Fisk's unfortunate return into Maya's life sends her on a tailspin.
Tropes
- Augmented Reality: Fisk forcefully gives Maya a special contact lens that virtually overlays people with simulated sign language, allowing him to communicate with her without using ASL himself. He also equips an earpiece that automatically translates Maya's signs.
- Bait-and-Switch: Fisk's thugs hold down Maya and pull her eye open, making it look like they're going to cut her eye out as payback for shooting Fisk's. Instead, they were just inserting a special contact lens that translates speech into ASL.
- Calling the Old Man Out:
- Maya tells off her grandmother Chula about breaking contact with her years before once they meet again.
- Maya rightfully calls out how shallow Fisk's attempt at winning her back is, since he went out of his way to commission technology just so he wouldn't have to be bothered to actually learn ASL, something all of her real family have done.
- Company Cross References: At one point, Biscuits' friend says "Everything the light touches is yours" (though the actual quote is "Everything the light touches is our kingdom"). Biscuits even points out that he ripped that off the movie.
- Continuity Nod: Fisk shows Maya that he's kept the hammer he murdered his father with, and tries to entice Maya to do the same to him.
- Disproportionate Retribution: In a flashback to 2008, Fisk beats an ice cream vendor to near death because he didn't realize Maya was a deaf girl attempting to communicate with ASL and was rude about it.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Fisk's ASL interpreter is shown turning a corner to walk down a corridor covered in vinyl sheeting. The scene immediately cuts back to Maya and Fisk for the audience to hear a scream and a gunshot followed by two goons cleaning up the body.
- Hypocrite: As Maya lampshades, despite Fisk claiming he loves her and has always seen her like a daughter, he never bothered to actually learn sign language (minus a few basic words here and there) to communicate with her properly, having first used an interpreter or counted on her to lip-read, and now, went out of his way to commission technology for both of them to translate between them. By contrast, all of Maya's extended family—her grandparents, cousins, and uncle—did learn ASL to talk to her and her late mother.
- Internal Reveal: Apparently the real reason for Fisk's father's death never came up once for Maya before this series."My father felt stronger when he beat my mother. Until I grew strong enough to beat him. With that."
- Kick the Dog: Fisk has his ASL interpreter—who always loyally translated for him and Maya and seemed sympathetic to her—murdered for no real reason except deciding he no longer needed her services and making a point to Maya that she and he could only trust each other.
- Like a Son to Me: Wilson tells Maya he's always considered her to be like his daughter. The flashbacks show he was a Papa Wolf against an ice cream vendor who had been rude when she tried speaking with him using ASL, beating the man severely. However, by now Maya knows he had her father killed, and so while she'd once seen him as a surrogate father now she rejects him.
- Mythology Gag: Maya witnessing a parental figure committing violence for no apparent reason is actually an integral part of Daredevil's backstory - ironically, it's his father, boxing champion Hammerin' Jack Murdock, reduced to debt collecting for Kingpin.
- No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: Wilson comes to Maya not to attack her, but to have their traditional Sunday evening dinner... on Thursday.
- The Reveal: The unknown pregnant woman who had been popping up in the flashbacks is revealed to be a young Chula, who was in the process of birthing Maya's mother.
- Start of Darkness: Little Maya witnesses Kingpin brutalising the ice cream vendor, and instead of taking away the correct message from this, she also kicks the guy.
- Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred!: Fisk instructs Maya to kill him with the same hammer he murdered his own father with, so she can free herself like he freed himself. Maya realises that Revenge didn't free Fisk, but sent him down the path to become the monster he is today. Rather than be like that, Maya refuses to kill him.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: With Fisk considering Maya's training complete, Fisk tells the ASL interpreter who's been translating between them for years, "You're dismissed." Too late, the woman realizes the dismissal means silencing her for all the secrets she passed along.
