Relationship Spotlight: Matt Murdock & Jennifer Walters (She-Hulk)

*Spoilers.*

Is it too soon to be hoping for Jen appearances in Daredevil: Born Again? Just kidding, that question is rhetorical—of course it’s not too early. In the span of a single episode, Jen and Matt jumped into my Top Five MCU romances. In fact, to go one further, in the span of a single episode, they made me decide, “I should make a list of my Top Five MCU romances.” I dare anyone to withstand the awesomeness!

Throughout season 1, a big part of Jen’s struggle with her new circumstances deals with the different ways people react to both sides of her identity. In particular, as she starts coming to terms with being She-Hulk, she quickly realizes how much everyone seems to gravitate toward She-Hulk and ignore “just Jen.” On dating apps, She-Hulk’s profile wracks up way more matches than Jen’s, and after a great date with a guy who’s practically been crafted in a lab to be perfect, he bails the following morning when he sees her as Jen rather than She-Hulk, later admitting that Jen just “isn’t his type.” Part of why Josh ghosting Jen hits her so hard is because he seemed to be the one guy who liked her specifically for Jen.

Enter Matt, who meets her in the courtroom as She-Hulk, flirts with her off hours as Jen, first fights her and then fights with her as She-Hulk, and then goes home with her as Jen. Regardless of which body Jen is inhabiting, Matt simply regards her as herself, no differentiation needed. He’s not “perfect,” but the way he treats her is just what she wants, and it’s no accident that when she crafts her own ending for the season, it involves Matt literally dropping out of the sky so they can see each other again.

In recent years, my patience for fragile dudes who can’t handle being with smart, strong women has entirely run out, and I celebrate every time a show or film models a cishet romance in which both parties really feel like equals. Jen/Matt have that in spades. Even when they’re fighting, be that in court or with fisticuffs, there’s a “game recognize game” feeling between them. They’re sparring, and even as Jen asks the camera, “Who’s this asshole?”, there’s a part of her that’s impressed by his abilities. Such that, when he approaches her at the bar after having beat her in court, she moves quickly into flirty verbal sparring instead of trying to brush him off.

With these two, there’s lots of fun banter and implied good sexytimes—it kills me that Jen can’t figure out how to get Matt’s Daredevil suit off, and I love how happy he seems during his walk of non-shame in his suit the next morning—but it’s not solely uncomplicated fun. They also connect in a real way. They’re both powered people with careers that they care about, and neither wants to give that up for the sake of superheroing. But even before Jen learns about his secret identity, Matt tries to offer her some genuine advice about the potential of She-Hulk helping people both in and out of the courtroom. Yes, she punches a couple of baddies in the earlier episodes, but when she actually dons her suit for the first time and infiltrates a villain’s lair, she has Daredevil with her. The two of them giving Leape-Frog legal advice as they bust him and his goons is one of my favorite things.

I’m so glad that the finale establishes that their thing isn’t a one-and-done. In the closing scene of the season, Matt is meeting Jen’s family at a cookout, gamely putting up with her relatives grilling him about his prospects and good-naturedly waiting for Jen to come to his rescue. I don’t know what the MCU has planned next for Jen, and I don’t know how Daredevil: Born Again is going to fit into everything (including what came before,) but whatever the future holds, I hope it involves giving us more scenes of Jen and Matt together!

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.

Relationship Spotlight: Jessica Jones & Matt Murdock (The Defenders)

The team interactions is my favorite part of The Defenders, and I think Matt and Jessica in particular are my absolute favorites.  It’s a dynamic that shouldn’t really work but totally does, and I’m down with any future Marvel Netflix show that wants to find an excuse to have these two share screentime (a few Matt-Jessica-related spoilers.)

Jessica and Matt meet first in the “real world” rather than the superhero world.  At least, at this point, it’s known who Jessica is and what she can do, so when she’s brought into the police station, they know they’re questioning an enhanced person, but Jessica first meets Matt the lawyer, not Daredevil the hero.  There’s a bit of supporting-character crossover to get the stars to align for Matt to show up on the scene as her attorney, and even though he does his job quickly and efficiently to get her out of an undesirable situation, she doesn’t want anything to do with him.  Of course, when she catches him pulling parkour moves in an alley, that’s a different story.

Both are suspicious of what the other isn’t saying, and that leads both to keep an eye (so to speak) on the other, until both wind up in the show’s first unintentional team-up against the Hand.  Due to the circumstances, Matt ends up fighting without his suit (but still trying to be incognito,) and Jessica is the first in the group to twig that he’s really the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.  When Matt wants to pull away, nervous about protecting his secret identity, Jessica is the one who convinces him to stay.

On paper, it seems like the makings of either an odd couple or love/hate dynamic, because despite some deep similarities, they’re pretty different people.  Both are a mess, but Jessica wears hers openly and uses it to keep others at arm’s length while Matt is super-repressed, pretending he has it all together when there’s a darkness in him he can’t always control.  They seem poised to butt heads, and there’s definitely a certain combativeness to their vibe.  Jessica gets in Matt’s face when she thinks he needs to get over himself, gets to know him better by pushing his buttons, and snarks freely at him on all matters, especially his Daredevil suit.  Matt, in turn, gives nearly as good as he gets (nearly – sorry, Matt, but nobody snarks like Jessica.)

When it comes to the work, though, they make a pretty superb team.  It’s noteworthy that, in a superhero show, one of my favorite sequences is completely devoid of action:  it’s the one-two punch of Jessica and Matt investigating the architect together, both playing to their own strengths as they interview his daughter and find important answers to questions about the Hand’s plan.  They’re remarkably in sync, they get good results, and they do so without losing the fun back-and-forth between them.  They kind of just fall into it like they’ve been doing this for a while, and without a lot of fanfare, these two people with very confirmed trust issues find themselves working alongside one another.  (It’s interesting that Jessica and Luke’s past history would lend itself to making them a natural duo and, given the mutual Hand connection, the same would be true of Matt and Danny, but when the dust settles, the most prominent partnerships are definitely Matt-Jessica and Luke-Danny.)  Don’t know when we’ll get to see them together again – if it won’t be until whenever The Defenders comes back or if there will be any guest appearances in the next seasons of Daredevil and/or Jessica Jones – but I’m ready for it.

Relationship Spotlight: Matt Murdock & Foggy Nelson (Daredevil)

Realizing that Marvel has too much for me to only talk about in periodic write-ups, here’s a new regular feature:  Marvelous Wednesdays!  The MCU has a real way with depicting relationships between a superhero and their nonpowered friend.  Jessica and Trish, Steve and Bucky in the first Captain America, Peggy and Jarvis (although, in their case, the “super” part isn’t required,) and here, Matt and Foggy.  Much love for these two, who might get the deepest examination of this type of relationship.  Some Foggy-Matt-related Daredevil spoilers, including season 2.

The early episodes of the series quickly and clearly set up Matt and Foggy’s dynamic.  They’ve been through the trenches of law school together and are now ready to take on the world as defense attorneys looking out for the little guy.  They’re quite the “little guys” themselves; even though they know their stuff and aren’t afraid to mess with the big dogs, their operation looks decidedly ramshackle, what with their tiny, bare offices, their sole employee, and their zero dollars.  Still, they’re undaunted by what they don’t have and instead focus on what they can do.  Both give each other the sort of hard time that only best friends can, but both also know how to buckle down and give it their all when it comes to helping out someone in trouble.

However, Matt and Foggy are different from the other duos mentioned above in a key way:  at the start of the series, Foggy doesn’t know that Matt puts on a mask at night and fights gangsters.  He’s completely in the dark about Matt’s superpowers, and when he accidentally discovers the truth in the middle of season one, it’s rough.  He’s of course hurt by all the secrets Matt has kept from him, he’s naturally concerned for Matt’s safety, and he worries about the drive within Matt that makes him dish out such a brutal, self-determined brand of justice.  The revelations knock him over, and it takes time for them to get to any sort of good place again.

Even as Foggy struggles to reconcile Matt’s secret life, however, he can’t stop caring.  He gives Matt raw diatribes on how much his ever-present worry for Matt is tearing him up, but he still rushes in whenever Matt is hurt, dragging his bleeding friend home and helping to patch him up.  He puts himself in incredible danger at times to make sure Matt is safe.  Part of it is simply the depth of their friendship, but I imagine that part of it is also the fact that Foggy can’t shake the impression he’s developed over the years of Matt being slightly more in need of looking after.  Not that Foggy ever really patronized Matt or treated him with kid gloves due to his disability, but it’s clear in the little things that he’s accustomed to “helping out.”  Matt holds Foggy’s arm when they walk down busy sidewalks together, and Foggy frequently serves as his informal audio describer, filling him on visual details like someone’s facial reactions.  Although Matt’s powers essentially nullify his blindness and then some, I think Foggy’s gut still thinks of Matt as that guy, the one who needs an extra hand.  (In truth, I think any friend of a superhero would display much the same level of concern, but I think this particular detail gives the show more room to explore it.)

By the end of season two, I’m not quite sure where things will go moving forward with Matt and Foggy.  Their friendship has been put through the ringer, personally and professionally, and as much as Foggy still cares, he realizes he can over take so much of Matt putting himself in danger.  I hope things work out for our favorite avocados at law, and I suspect they probably will in the end, but it might be a long time coming.