record. "Battlin' Jack" Murdock is said to have a losing record, yet posters on gym walls show that he's headlined events, and he's still fighting televised matches against notable boxers, even being paid to take a dive. Real journeymen boxers, the kind with losing records, fight in obscurity, matched against other no-names or young prospects looking for easy victories before becoming a name.
• Art Shift: In contrast with the warmer film-like quality of previous MCU entries, Daredevil has a starker and darker color palette with harsh lighting and has a rawer video quality. It also relies more on handheld cameras than on steadicams to increase the sense of unease that exists in the neighborhood.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Karen Page was Matt's longest love interest in the comics yet never really was an active character. Here, she's the secondary lead of the show, with her providing as much contribution to bringing down Fisk through the media as Matt is doing with his Daredevil activities; and in Season 2, Karen is the main protagonist of the Punisher plotline after Elektra is introduced into the show. In Season 3, she also takes over Ben Urich's comics role as Matt's newspaper ally in addition to her role as his love interest.
  • James Wesley was a one-off right-hand in the comics, only appearing in the Born Again story where he was tasked with tracking down Nuke^note The character on whom Will Simpson from Jessica Jones is based for the purpose of setting him loose on Hell's Kitchen, before quietly disappearing. In the show, Wesley is Fisk's closest friend and the one in charge of carrying out a lot of Fisk's orders. In fact, this version of Wesley would be transplanted back into the comics, where he's a criminal lawyer for Fisk and anyone under his payroll.
  • Mitchell Ellison is initially a recurring character in Season 1, there to be an interference in Ben Urich's investigations into Fisk to mislead the viewers into thinking he's Fisk's mole in the paper. The mole is actually Ellison's secretary. In Season 2 and Season 3, Ellison gets a much larger role, which coincides with Karen taking Ben's job and office, while Ellison himself ends up filling Ben's place as mentor to Karen.
  • Marci Stahl is initially a recurring character in Season 1, first introduced as Foggy's ex-girlfriend from college^note In fact, according to Amy Rutberg, Marci was originally only supposed to have that one scene, but her performance led to them giving Marci additional scenes later on. Foggy rekindles his flame with Marci as he persuades her to help Nelson & Murdock take down Fisk by turning on her corrupt partners. In Season 2, she only gets two scenes but is established to be working at Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz. Foggy later joins her at HC&B at the end of the season following the closure of Nelson & Murdock, and the two of them are established by dialogue in The Defenders to be back to fulltime dating. They're already considering marriage by Season 3, where Marci has a somewhat bigger presence, suggesting Foggy run a write-in campaign for D.A. against Blake Tower to bring the issue of Fisk being released into the public spotlight, and a case of hers being what leads Foggy to realize Fisk is setting himself up to be the go-to man other crimelords will have to depend on for protection from prosecution.
  • When introduced in Season 2, Blake Tower has a fairly minimal presence, mostly being a subordinate to Reyes and a reluctant ally to Nelson & Murdock after Karen confronts him with evidence of Reyes being a backstabber. He has a much larger presence in Season 3 due to Foggy running against him for District Attorney.
  • In the comics, Felix Manning was a one-time character who appeared in the "Born Again" storyline to shadow Matt. In Season 3 of the show, Felix Manning is a fixer and has more or less taken over all of the duties of both Wesley and Owlsley.
• Asshole Victim:
  • In "Dogs to a Gunfight," Frank Castle kills a Neo-Nazi pawn shop owner who tried to sell him child pornography. Pretty much everyone he kills is one of these. Justified, as it's The Punisher's raison d'être.
  • In "The Man in the Box" District Attorney Reyes definitely had it coming one way or another for being partly responsible for the Castle family's deaths, by botching the sting operation as well as getting other innocent people killed in the process. No one's going to be missing her after being gunned down in her own office by the very same crimelord she disastrously failed to go after.
• Audible Sharpness: In Matt's fight with Healy, a dagger of broken glass sings at the edge of hearing. If anyone can hear it, Matt would be the one.
  • In Season 2, Stick blows on the edge of a sword he's just sharpened, producing an audible (metal-on-metal) "ching".
  • Also in Season 2, it becomes a plot point. In a fight with The Hand they start tossing away their weapons to fight hand to hand, realizing that Matt is relying on hearing their weapons to actively fight them. It works as Matt starts getting decimated in the next encounter. He has to learn how to listen to their breathing in order to properly fight back.

B

• Back from the Dead: A minor subplot about Season 2 concerns Matt learning that the Hand have the ability to bring people back from the dead, a topic that Iron Fist and The Defenders later explore in detail.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Out of the four important figures in the various bad guy factions who die in Season 1^note Technically a fifth, Nobu, (probably) does die by Matt's hand, but since he's from the Hand, it doesn't take, only one (Wesley) is killed by someone else (Karen). Fisk directly kills Anatoly and Leland; corrupt cops working for Fisk kill Vladimir. And Detective Blake is killed by his own partner and best friend Detective Hoffman, who was coerced by Fisk into doing so.
• Badass in a Nice Suit:
  • Wilson Fisk has a large wardrobe filled with immaculate bulletproof dark suits. The show implies that he generally picks the same ones, but Vanessa encourages him to try some different offerings. In Season 3, he switches to his iconic white suits.
  • In Season 2, Episode 8, during the courtroom scene, Frank Castle is called to the stand and he is brought by two officers. He is wearing a suit and has cleaned up very nicely. Considering that it is the Punisher who is wearing a suit, he fits this trope pretty well.
    Foggy: He looks better than I ever have and he's not even wearing a tie.
• Badass Pacifist: Foggy. Despite not having Matt's training, he's shown early in Season 2 walking into a Dogs of Hell club to get information about a Punisher massacre despite not having any weapons or training, and coming close to death in doing so. Later, in "New York's Finest," he visits Claire at the hospital trying to find Matt. The hospital happens to have just received a mass influx of patients from a gang shootout and the blood is so bad that two guys decide to settle a score right there on the emergency room floor. Foggy gets them to drop their weapons by appealing to their pragmatism, something the hospital's security guards weren't able to do. When Dex attacks the Bulletin in Season 3, Foggy lands a few punches on Dex before being overpowered.
• Baddie Flattery: Wilson Fisk compliments Matt's decision to wage a one-man war to change Hell's Kitchen.
  Wilson Fisk: I respect your... conviction; the lone man who thinks he can make a difference.
• Bald of Evil:
  • Wilson Fisk has no hair, as usual.
  • Subverted with Melvin Potter, as he's actually a good guy who's been threatened into working for Fisk.
• Ballistic Discount: Subverted by the pawn shop owner who made sure to unload the shotgun before giving it and waiting for the payment. Frank kills him with a baseball bat for a completely different reason.
• Ballroom Blitz: Fisk's wedding in the Season 3 finale becomes one as Dex decides to crash the wedding so he can exact revenge on Fisk for assassinating Julie Barnes.
• Battle Couple:
  • Matt and Elektra during Season 2, as Elektra and Stick recruit Matt into Stick's war against the Hand.
  • Matt and Karen have a few moments of these in Season 3, such as working together to fight Dex when he comes after Karen in the church, or when they're tracking down Matt's lead on Jasper Evans (the inmate Fisk paid to shank him).
• Batman Gambit:
  • By the end of World on Fire, Fisk reveals that the entire time we thought the Russians were gaining the upper hand on him, they were actually playing straight into his plan to remove them from the picture entirely. He had not only anticipated, but planned on Vladimir reacting to the revelation that he was Anatoly's real murderer by assembling his troops and putting a price on Fisk's head.
  • Leland's gambit to poison the champagne at the gala is supposed to kill Vanessa and spare Fisk. This counts on Fisk not drinking the wine and Vanessa having some. Either by luck or design, Fisk is generally uninterested in wine and too busy to drink, while Vanessa enjoys wine and has little to do but sip a glass while she waits.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished:
  • A number of people are attacked with intent to murder them over the course of the first season. Unless they die, the intended victims don't end up with scars. This includes many of the recurring protagonists, but the most egregious example is Matt himself, beginning in his backstory when he's doused in chemicals that blind him but leave him otherwise unblemished.
  • For the most part, Matt actually is an aversion. He usually keeps all the scars he's sustained from knife fights hidden under his shirts.
  • Averted with Frank Castle in Season 2, who spends the second half of the season with his face badly bruised after his fight with Wilson Fisk.
• Beneath Suspicion: Blind people.
  • Matt is beneath suspicion for being the Devil of Hell's Kitchen because he's just a blind man.
  • Madame Gao's heroin is packaged and delivered by blind Chinese mules. When discussing the mules, Ben Urich even comments to Matt of all people that no one looks twice at a blind man, which Matt doesn't dispute.
• Berserk Button:
  • Matt's is harm to vulnerable people. The Russians kidnap a child to lure Matt into a trap in the first episode. In "Speak of the Devil," Wilson Fisk has Elena Cardenas killed to lure Matt into the ambush from Nobu. Fisk even identifies Matt's button ("Women... children... I assumed it would extend to the elderly...").
  • Wilson Fisk has a couple of his own:
    • Embarrassing him in public (while he's on a date) is enough to provoke him to beat Anatoly unconscious and then decapitate him with a car door.
    • Go anywhere near one of Fisk's women without his permission, or (worse) harm them, and he'll kill you, as Fisk's own father, Anatoly, and Ben Urich could tell you.
    • Saying Fisk's name in any sort of police/vigilante interview is also forbidden. Blake and Hoffman are instructed to kill the offender immediately, and regardless of where Fisk's name is said, he'll go after the offender and after any of the offender's loved ones to make an example of them. Healy immediately impales himself (through the head!) on a fence spike after giving Fisk's name to Matt under torture.
  • Frank Castle despises all criminals. But don't admit to having child porn in his presence, especially since he was a father. This is shown when he visits a pawn shop run by a very sleazy broker to get stolen police equipment. As Castle is about to leave, the broker tries to sell him child pornography ("She's barely twelve, guaranteed!"). Without saying a word, Castle promptly flips the sign in the door to "Closed", walks back towards the desk, picks up a baseball bat and uses it to beat the pawnshop guy to death.
• Beta Couple: Foggy and Marci have a pretty steady romantic relationship compared to Matt and Karen's very rocky Will They or Won't They? / UST relationship. By the end of Season 3, they're more in love than ever, and while Foggy has not officially proposed, both of them are definitely thinking about marriage, going by Foggy's reaction after they have Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex following his near-death experience in Dex's attack on the Bulletin.
• Beta Outfit:
  • In Season 1, Matt wears a utilitarian, ninja-like outfit which includes a mask without eyeholes, which serves as an homage to his getup in The Man Without Fear. There is even a running gag wherein people tell Matt that his costume really sucks, to which Matt sheepishly admits it's a "work in progress". In the Season 1 finale, Melvin Potter tailors the iconic red devil costume for Matt prior to his final showdown with Fisk. Melvin later tailors Matt an upgraded helmet partway through Season 2 after his first helmet takes a bullet to head during an altercation with Frank Castle. In the Season 2 finale, Melvin also tailors Matt his signature billy clubs.
    • In Season 3, Matt reverts back to his original Season 1 costume, given that his Season 2 costume was destroyed in Midland Circle. Although instead of his original mask, he's relying on the fabric of a nun's habit. The red Devil costume does appear...on Dex, who gets Melvin to build him such a suit so he can commit crimes as Daredevil as part of a scheme by Fisk to tarnish Matt's reputation.
  • A flashback in "Nelson v. Murdock" reveals that Matt had an even cruder outfit before the ninja look, which basically consisted of some dark, baggy clothes and a blindfold.
  • Frank Castle wears a variety of black tactical jackets throughout Season 2. Come the end of the season, he manages to find a bulletproof vest in the Blacksmith's weapons stash, which he spraypaints his skull insignia on and wears under a trench coat.
    • Lampshaded when he kills the inmates that Fisk sends to attack him in prison and ends up with the bloody face print of one of them on his white overalls.
  • Elektra starts out with a black vest and pants and a red scarf for her face, and then in the Season 2 finale, alongside Matt's billy clubs, Melvin tailors for Elektra a more ninja-esque red and black outfit.
  • At the start of Season 1, Wilson Fisk is wearing all-black suits. After he takes his relationship with Vanessa to the next level, he begins wearing lighter shades, which lasts until his arrest. After he manipulates his way out of prison in Season 3, he finally adopts the white suits that he's known for wearing in the comics.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: After telling Matt who Wilson Fisk is, Healy impales his own head on a fence so that Fisk can't make an example out of him.
• Betty and Veronica: In Season 2, Matt is involved in a Love Triangle between the fair-haired everywoman Karen and the dark-haired Action Girl Elektra.
• Big Applesauce: The show picks up with Hell's Kitchen rebuilding after the "incident", and there's the bombings Fisk carries out to wipe out the Russians' manpower.
• Big Bad: Wilson Fisk is the main antagonist of the show. He is behind most of the illegal operations Matt targets.
  • Season 2 doesn't have a main Big Bad, but it does have a Big Bad for the two main plotlines. One plot has the Yakuza (actually the Hand), lead by Nobu, who fill the Evil Power Vacuum left by Fisk's incarceration as part of their continuing plan to mine for dragon bones under Manhattan, while Frank Castle's plot has a drug lord known as The Blacksmith aka Colonel Schoonover as the mastermind behind his family's death. And Fisk himself, despite having a reduced presence, still gets to be the overall Big Bad because both of those storylines still tie back in with him: he's connected to the Hand storyline due to his Season 1 ties with Nobu and Madame Gao, and he also uses Frank as a pawn in his scheme to get rid of Dutton and take over the prison's underground scheme, which is setup for his return to being the main villain for Season 3.
  • Season 3 has Fisk as the Big Bad again for most of the season, with Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter, the up-and-coming Bullseye, as his Dragon and Heavy; however, at the end of the season, Dex turns on Fisk (after Matt reveals to Dex that Fisk ordered the murder of Julie Barnes, a woman Dex has been obsessed with) leading to a Big Bad Ensemble between the two of them.
• The Big Guy: Vladimir and Anatoly Ranskahov, and for that matter, most of the Russians. But only when they're operating on their own. To Wilson Fisk, they mostly provide muscle and wheels.
• Big Red Devil: In the Season 1 finale, Matt gets Melvin Potter to tailor him such a suit for his final fight with Fisk, built from the same material that lines Fisk's suits.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • In "World on Fire," Karen claims that she only speaks Spanish at a high-school level. However, Deborah Ann Woll's command of it is quite impressive, as she understands Spanish vocabulary beyond what most high school classes would teach. On the other side of the spectrum, despite the show suggesting otherwise, Charlie Cox's rapid-fire Spanish isn't actually that good.
  • The Ranskahovs' taxicab front business is known as Veles Taxi. Veles is a Russian deity similar to Loki. He is a wooly dragon sometimes depicted with the head of a bear. It opposes its brother Perun, the Thunder God.
  • Anyone fluent in the languages can tell that James Wesley often declines to quite translate them accurately. Also, the Russian used by Vladimir and Anatoly is very colloquial (and somewhat broken), whereas the subtitles are more straightforward.
  • The song that Vladimir mumbles as he waits to die fighting the cops on Fisk's payroll is a Soviet warsong about wounded soldiers and tankers being sent to their doom. It's especially fitting for how how gruesomely injured he is as well as just by long it took him to go down, given how long Matt could hear different sources of gunfire.
  • The Japanese characters written over the block of tenements on Nobu's map read "kuro sora" — literally, "black sky".
  • As the FBI starts dismantling Fisk's organization, we hear the aria "Nessun Dorma" from Turandot. The final word of the aria is a triumphant "Vincero!" repeated three times. "Vincero" translates into "I Will Win", and at this point the heroes seem to be victorious. Fisk, of course, still has one last-ditch effort to make with his attempted escape from custody.
  • When Wilson Fisk bombs the Russians' hideouts during Foggy and Karen's dinner, Elena rushes into the living room and shouts, "The heavens are opening up again!" in Spanish.
  • Being French herself, Elodie Yung speaks perfectly unaccented French as Elektra. As does Jacques, the assassin Stick sends after her.
  • In Season 2, Hirochi, a member of the Hand calls Daredevil "Akuma-san." Akuma means demon/devil in Japanese. -san is a polite honorific title, roughly equivalent to Mr./Ms. He's calling him Mr. Devil. They're really polite, that way.
  • The Nelsons use Sláinte as a toast, the Irish word for "health".
• Bilingual Dialogue: Quadrilingual, actually. Throughout Season 1, meetings between Wilson Fisk's cronies involve English, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian (although Vladimir and Anatoly speak English when directly speaking to Leland, Fisk, or Wesley), with Wesley being the only one who can understand what everyone is saying. Or so it seems. Fisk and Madame Gao can also understand and speak all four, and Nobu knows English as well, but all keep it a secret. Wesley's a bit disappointed when he realizes he's a Completely Unnecessary Translator.
• Birds of a Feather: Matt and Karen. They are both driven by a sense of justice, they both have an inner struggle about life and death (Matt fears crossing that line because he knows there's no return; Karen is racked with guilt after killing James Wesley). They both think other people's lives are worth saving (Grotto and Frank Castle) even if they've done bad things, and they want to seek justice in their own way. They even like the same kind of simple "cheap" life.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Season 1 ends with something of a Pyrrhic victory. Matt, Karen and Foggy succeed in bringing down Fisk's operations within the law, and Daredevil stops Fisk when he makes a run for it. However, a lot of people suffered and died along the way, including Mrs. Cardenas and Ben Urich. Also, Karen killed Wesley, and Fisk will have her killed if he ever finds out. Further, the most powerful of Fisk's partners, such his allies within The Hand (Madame Gao and Nobu), are still out there.
  • Season 2 is even starker. Nobu is killed again and he won't be coming back this time, while Frank has exacted his revenge on the Blacksmith. However...(deep breath) Frank was released from prison with Fisk's help, and he knows his crusade against organized crime will only serve to help Fisk regain control of his criminal empire once he's out of prison. Matt and Elektra rekindled their relationship only for her to die saving him and then her body is taken by the Hand, a fate she was trying to avoid in the first place. Nelson & Murdock dissolve in both business and friendship, and while Karen goes on to become a reporter for The New York Bulletin and Foggy takes a lucrative position at Hogarth, Chao, and Benowitz, Matt is left with only Karen, out of a job, and facing a dark future as his enemies are growing in power. So for him it's a straight-up Downer Ending, though that's mitigated by The Defenders which show that Matt is doing very good running a solo law practice out of his apartment and he is still on amicable (albeit awkward) speaking terms with Karen and Foggy.
  • Season 3 has the most unambiguously happy ending, but even it isn't immune to this trope. Fisk is in prison, seemingly for good this time as Matt has leverage to ensure his scheming days are over. Matt, Foggy, and Karen have reconnected as friends and plan to re-open Nelson and Murdock as Nelson, Murdock, and Page, with Karen as a professional private investigator. Matt has cleared Daredevil's name by handing the police Dex in a Daredevil suit with a broken back (courtesy of Fisk) as Matt in his Beta Outfit walks off the scene. Matt's reconnected with his mother, a nun, who will provide the guidance and wisdom Matt used to rely on Father Lantom for. And finally, Daredevil, in his black starter outfit, is seen once more standing watch over Hell's Kitchen. But. . . Father Lantom is dead at Dex's hands. A chunk of the FBI has been arrested for collusion with Wilson Fisk, adding to the general corruption at all levels of government in the MCU. Fisk's rise to power involved creating a deliberate power vacuum that he could slip into, and that vacuum is again vacant, and we saw how that turned out in Season 2. Melvin Potter has been arrested for violating parole in working with Fisk again and trying to frame Matt as "murderous Dex" Daredevil, so it's unlikely Matt will be getting a new costume anytime soon (and even if he did, there may be lingering resentment against that particular suit). Finally, Dex is undergoing experimental surgery to repair his broken back, and as the doctors debate whether it'll work at all, Dex's eyes flare open and we see a Bullseye reflected in them, indicating Daredevil hasn't seen that last of his greatest foe. Oh, and Netflix cancelled the show, so whatever continuation Daredevil's story will have will be in a different format.
• Black-and-Gray Morality:
  • The show dramatizes the ethical dilemma of Matt Murdock, a lawyer sworn to uphold the law, who is routinely breaking it as a vigilante.
  • Matt also fights a second ethical dilemma under this same trope. As a Catholic, murder is a mortal sin and would damn his soul, but with all the pain and death Fisk is causing, Matt feels he may be obligated to kill him anyway.
  • Wilson Fisk was written to be well-intentioned in order to highlight and intensify Matt's moral dilemmas.
• Blind Seer: Has a lot of perks to make up for his blindness: he can identify a person by listening to their heartbeat, has accrued hearing, sense of touch, he can frigging do parkour because of how good his balance is. The only downside is, take one of these senses away, and you'll deal him a big blow.
• Blackmail: Fisk uses a lot of this, often combined with threats to their loved ones, to get people to cooperate with him. The most notable example is the dozen or so FBI agents he gets to work for him in Season 3; it's pretty clear that only Dex is working for him of his own free will (and even that took manipulation on Fisk's part, including murdering Julie), and all the other agents were forced into doing his bidding this way. This is definitely the main reason Ray Nadeem briefly ends up forced to work for him.
• Blasphemous Boast: Matt's despair leads him to denounce God, attribute all his goodness to himself, and say that even The Omnipotent can't change who Matt has made himself.
  "I'm Daredevil, and not even God can stop that now."
• Bloodier and Gorier: Season 2 is much more bloody and violent than the previous one, especially for the debut of Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, a brutal vigilante who tortures and kills criminals.
• Blood-Stained Glass Windows: Season 3 features a brawl that breaks out in Matt's church as Fisk sends Dex there to kill Karen as revenge for Wesley's death. Dex makes his attack as Father Lantom is starting evening mass. Almost everything in the church is desecrated as rosaries, pews, collection plates, and devotional statues are all turned into murder weapons. Father Lantom is killed during the fight as he shields Karen from one of Dex's batons.
• Bloody Smile: One poster shows Daredevil with a bloody smile, cracking his knuckles, which is seen commonly during the series.
• Bodyguarding a Badass:
  • Fisk is more than capable of brawling on his own yet still has bodyguards to protect him.
  • At the start of Season 3, the FBI function as bodyguards to Fisk as they move him to a safe location after an attempt on his life in jail. When the convoy is ambushed by Albanian gangsters trying to assassinate Fisk, Dex is the one to kill them as Fisk is trapped in his car and unable to get a gun to fight back.
• Bolivian Army Ending: "Condemned" ends with Vladimir holding off a corrupt ESU unit while Matt escapes through drainage tunnels. The last thing heard in the episode is Vladimir continuing to fire his weapon.
• Booked Full of Mooks: In a season one episode, crime boss Wilson Fisk takes Vanessa out to a restaurant full of couples eating and chatting. A rival of Fisk's shows up, and all the men seated at the other tables immediately stand up and move in on him to prevent him from reaching Fisk. Fisk booked the entire restaurant for the evening and made sure that the only patrons present were his men and their wives and girlfriends.
• Book Ends:
  • In the first episodes, Karen asks if Matt and Foggy are Good Samaritans, setting up that they are the good guys. In the FBI transport at the end, Fisk realizes that he's a bad guy by relating the story of the Good Samaritan. Likewise, Fisk's life of crime begins with him staring at a wall, thinking about the man he will become. It ends with him in prison, staring a blank wall, clearly thinking about what man he will be once he leaves prison.
  • In the first and last episode, Matt is seen working out at the ring where his father trained.
  • Episode 12 starts with Karen, after killing Wesley, having a nightmare where Fisk invades her home, talks to her calmly and then kills her. The episode ends with Fisk invading Ben Urich's home, talking to him calmly, and then killing him.
  • "Shadows in the Glass", Fisk's Day in the Limelight episode begins and ends with his morning routine. The first step of which is to stare momentarily at his new painting, which resembles the wall he was supposed to stare at on the evening he killed his father. His last scene in Season 1 is staring at a very similar wall in prison.
  • In the first fight scene of the series, Matt opens his fight with Turk and his men with a leaping downward punch. He uses exactly the same move to finish his climactic fight against Fisk.
  • James Wesley is introduced strong-arming a guard into carrying out a hit on Karen by threatening the life of his daughter. In his last scene, Karen kills Wesley after he tries to strong-arm her into backing off by threatening the lives of her bosses.
  • The beginning of Season 1 had Matt and Foggy first opening their law practice together and hiring Karen to work for them as an office manager, and the end of Season 2 saw them dissolving Nelson & Murdock and going their separate ways (which remained the case for Defenders and any series they've appeared in before this season). At the end of Season 3, with Foggy growing weary of his current job and Matt and Karen both unemployed, the three of them once again decide to go into business together, this time as Nelson, Murdock, & Page, with Karen as an investigator.
  • Season 3 begins and ends with a Crucified Hero Shot. The first episode has Matt doing this, as he is swept into a sewer, while trapped in the explosion and demolition of Midland Circle. The last episode has this happen to Dex, a rare villainous example, as he is seen strapped face-down on an operating table in the aforementioned pose, his damaged spine being replaced with Cognium steel by two surgeons. Of course, being a villain, it's an inverted cross.
• Boom, Headshot!: A common method of execution.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: When Karen and Foggy enter the lobby of Landman & Zack, Karen says, about the architecture, "Feels like a place in a movie where you'd buy a clone. Maybe a robot baby. Or the clone of a robot baby."
• Break Out the Museum Piece: For Season 3, Matt returns to his old ninja costume from Season 1, as the red devil suit that Melvin built him was damaged beyond repair in Midland Circle.
• Breather Episode:
  • "Stick" in Season 1 takes a break from the Fisk storyline to set up the Hand storyline that's going to come into play in Season 2 and The Defenders. At least on Matt's end, that's the case, as Karen keeps the investigation going through meetings with Ben Urich and Elena Cardenas.
  • "Kinbaku" in Season 2 has no scenes of Matt in costume. The episode is primarily spent establishing Matt's past relationship with Elektra while he also begins dating Karen.
• Brick Joke:
  • In the first episode, Foggy steals some tea from the financial office across the hall form Nelson & Murdock to brew for Karen. Later, in the "Nelson v. Murdock" flashbacks, Matt and Foggy have a similar exchange when Foggy is stealing bagels to fit into his box as they prepare to quit Landman & Zack.
  • In the "Nelson v. Murdock" flashbacks, Matt and Foggy joke about being "Avocados at Law" after Foggy mispronounces "abogado" (the Spanish word for lawyer). In the Season 1 finale, Matt makes the joke to a confused Karen as they're admiring the newly erected Nelson & Murdock placard on the street.
  • Throughout Season 1, Foggy goes on about how his family, the 'whole extended brood' wanted him to be a butcher. In Season 3, we finally see the shop; as well as his large family.
  • During their study date in the midst of Frank Castle's trial in Season 2, Matt, seeing Karen's due dilligence with the case, jokes that Nelson & Murdock might be more fun as "Nelson, Murdock & Page". In the Season 3 finale, with Karen out of a job at the Bulletin in light of Dex's attack, and Foggy having come to be dissatisfied with white collar law, Foggy proposes that the three of them go back into business together as Nelson, Murdock & Page. And much like when Foggy doodled an outline for his proposed Nelson & Murdock plaque in the "Nelson v. Murdock" flashbacks, he writes their names down on a napkin.
• Brooklyn Rage: Wilson Fisk has shades of this (incidentally, Vincent D'Onofrio is a native of Brooklyn's Bensonhurst neighborhood. In flashbacks, his father is played by Domenick Lombardozzi, a native of The Bronx).
• Burner Phones: Matt gives a burner phone to Claire so she can keep in touch with him, and uses one himself. Foggy teases him about calling girls on it.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Detective Christian Blake. First he gets utterly humiliated by Matt and Foggy's rule-fu regarding Karen's Union Allied matter. Then he gets his right arm broken by Matt outside the precinct, leading to Matt obtaining the list of the Russians' hideouts. Because the information fell into Matt's hands, Fisk decides to have him killed. Thus he orders an ESU sniper to gun Blake down outside the scene where Matt is holed up with Vladimir. But Blake manages to survive this. So his best friend/partner Hoffman is sent to poison him, finishing him off for good.
  • After the introductory episode, a lot of Turk Barrett's appearances involve things going south for him. His guns don't work properly, he gets beaten up by Matt really thoroughly twice, and then the FBI arrests him. Right after making parole, he continues the streak by having Matt break his hand and then throw his car keys in the water. Then he gets kidnapped by the Hand for being connected to Daredevil, and his foot is almost cut off when Karen activates his tracking bracelet. This reputation as a chew toy then proceeds to follow him to every one of the other shows.