Favorite Characters: Matt Murdock a.k.a. Daredevil (Daredevil)

When it comes to Marvel’s TV shows, Matt is my third-favorite protagonist thus far, after Peggy and Jessica, although that’s no knock on Matt – it just speaks to how much I love the other two!  I do like Matt quite a bit, and I think he was a good lead-in choice for the darker world of the MCU’s Netflix properties (a few spoilers.)

First of all, I can’t get over how much I like Matt’s powers.  As I’ve said before, the first version of Daredevil I saw was the Ben Affleck movie, where his powers pretty much just cancel out his blindness.  Here, though, Matt’s powers make him legitimately super.  Yes, his strength and fighting prowess is from his years of good old-fashioned training (including his tutelage under Stick,) and the way he throws himself fairly heedlessly into danger is down to his assorted issues, but in no way is he just a blind vigilante who can see.  All his other senses are ridiculously heightened, allowing him to hear, smell, and otherwise sense things from superhuman distances, allowing him to track his enemies and fully anticipate any attack.  (And yet, trying to fight him by assaulting his senses doesn’t really seem to be a thing.  Is it because he now has such control that loud noises and stuff don’t bother him anymore, or does virtually no one know that’s what his powers are?  Or that he even has powers, for that matter – I suppose his ability to find bad guys seemingly out-of-nowhere might be his only “tell,” and that just adds to his air of mystery.)

In fact, part of the reason Matt originally became Daredevil is because he couldn’t stand to lie awake at night and hear the suffering in the city around him without doing anything about it.  It feeds well into his aforementioned issues, of which there are many.  He has a driving need to help others with incredibly little regard for his own well-being, and his (now-deceased) father taught him to always go down swinging.  Even as he takes extreme measures and fights his way through the lower echelons of Hell’s Kitchen, he’s conflicted about it, in part because he knows there’s a piece of him that craves the violence, the darkness there.  His Catholic upbringing also makes him doubt the work he’s doing, and he has cryptic confessions in which he tries to justify the sins he plans to commit in order to help people.

Matt has plenty of the faults common to heroes.  He has an overactive sense of guilt and tends to take everything upon himself, meaning that he’s definitely one to shy away from those who want to help him.  And yet, when he does have to admit he needs someone else’s skills, he wants it entirely on his terms, exactly when and where he needs, no questions asked, no input required.  Even though he frequently doubts himself and his mission in private, anyone who argues with his plans usually gets a “my way or the highway” reaction, and he’s not about to listen to any suggestion that he’s being too reckless or going about things the wrong way.

Because Matt is regarded as a somewhat darker hero and his strong violence lends more legitimacy to the “hero or menace?” discussion than, say, Spider-Man does, he doesn’t get as many “save the civilian” moments.  If anything, he more visibly saves people through his day job as a defense attorney.  This can make him seem more about fighting the villains than protecting the innocent, but really, it all goes back to the voices Matt could hear crying out all over the city.  Although he worries about how cathartic he finds the fighting to be, it’s for them, the people of Hell’s Kitchen, that he dirties his hands.  That can be easy to forget – I think even Matt forgets it sometimes – but it’s still there.