Headscratchers / The Defenders (2017)

Destroying New York City

• Seriously, isn't destroying New York City an incredibly stupid thing to do for the Hand? Oh sure, they were behind several historical events too and passed them off as just catastrophes, but this is New York City aka the (former? Dunno when the series takes place) headquarters of the Avengers. And even if they wouldn't investigate it personally, it would AT LEAST warrant an investigation by S.H.I.E.L.D. and pull them out of the shadows.
  • Gao seems to imply that it would take a while to actually collapse, the Hand may have had enough time to scrub any trace of their involvement before it happened.
  • Don't forget that Alexandra was rushing things. Presumably they normally would have done the whole process over several years.
  • The Hand have apparently destroyed many cities in the past, and they're good at covering their tracks. They'd likely just vanish in the chaos and go into hiding; the only reason they revealed themselves as much as they did was in desperation to get the dragon bones.

Collapsing while underground

• ...so wait, that dragon skeleton is holding down the entire ground of New York? It doesn't seem THAT big. How do you harvest something that holds the ground you're under? Shouldn't all the miners die when the "keystone" bone is pulled off?
  • See above. Gao implies that the collapse would take a while. They'd have more than enough time to leave.
  • Digging underground is highly unsafe. If people are setting off detonations and removing massive amounts of bedrock with no regard for the lives on the surface, you can bet that a large number of people will be killed.

Behind the door

• In episode 2, Gao and Alexandra have a discussion where Gao tells Alexandra that they've hit the wall. Alexandra says it's a door, since, and I quote (approximately): "If they wanted it inaccessible forever, they could have destroyed it. This is meant to be recovered". First, how do you "destroy" a giant skeleton, knowing that your enemies just need powder from the bone/marrow? The Hand could pick up the scraps anyways. Second, I thought the reason why the Five fingers were banned from K'un L'un is because it's desecration. So they wouldn't have destroyed it, right? Ok maybe it's more of a plothole than a headscratcher, but I'm still confused.
  • The desecration could mean using the bones to keep reviving themselves, not actually destroying the bones in the first place. And grounding the bones into a powder and spreading it over the ocean would probably keep the Hand from getting any of it.
  • Bones are simple to destroy. You can dissolve them in quicklime pitch.

Disasters among history

• To vaguely quote Stick, the Hand is apparently responsible for "natural disasters" that got covered, and he names Chernobyl...and Pompei. Uhhhh...how do you cause a volcano to erupt, exactly? Even with the reveal in the end, it seems a bit far-fetched...
  • The audience only knows something's suspicious about the earthquake we see Alexandra brag about it. The characters are confused by the quake, but mostly accepting of the cover story...until the geologist calls into Trish's show to explain why it can't be natural. Without modern understanding of geology, an artificially-induced volcanic eruption wouldn't be detectable. (As for how they caused the eruption, the Hand digs underground for dragon corpses, taking so much material that the surface grows unstable. Quakes can trigger volcanoes.)

So What Even IS Black Sky??

• As early as Daredevil, Black Sky has been touted as some sort of doomsday weapon worshiped and sought after by the Hand. Alexandra drones on and on about how Elektra being the Black Sky is of utmost importance. And yet Elektra is never shown to be more than simply a powerful warrior, with at least three of the Hand's five fingers dismissing her usefulness entirely and outright stating that she's not important to their plan. So what is the Black Sky, why is (or was) it important to the Hand's plans, why is it so rare, why did Stick and the Chaste think that the Hand having one was such a dire prospect, and why does an organisation with super-warriors coming out of their ears so desperately seek one extra?
  • Apparently the Black Sky is the Hand's equivalent to the Iron Fist. As we see that is a very skilled and lethal warrior with similar strength to at least Jessica Jones, so the Chaste would have reasons to fear that their enemies have such a weapon, specially if they were losing the war.
  • Elektra curbstomped everyone she fought except for Matt in the end, and he notes that she's holding back. She fights off all four Defenders at once a few times. So yeah, she's pretty damn powerful. Gao also mentions a prophecy of the Black Sky (while also noting that Alexandra is the only finger who ever really took it seriously), so there seems to be some quasi-religious stuff mixed in with her importance as well.
  • Danny actually beat her twice with his Iron Fist (in Cambodia, and when she tried to finish off Matt at Midland Circle), and I'm betting that if he hadn't been drugged by Stick, Luke could probably have subdued Elektra like he did with Sowande.
  • It still just equates to 'powerful warrior', and a disloyal one at that. Certainly a threat, but nothing like the doomsday weapon we were promised. Most of the Hand leadership seem to think Elektra is superfluous and not worth the effort, and she gets beaten by the Defenders in their final fight. So was the Black Sky just a massive case of false advertising?
  • A little bit of false advertising, but it also seems that the Hand, the Chaste, and K'un Lun are a little out of touch with the times (understandable, considering how old they all are). To them, the Black Sky and the Iron Fist are the most powerful things in existence, because for the last few centuries, they were the most powerful beings that they knew of. Now, with the rise of groups like the Avengers, the Black Sky and Iron Fist aren't nearly as powerful in comparison, but the Hand hasn't really grasped that yet (and now it's likely they never will). Hell, in the series itself, Jessica and Luke were clearly a bit of an OCP for the Hand and Black Sky to deal with.
  • If Black Sky is just a powerful warrior, then what was the deal with the first Black Sky we saw in Season 1 of Daredevil? He was just a kid, and it was implied there was something supernatural about him, when Stick told Matt he should've sensed "what that thing really was". If the Black Sky is just someone who excels at martial arts, what exactly should Matt have sensed about the kid, since he wasn't fighting anyone? And why was the kid being smuggled to New York? Clearly he was too young to have already finished his training to become a full warrior, so shouldn't he have been kept in one of Hand's training facilities? Hell, why didn't Matt bring it up in Daredevil season 2 when Stick mentioned Elektra being a Black Sky (something like, "Oh, Black Sky. Like that kid in the crate you killed last year")?
  • With the lack of knowledge of what a Black Sky can do, all that costly resurrection clearly was able to accomplish was to suppress Elektra’s memories and personality, and give her a cool Matrix-style coat, along with the presumably mystical ability to never get her legs tangled up in it while fighting. She’s just…an extremely skilled fighter who obeys orders without question. Until she doesn’t, and then she’s just an extremely skilled fighter who’s doing whatever the hell she wants. She wasn’t supposed to get her memory back, but still, that’s their ultimate weapon? Someone who can fight really well? If Elektra does have any other special abilities, they didn’t bother telling us about them.
  • Watsonian vs. Doylist: The Watsonian answer is that she is just a very powerful warrior the Hand (and more specifically Alexandra) were eager to recruit as a weapon to use against their enemies, and while Elektra does just that the problem was that most of the damage she does (against K'un-L'un and the Chaste) happens off-screen and is less impressive to the audience; the Doylist answer is that Daredevil, Iron Fist and The Defenders were made by different teams of writers who didn't really have a fleshed-out, agreed upon master plan in mind, so the writers of Defenders just made it up as they went along. Presumably the "Black Sky" would have been the intended host of The Beast, the demon that controls the Hand in the comics, but since the show opted to ditch that particular bit of mythos for the Hand in favour of an origin and motive that was far more mundane, leaving Elektra in an awkward position narratively speaking- Daredevil season 2 had set up her resurrection and flat-out claimed she was destined to lead the Hand, but that was at odds with the direction they were going in.

Bakuto, Overconfident or Just an Idiot?

• The only way to properly kill a member of the Hand is decapitation. Colleen Wing knows this. So why would Bakuto calmly tell her that any damage she does to him can be reversed? She's right in front of him, holding a sword; given how much the Hand have been shown to fear death, he should be well aware that he either wins their duel or dies permanently.
  • Psychological warfare. Of course he knows that she is capable of killing him, but he also knows that him being a zombie makes him harder to kill, so it's in the spirit of "when you run into a bear, make yourself look big and scary to frighten it into submission / retreat and hope it doesn't kill you". He needed to kill them to stop them from blowing up the building, and he was in quite a bit of real danger for once, so he's just acting like he's unstoppable to intimidate her and make winning easier. It's also totally in-character for him to act this way.
  • Fair point, but it still would've taken a lot of the wind out his sails if Colleen had given him a condescending look and come back with "No, if I cut off your head, with this sword you die for good. Moron."
  • Did Colleen even know the Hand had no more of the revival substance?
  • Why would he be afraid to fight a person who he trained, isn't even 1/100th as experienced, and is emotionally compromised? The first time they fought, Bakuto nearly killed Colleen and she lucked out by kicking the sword-shard into his leg. The second time they fought, Bakuto beat her and sliced her across the belly. If it wasn't for Luke and Danny showing up, she would have died. Even in the final duel, he had her on the ropes and it wasn't until Misty and Claire ran some interference that she finally managed to cut off his head. He had a reason to be confident.

Matt just beat up a shop owner

• Episode 2, did Matt just beat up a shop owner whose store got looted?
  • Yes he did. The store owner was about to shoot unarmed thieves who were already running away. Self-defense laws only stretch so far and you can't just shoot people because they stole your stuff. You can use deadly force ONLY if you believe your life is in immediate danger, but this store owner was most certainly not in any danger as they were RUNNING AWAY. Stealing things does not deserve death.
  • Yes. Matt prevented a murder from happening, probably saving not only those kids' lives but also keeping the store owner from being arrested and sent to prison for murder or manslaughter charges.
  • It makes sense that Matt, being both a Catholic who subscribes quite firmly to Thou Shalt Not Kill and a lawyer who recognizes that killing the looters would not qualify as an act of self-defense, would stop the owner and his son(?) from killing the fleeing. That said, it makes less sense for him to rather brutally beat up the younger of the two after already disarming him, especially when Matt goes on to ignore the looters themselves.
  • Matt is a Blood Knight with a lot of pent-up grief and rage, and the last time he fought was against The Hand's undead ninjas - i.e, very skilled opponents against whom he needed to use maximum force. He lost control. He has a clear My God, What Have I Done? when he's trying to bandage up his bloodied knuckles, like he realizes he went wayyy overboard on the store owners.
  • Also, it looked as though he tripped up the thieves and forced them to drop the merchandise. On top of that, one of the store owners was ready to shoot Matt in the face with a shotgun. They weren't that innocent.

Elektra slaughtered K'un Lun?

• In episode 7, she tells Danny that she was the one who massacred the residents of K'un Lun. But....how and why? The Fingers of the Hand made it clear that their goal was to return to the city, not destroy it. Elektra is into psychological warfare, but what reason would she have to lie? It's not as if she knew Danny had tried to visit the city. And even if they're not in possession of the Iron Fist, that's still a city of martial arts masters. Elektra is skilled, but no way she could slaughter hundreds if not thousands, if she's telling the truth.
  • I'm pretty sure she was lying to goad him into using the Iron Fist. That was the whole reason they had Danny alive; to break the barrier to the dragon skeleton, which they needed the Iron Fist to do.
  • or she was talking about murdering the last members of the Chaste. To her K'un Lun/the Chaste are the same thing.

Portal to K'un Lun

• Related to the "Elektra slaughtered K'un Lun?" question, each Finger of the Hand implies that what's under Midland Circle will help them return to K'un Lun. It's eventually revealed to be a dragon skeleton that will help them with their resurrection, but no mention of returning to the city is added to it. The way it's discussed (such as calling it a door), and the fact that K'un Lun has vanished, implied it was a portal. Did the writers just forget?
  • Maybe they're leaving some stuff open for a next season. It could even be related to how Matt ended up in the surface after the building collapsed.
  • "Returning to Kun Lun" is probably just their plans for after they recovered their immortality. If you were going to make a move on an ancient city of warrior monks while their guardian is away, you'd probably want to make sure the biggest trump card you had was still in your hand.
  • About returning to K'un Lun, yes, the monks are all dead, but isn't the city still there anyway?

"You'll Get Used to Watching Them Fall"

• What, is there a dragon skeleton somehow preventing every city from collapsing? How did they get there, and why were cities built over them? And if Alexandra was just generally talking about destroying cities then it's an overambitious statement, considering that their only stated accomplishments were Pompeii (2000 years ago) and Chernobyl (which killed only 31 people). With their reliance on business and enterprise, why would the Hand even attempt to destroy cities anyway?
  • It's not the dragon skeleton holding it up, it would be the sudden removal of a lot of the earth below the city, potentially creating an apocalyptic-sized sinkhole.
  • Alexandra wasn't talking literally. The Hand destroyed cities in the past to achieve their ends. In this case, taking the bones would collapse a big chunk of NYC, but that's just another thing they've done to kill a city to achieve one end or another.
  • There's also the implication that Alexandra might have been grooming Elektra to take her place as a high-level member of the Hand, one with access to their better immortality technique (requiring "the substance"). Live a few hundred years, and you will see cities fall, even if you didn't personally bring them down.

How is Turk Barrett still in business?

• Seriously, by now his Honest John's Dealership should be common knowledge. Hell, given that he screwed people like John Healy over in the past, I wonder why he is still BREATHING.
  • Because his street cred gets him a long ways.
  • Sometime he sells Judas bullets or sex slaves, maybe he just like scamming newcomers.
  • Because he's Turk Barrett, baby.

Luke and Midland Circle

• So how did Luke get up to the penthouse floor of Midland Circle and know that he was to go that specific floor when he arrived (as Matt and Jessica had the benefit of Matt hearing the gunshots from Danny disarming the "secretary", but Luke didn't)?
  • Luke presumably got up to the same floor by asking the same questions that Danny did, and followed the sounds of the fighting. Either that or we had another offscreen Crispus Attucks-style fight with Luke wandering the hallways and smacking aside countless Hand goons before he found the right room.
  • When Luke bursts into the board room, we see that he's throwing two henchmen through the doors, so that's a likely outcome.
  • When Matt, Jessica and Luke escape the precinct to go back to Midland Circle, Luke mentions he entered through the parking garage the first time around.

Restraining Danny

• So Danny tries to explain that restraining him, rather than sticking together as a team, was a bad idea, and playing directly into the Hand's… well… hand, as they are already in the process taking an agressive stance towards him, even trying to surround him. They act like *he* is the one being unreasonable, while insulting him, yet he knows how the Hand works better than anyone else there, save for Stick. And okay, Danny threw the first punch, but it was after it was clear that they were going to forcefully restrain him, against his will. He felt betrayed (as ANYONE would) and was defending himself. This is just odd to me because of how quickly they turned on Danny for this complete stranger Stick. Stick, who Matt has already established will say and do anything to get his way. Even more odd that Stick pointed out at the restaurant that the Hand will *always* find them, but nobody seems to remember or take that into account when this is all going down.
  • I'm completely with you, I think the others were definitely the unreasonable party there. Especially when Stick made it clear that he wanted to kill him just to make sure and they still let him near him.
    • Matt, Luke and Jessica were wrong, but they were actually trying to calmly discuss the issue. They wanted to hide Danny, not hurt him, and if Danny had calmly explained why that wouldn't work, then it would never have escalated like it did. Instead, he let his frustration and sense of betrayal get the better of him. Matt only stepped in front of Danny because Danny was going to storm off, something that, at least as far as they knew, would leave him vulnerable to capture by the Hand. Even then, he wasn't trying to engage Danny beyond that. He admitted that he didn't want a physical fight and asked Danny to calm down. Then Danny escalated the confrontation and punched Matt in the face. It was Danny who threw the first punch. When Jessica stepped in, it could be argued she was trying to say to Matt, "Okay, you've made your point, stand down," but unfortunately for her, Danny was still in fight mode, so she had to get physical.
  • Stick didn't make that clear until the very last second, when he had already rendered Luke unconscious. As for the start of the whole mess, this is another example of Danny screwing things up by being too emotional. At first, the others just thought he should stay in one place where they could keep him safe. He might have been able to talk his way out of that, but he got angry at the thought of not being allowed to help fight the Hand, and got aggressive. The others got ready for a fight. That made him more angry, which turned it into a real fight, which led to them tying him up. You'll also note that Claire, Foggy, and Colleen weren't there, and they have much more experience with deescalating and negotiating between the group's conflicting personalities.
  • I think it was a case of neither side being right. Leaving Danny behind while the team goes to investigate sets him up to be captured. Danny should have calmly explained this instead of throwing punches, though.
    • They all fucked up by having to restrain Danny, and Danny fucked up by not taking into consideration what they were trying to do because this is personal to him. The same way Matt was reluctant to divulge what he knew about Elektra until he was forced to: It's personal for Matt too, but he at least acts like an adult and owns up to his mistake. The Hand killed Danny's parents, destroyed the only home he knew, and was trying to destroy the home he never got to know. He's also just a kid as his mind is still that 10 year old boy that witnessed an extremely traumatic event that changed his life forever.
  • Danny did explain to them at first why making him stay back is a dumb move, as he is more experienced in fighting them and dividing them is how the Hand works. He just starts getting aggressive when they ignored his argument and refused to let him go.
  • Had Danny controlled his temper, thought logically about the situation and taken a step back, things would definitely be different. Being told he was the only one who could take down the Hand didn’t help, but it was pretty obvious they needed him for evil and he let his ego and need to save something get in the way. In all honesty, they should have taken him out of New York City, because, yeah… Elektra always tracks down the people she’s after. Danny saw it overseas, Jessica saw it in her apartment, and they all brushed elbows with her at Midland Circle and the Royal Dragon. But even if Danny went to New Jersey or something, Stick still might have done the same thing.
  • Danny wouldn't have to be tied up if he didn't freak out and punch Matt. They said they wanted to hide him, not restrain him. If Danny agreed to hide he could have not been restrained. Stick might still have tried to kill him but he would have a fighting chance. They also would've had a fighting chance if Stick hadn't knocked Luke out with the incense. If Luke wasn't incapacitated they could have stopped her.
  • Danny was acting as if the whole team betrayed him, but none of them did that. He kept saying how they were acting like he is the enemy. The reason why he got tied up is because he was freaking out and projecting his fear onto others. Nobody thought of him as an enemy. Nobody was trying to divide the group. He was so obsessed with his own "duty" that he couldn't see other people's perspectives. They never wanted to fight him - just to hide him somewhere safe UNTIED. However, he threw a punch at Matt and thought he was being betrayed. The other three had enough of his shit when he won't stop the fighting so they tied him up. If he had listened, he would've been able to walk free - just that he'll have to stay in some safe place. Stick wouldn't be able to touch him if Danny isn't tied up. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy on Danny's part. Hostility begets hostility. Nobody wanted to hurt him, but he thought otherwise.
    • It wasn't about holding him against his will until Danny blew up and hurt everybody, and even then he wasn't sorry for it, he was still going to look for the Hand by himself, the one thing he shouldn't have been doing considering their goal. Danny trying to leave is what caused him to punch Matt and forced Jessica to knock him out, and then they proceeded to tie him up because it's pretty clear that Danny was going to use that fist on them again the first chance he got. He wasn't acting rationally at all. He's just lucky the one he punched with the Iron Fist was Luke and not Jessica or Matt. (Can you imagine how mad Foggy and Karen would be at Danny if he punched Matt with the Iron Fist?)
  • Danny absolutely wasn't rational. He completely did not seem to get this part where they wanted to hide him because the alternative was either The Hand using him or Stick cutting his head off. But, at the same time - the situation was pretty heated, they were all strangers to each other and now these strangers wanted to sideline him from a fight he believed was his, freaking out and attacking him was hardly rational and a bit idiotic, but I don't blame him for it all that much.
  • They weren't initially trying to hold Danny prisoner at all though. Their intention was to hide him. Danny got angry at the idea of being kept out of the action, when taking down the Hand had been his quest first. Every single member of the team was calm and rational in the initial dialogue except Danny. Even when Matt stepped in front of him, it was a calm, measured stance with an open dialogue. Danny's the one who decided to snap, "I'm all out of calm" and then punch a blind man unprovoked in the face. That doesn't look good no matter how you slice it.
    • In fact, when you think about it, what the team wanted to do with Danny was pretty much what ended up happening with Colleen, who got forced to hide in the precinct with everyone else instead of participating in the action (admittedly, she also had a justified reason to be hidden - so that her stomach wound could heal - but it's kinda the same logic).
  • No, if you calmly say to someone "stay in this room until we release you" you're holding them against their will (and if you keep the guy who wanted his head cut as jail keeper bullshit you try to spare him). Like since giving shit because Iron Fist series was bad is in full effect Danny everyone has to be painted as the voice of reason even as they decide to lock someone up against his will, shame him for stopping criminals from erasing bodies and all around and ignoring him in the discussions. Also Matt totally provoked him, when Jessica and him try to leave notice that Danny tried talking instead of standing there menacingly and blocking their way, because that's kind of a dick move to do especially to the guy who stopped your brainwashed girlfriend from killing you yesterday. They aren't being rational or calm they are just being disrespectful they ignored him half the time while they were talking about secluding him (Jessica just turning to Stick when Danny ask her to not do it) treating him like he wasn't one of the team but just some MacGuffin to keep around with disdain. The first time they act as the team Danny wanted to make and it's to restrain him on the orders of a guy who likes decapitating his problems.
    • Danny was the ONLY thing the Hand needed to achieve their goal and destroy the whole city. Danny couldn't hold off a boardroom of employees by himself, and his pompous, arrogant ego that he could do it alone and put himself exactly where the Hand could actually get him and kill millions, that was what the other Defenders were concerned about. Maybe it doesn't matter that Danny got angry. But it does matter that Danny couldn't get past his own needs and wants in order to see the bigger picture and make a rational decision that was best for everybody and not just himself. What were their other choices besides try to keep Danny safe? Kill him, according to Stick. Between hiding Danny and killing him, hiding him was a better option, but Danny refused to see that. This Hand situation isn't just about Danny, it's about millions of people, but Danny's immaturity and ego got in the way, because time and time again, he's proven he can't keep his emotions in check which makes him a liability.
    • To be fair to Danny, his decision to confront the board was actually a very pragmatic decision. In his experience with shady corporations, like with the stuff the Hand was doing with Rand Enterprises, he found that in your ordinary boardroom, the people just talk business politics and rhetoric and deflection. Assassinations and hit squads and evil schemes, they happen off the books and in sketchy back alleys. He tried to confront them as Danny Rand the businessman and thought he could go after them through their money trail (sorta like how Matt's efforts to take down Wilson Fisk through Nelson & Murdock involved tracing his money), only to realize a moment too late, that the Hand's villainy is their business, they aren't hiding anything, and there are just more ninjas.
  • Stick floats the idea very early on in that discussion that the best way to ensure the Hand cannot use the Iron Fist to unlock the substance is to kill Danny now. Only Matt, who knows Stick better than the other three do, really sees through Stick's vagueness. Which is part of the reason Matt tries to step in and take on a leadership role: to steer the discussion in a less lethal direction. Stick sees that they're all unwilling to do what he thinks is necessary, so he just waits to strike. He needed the group to tie up Danny and neutralize his skill (and chi advantage) in order to take him out. The whole sequence reveals a lot about Stick: not only is he as singlemindedly obsessed with stopping the Hand as Danny is that he's prepared to kill, he's also prepared to kill an ally for the greater good. Matt understands that Stick initially meant to kill Danny but foolishly/naively thinks that Luke will be able to stop Stick from going through with that, or that the group has convinced Stick to abandon that plan. Meanwhile, Jessica sees Danny as a liability rather than a potential asset (and in that moment, she's not wrong, given how when she tried to break Matt and Danny up, Danny shoved her aside so he could go at Matt again). But none of them really attempt to persuade Danny not to take on the Hand head first. They just outright tell him not to, something that Jessica and Luke would all arc up to if the shoe was on the other foot (Matt wouldn't, because he isn't a hothead and would have at least considered going into hiding, or would have said "best thing to do is keep me out of their hands" and then gone into hiding; or if he disagreed with having to hide, would've expressed it like an adult).
  • Stick put it best, that Danny, "the Immortal Iron Fist, living weapon, and protector of the ancient city, is still a thundering dumbass." Danny is just too rash. He acts without thinking things through and he lets his emotions get the better of him, something that shouldn't happen nearly as much as it does due to his training in K'un-L'un. Matt tries to calm Danny down and reason with him but unsurprisingly Danny doesn't listen. He still acts like an impatient and naive kid at times. Instead of thinking things through he decides to pick a fight with Matt and gets his ass beat. Matt has faced the Hand before and has more experience with them than Danny does, and he's had more opportunity to see just what the Hand are capable of (Elena Cardenas's death^note Yes, technically, it was Fisk who ordered Elena's murder, but it got rid of an obstacle to the Hand's plans to build Midland Circle, the hospital attack, Karen being kidnapped, Elektra getting killed, etc.). The Iron Fist is supposed to protect K'un-L'un from the Hand and destroy it, but Danny failed in that. The only exposure he had with them was Madame Gao's and Bakuto's work moving Hand money through Rand and Colleen recruiting fighters for Bakuto. Before that, all he knew about the Hand was what he heard from the monks who trained him, who obviously probably were biased and didn't tell him all the minor details. For someone who was trained for the purpose of destroying the Hand and has the power to do it, Danny has done a pretty bad job of it. He's told almost everyone that he's the Iron Fist and that he's sworn to destroy the Hand more than he actually fights it. Hell, Matt didn't even want to be involved with Stick's war with the Hand and he didn't learn about them until in the midst of trying to balance out ninja-fighting with defending Frank Castle. He still took down the Hand to protect his city because someone had to do it.
  • Had the others listened to Danny, they wouldn't be in this situation either. Instead they all played into the Hand's hands. Both had points, but Danny was right that he was being set up to be captured. Emotion-control aside, Danny was right when he said they're stronger together. Also take into account that Stick helped play them against each other the second he thought of killing Danny. They were all being manipulated from different sides. And Danny was raised to be a weapon. He was taught his whole life that he was the one thing able to stop The Hand. That's why he's said he's the Iron Fist over 9,000 times. His sole purpose is to defeat the Hand and being told from people that have just barely been introduced to this organization (aside from Matt) that he has to not fight, isn't going to go over well.
  • Matt really doesn't know Stick that well, certainly not as well as he thinks he does. Matt only really knew Stick for, what, 15 to 18 months tops? And Stick specifically left after having taught Matt how to function, before really beginning to indoctrinate him or explain anything much at all about the Chaste or the Hand, and Matt specifically doesn't believe him. Stick being willing to kill the members of a zombie ninja death cult and being willing to kill a kid who Matt just found out was basically the messiah of kicking said ninja cult's asses are two different things. We as the audience know the Hand need Danny's magic hand to open the wall, and that stopping the Hand actually really is exactly that simple. Matt, meanwhile, is still assuming that this is all still a lot more complicated than Stick's making it out to be, that Stick's got his own cult to run and that this is just the shit they hand out with the pamphlets on visitors' day.
  • Similar to arguments like Jessica's clashes with Simpson over how to handle Kilgrave, this is a situation where no one is really “right” or “wrong”. And that’s how it has to be, given the nature of the show. Even if the main protagonists fight, they’re all main protagonists. They all have to be somewhat in the right. It’s just like the conversation between Danny and Luke concerning Cole. Each character is coming at the situation from a different point of view, with limited information, and this impacts their behavior:
    • Luke, Matt, and Jessica are not “wrong” per se for thinking that hiding Danny is the best option. They don’t know Danny that well yet, and thus don’t have enough faith in his fighting ability, and they have all seen by this point how powerful and terrifying the Hand are. Even Stick, who is the most informed of the group, is limited by his paranoia and overcautiousness. He trusts his own judgment and abilities far more than anybody else’s, and he’d rather kill Danny and remove the danger entirely than take even the slightest risk of him getting captured. Meanwhile, Matt is compromised because at this point he's aware that the Hand have revived and brainwashed Elektra, he doesn’t want to feel responsible for the Hand killing/capturing anyone else, and he's afraid that Danny might kill Elektra if he faces off with her. This all makes sense, character-wise, and in another situation, who knows? Maybe hiding Danny would have been the best option.
    • Meanwhile, for Danny, defeating the Hand is the only thing that’s been keeping him going since the end of his solo show, and he won’t be able to move forward in life unless he completes it. That has to be understood in order to fully grasp his distress in this scene, and while the audience and Danny understand this, the other characters do not. By preventing him from doing his job, and hiding him away like he’s some kind of liability, the others strip him of his power and deny him the chance for closure. Tied to this is Danny’s paranoia about being betrayed, and the pain of losing even more people he cares about and who he thought cared about him. Of course, that's not true: Matt, Jessica and Luke do care about Danny and think they’re acting in his best interests. But after his recent experiences of getting stabbed in the back by Bakuto and Harold Meachum, Danny would have reason to be skeptical about this.
    • Furthermore, Danny’s suggestion that the Hand want him out of the fight makes perfect sense. (And Stick, with his knowledge of the Hand, might agree. Though again, being his cynical self, he likely doesn’t trust Danny’s abilities enough yet to take that chance.) While Danny is a new, inexperienced Iron Fist, he’s still their biggest threat, and the Hand are great at manipulating people to get what they want. Getting Danny locked away from the action, and sowing discord among his new allies, fits their modus operandi and would be a logical tactic for them to use at this point in the fight. This is an argument that seems to be supported by the events of the rest of the show, wherein he is only captured because he gets tired out, tied up, and is prevented from protecting himself and his friends.
  • The main issue in this scene is that everyone is extremely emotional, and they are unable to get past that to understand each other’s point of view. To Danny’s infinite credit, he tries again and again to explain himself calmly, and only resorts to violence when it becomes clear that no one cares what he has to say. And the others don’t understand why Danny is so adamant, because they don’t understand how important this is to him (though if they’d been paying attention to him instead of rolling their eyes during their earlier conversations, they might have). And the same goes for Matt. Matt is thinking about Elektra, and the others don’t fully understand that. If someone like Claire, Colleen and/or Foggy had been there, the fight probably wouldn’t have happened, if only because they would have provided more voices and a better opportunity for dialogue. They also made the classic Scooby Gang mistake: they split up (Matt and Jessica went off to find the architect's daughter while Luke remained behind with Stick and Danny), and that lack of unity undermined them. And the fight could have gone more in the heroes' favor if A) Luke hadn't been drugged by Stick's incense, while B) Stick would have gotten the upper hand in his swordfight with Elektra if he wasn't down a hand.
  • The reason for Danny's behavior is that K'un-L'un trained him to suppress his emotions. Consider Claire's interactions with Davos back in Iron Fist. In one scene, Davos is about ready to go into a rant about Danny taking away the Iron Fist, what Davos believes was his "birthright". Before he can properly get into it, he turns his head, breathes and says, "I shouldn't have raised my voice, I apologize." Claire asks him what exactly he just did, and he replies:
    Davos: I centered myself; calmed the storm within me.
    Claire Temple: I've seen Danny do that.
    Davos: It's how we were trained. You don't let emotions cloud your actions.
    Claire Temple: So you just lock it all away. Pretend your feelings aren't there?
    Davos: [with a tone of pride] A weapon knows no feelings.
    • In other words, it's ingrained into the training of warriors in K'un L'un because it "worked" for the previous Iron Fists. People who are assigned to be glorified bouncers and attack dogs. You stand at the gate of K'un-L'un in loneliness and solitude, and only respond to anyone who crosses that pass. These people who trained under K'un L'un's doctrine were literally beaten, physically and psychologically. This had been earlier hinted at several episodes prior, in the conversation Danny and Joy had in his penthouse:
    Danny Rand: Every moment was a struggle. Failure... Lead to a beating. Victory was just the next fighting... The next lesson.
    Joy Meachum: [worried] Sounds like abuse.
    • The sadistic part is that allowing that emotion to be bottled up for years, and to let whatever sad sack becomes the Iron Fist to be alone for the majority of their life, with nothing to think about aside from their past, it probably makes them more vicious and effective whenever they come across someone they're "supposed" to kill. The effect is only exacerbated for Danny when he had a life before, a family before, that he knows was intentionally taken from him. And the fact that he was an outsider of K'un L'un, and was treated as such. Lei Kung the Thunderer basically reduced Danny to an attack dog, a glorified weapon ("Bury your mother, bury your father! You belong to me. And to me alone. You must submit, can you do it?!") When you take Danny out of that sheltered environment, keeping in mind K'un L'un is literally in another dimension, when you take him off the path of "Iron Fist: Guardian Of The Gate" and onto the much more grey path of "Iron Fist and Danny Rand: Mystic Martial Arts Warrior, Billionaire, Defender", he's gonna short circuit. K'un L'un is not Kamar Taj. And so when he loses it on Matt and the others in the theatre, that's what his mindset is like.

If Not Chi...

• ...then what does Jessica think Danny's glowing fist is? Nuclear-powered? Arbitrary skepticism is one thing, but for her to flatly say "it's not" chi, does she have another explanation in mind?
  • She doesn't care what it is, but her staunch disbelief in the mysticism that surrounds the Iron Fist is what makes her say "it's not".
  • She lives in the MCU, where guys with glowing thingies in their chest fly around in powered armor and glowing alien technology shoots laser beams. Jessica probably assumes that it's just some piece of technology and not mystical mumbo-jumbo, since prior to Iron Fist and Doctor Strange showing up, most of the weirdness in the MCU can be attributed to alien technology or advanced science.
  • I think it's just Jessica being her normal unfriendly self. She also had trouble believing in Matt's powers despite super senses being rather mundane compared to mind-control and bulletproof skin.
  • Mutant or special ability, I mean she can super jump without need of chi.
  • Maybe she thinks he is an Inhuman? As proven by Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., they have been widely featured in the news around the time Defenders is set.

Very Prompt Service

• When hiding in the Royal Dragon, one of the proprietor's conditions for letting the Defenders stay is that they need to order four of everything. Before Danny even finishes telling the others they can stay, the food is already prepared and being brought out. That certainly was fast, considering the restaurant is closing and the kitchen should have already begun cleaning up for the night.
  • Leftovers? That would explain why the owner included them ordering food in his demands instead of just asking for more money.
  • Having worked in the restaurant business in the past, I can confirm: there's almost always a lot of food leftover at the end of the night, especially in places like the Royal Dragon which serves buffets and large amounts of food. It usually has to get tossed, and Chinese food can also be cooked very quickly when needed. The owner probably just saw a chance to recoup food costs that would have been thrown out at the end of the night.

"I have pictures, asshole"

• So how did Matt not sense that Jessica had been taking pictures of him? As in, yeah, he was busy doing some parkouring, but you'd think with his heightened senses, the sound of the shutter on Jessica's camera would be very distinctive.
  • If he heard the camera shutter, he probably thought it was coming from the street, not necessarily someone taking a picture of him in particular. Matt can sense faint noises but he needs to focus on them to pick out their precise location, and by the time he might have noticed that the camera was closer than just the street, Jessica would have been gone. That's if he was even listening for a camera shutter, which would be a common sound in New York, compared with gunshots, screams, or police chatter.
  • That still doesn't explain why Matt would let Jessica see him in the first place - and he HAD to have known she was behind him, they were alone in that alley and she was practically right behind him. The most likely reason is probably just plot convenience so she could later call him out for being Daredevil and get the story moving.
  • It's super-hearing, not Spider-Sense.
  • Matt's senses are good but that doesn't mean he'd notice one specific person out of a crowd who moved into an alleyway a short distance behind him briefly, especially if he's not specifically listening for it. Matt's gotten used to being able to slip off without being followed very easily, and the worst that's going to happen is that if he gets spotted, someone will think he's just another parkour fellow. Anyone willing to follow him like that already knows what he's capable of, anyway. And Matt's senses do require him to be fully focused. Right before this parkour instance, there's a little moment where he nearly collides with another woman as he's trying to make his getaway from Jessica. And even in Daredevil we've seen Matt have to focus to actually narrow in on sounds, like when he follows James Wesley by listening to the ticking sound of Wesley's watch, when he's trying to locate where the Hand have taken Karen, or when he's trying to find Claire after the Russians kidnap her. And Matt hasn't been doing Daredevil activities for several months, so his use of his heightened senses in this regard might still be a little rusty.

Why dissolve the bodies?

• Why would Cole and the other guys on Sowande's crew be dissolving those bodies with acid? Wouldn't it be a bit cleaner and simpler to just load the bodies into a van and bury them in a mass unmarked grave outside city limits?
  • Transporting the bodies might be noticed by the police compared with quietly dissolving them and destroying the interior of the building with solvents. If the van got stopped by a nosy police officer, things would get complicated.
  • As Casino said: "You gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half hour or 45 minutes of diggin'. And who knows who`s gonna be comin' along in that time? Before you know it, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all fuckin' night." And that was in a setting where there is a desert, an isolated place outside New York City is hard enough that even without the transportation issue they would be working harder than simply destroying the bodies.
  • Surprising they can't use Spurlock's Mortuary anymore for body incineration?
  • Scarfe's notepad might have not been enough to get Cottonmouth in jail, but it was enough to bring heat, so even if he does disposal for someone that is not Mariah, he probably won't dispose six bodies with the "rumor" that he does that.

Why not contact The Avengers?

• This whole mess is going on in the same city as their Headquarters. You'd think at least one of the Defenders would consider moseying on over to Stark Tower and warning them about The Hand. Ant-Man had the excuse that Hank Pym didn't want Tony getting his hands on Pym Particles, but no reason is given here.
  • See Superman Stays Out of Gotham. Storyline wise, the Avengers are too "high level" for this and by the time the Defenders know the scale of the threat they're being hunted by the police. In terms of meta, the producers of the Netflix series are trying to keep the movies and Netflix series as separate as possible.
  • Stark Tower is being sold, so no Avengers are there at the moment. Additionally, the Avengers are pretty much disbanded now. There's Iron Man, Vision, and that's it as Spider-Man eventually refused membership, War Machine is crippled, Hulk and Thor are off in space, and Cap's entire squad are on the run. On top of all of that, they had a limited amount of time (the 8 episodes of The Defenders take place mostly in the space of about four days) and most of what was going on was in secret. The official story was that there was an earthquake. There's not much to get anyone's attention and they couldn't waste time calling people who might not be able to respond in time. There weren't big splashy battles or acts of terrorism to foreign nations. Matt, Jessica, Luke and Danny were drawn into this stuff because they and/or people they knew were personally attached to this stuff, which is why they knew about it.
  • How would the Defenders contact the Avengers? They don't exactly have Tony Stark's number on speed dial, and I somehow doubt you could walk into Stark Tower and make a claim of the city being in danger without it having to go through a lot of channels before ever actually reaching the Avengers. Plus, as was pointed out, the events of the series take place over a couple of days, so it would just be wasting time for them.
    • On top of that, there's no way Tony Stark would look into this urgently, based on his personality and given the way he didn't really even seem to care about Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Tony virtually ignored all signs from Peter about the Vulture until it was too late. I could much sooner see Tony unwittingly seeing a clue to the Hand stuff and thinking it was nothing.
  • Actually, a better question would be "why contact the Avengers?" What kind of help could they provide that those four could not do on their own with their own resources? Clear the area of evil ninjas in a short time and with little effort? They can do that as well. Their problem is not the physical strength of a single enemy (it's not like AIDA or Hive for the agents of SHIELD), but a group of quasi-mafia leaders who have reserves and can attack the heroes by attacking their closer people. If the Hand were the enemies of Infinity War or a later Avengers movie, things would have still been more or less similar.
  • It's perfectly reasonable why the Avengers or Doctor Strange don't show up. These guys already have enough difficulty trying to convince the NYPD to believe them (and that's with Misty Knight already on their side). How would they convince enough people to get the Avengers involved? How long would that have taken? Also, remember that it was established when Trish tried to talk about the earthquake on her show, and discussed when Madame Gao is conversing with Elektra after Alexandra's death, that the Hand has ties to governments and the media to keep things quiet. Also consider who the eyewitnesses are: a blind lawyer who would have to admit to being a vigilante, a private investigator who was investigated for murder and had stolen evidence from a crime scene, an ex-con who is known for that dashcam video of him assaulting two police officers (and was also framed for the murder of another cop), and a rich kid who says he fought a dragon. Not exactly the best witnesses to convince others.
    And as said above, the timetable of the plot was very quick, only taking place over a four day period tops. And each character came at the problem though separate means (Matt representing Jessica, Jessica's bomb-stockpiling architect, Luke dealing with Cole, Danny following the Hand's money trail). After the hallway fight, the Royal Dragon meal is the four of them discussing their next move, then getting the people they love most to safety, then keeping Danny away from the Hand, ending with them having to rescue him. This all happens really fast and by the time the real threat to the city was known (that extracting dragon bones would make Manhattan unstable) it was too late to try and get the Avengers.
    • On the subject of Doctor Strange, the Hand's activities weren't magical but just an illegal subterranean construction project. No magic was involved, at least not magic as it was shown in his movie. The only thing supernatural was the immortality substance, whatever enhanced properties Elektra received as the Black Sky, and Madame Gao's telekinesis. All of which easily flies under the radar of magical protectors more concerned with the world than a crime organization.
  • There's a few reasons Spider-Man wouldn't be involved. In-universe, the Hand worked via street crime, not blowing up buildings with laser weapons. And the heroes who got drawn in came because they just naturally ended up there due to the cases they got involved in. Out-of-universe, there's two issues: first off, Spidey wouldn't fit in tone-wise. In Homecoming, he was made to be funny and laughable, which would make him impossible for Matt or Jessica to tolerate. Furthermore, he'd be too overpowered for the show. He's possibly the strongest street level hero in the MCU, and he's definitely the fastest. But he's totally unwilling to throw a punch. He's been in two movies thus far and has thrown zero punches in either one of them, and The Hand are an enemy that cannot be bought, convinced, or detained. The Hand has to be met with force, and Spidey is too good natured a kid to even punch Adrian Toomes, so he would definitely hold back against the Hand. He also doesn't have any bullet resistance like Jessica and Luke have, or martial arts training like Matt and Danny have, so he wouldn't stand up well at all. Plus, he'd be completely out of his depth fighting a mystical ninja cult. I highly doubt Matt, Jessica or Luke would want a 15 year old to participate in the war, although Stick would be all for it, given their attitudes towards Danny, who's only about ten to twelve years older than Peter.
  • How would they contact the Avengers exactly? Considering the setting, the only Avenger who has some kind of public contact information is Tony Stark. Black Widow and Hawkeye are spies who are supposed to be unreachable and untraceable. Thor was in Asgard (and an alien god warrior prince isn't probably the best person to reach out to when it comes to criminal conspiracies). In addition, the heroes did not possess any hard idea of what they were involved with and by the time they did, the NYPD were on their trails. Even if they did find the Avengers, they would just consider the group to be vigilantes, and ignore them/hand them over to the police.
  • In regards to why the Avengers wouldn't be involved with an organization like the Hand, it's because the Hand generally moves in the shadows and isn't very "showy", unlike HYDRA, who, while being a behind the scenes thing, tend to be a little "loud" with their plans. The Defenders only knew about all this because of Danny's and Matt's direct connections to the conflict, and Luke and Jessica being involved with the normal people who are affected by it. Unlike most MCU threats, the public never knows about the Hand. Yes, there was the the hospital attack and them kidnapping those people Daredevil had saved, but those can be explained away as more of the same gang violence that had been plaguing Hell's Kitchen as different crews sought to fill the power vacuum Fisk and his allies had left behind. There was the incident some months later where a creepy guy covered in pond scum hobbled around Manhattan for a couple hours, babbling like an idiot, which was also quickly forgotten since no one recognized him as an undead Harold Meachum. Then a few months after that was a weird earthquake. And then a couple more days after that a building collapsed. That was all anyone outside of the main characters of the Netflix shows knew.
  • While they may not have a direct contact to the Avengers, they certainly have an indirect one. Danny Rand, majority shareholder of a Mega Corp, calls up Pepper Pots, head of Stark Industries. Who can probably contact Tony a lot more effectively than Spidey could. In fact, going by the street signs the buildings are literally a block apart (Vanderbuilt & 46th to Metlife Building). If nothing else, they could provide a more secure safehouse for the civilian friends of the party. Probably a better safehouse for the Defenders too, and possible help to cordon off Midland Circle.
    • That's assuming Danny knows anyone at Stark Industries, and he probably doesn't seeing as he's been so fixated in fighting the Hand. Furthermore, given how Tony ignored Peter's warnings about the Vulture, he'd probably not take serious any claims about ninjas threatening to lay waste to New York City, not without evidence.
    • And let's consider that Danny would never be on his fellow Iron Billionaire's watchlist because, contrary to what most folks think, because he doesn't mention his alter ego to everyone.

Matt recognizing the Iron Fist

• Can Matt perceive Danny's Iron Fist? It's only identified by its glow, which Matt can't see, obviously. So would Matt have no idea when Danny was coming at him with a potentially lethal punch as opposed to a regular one? Or does the Iron Fist give off some other kind of indicator which Matt's heightened senses can pick up on?
  • It makes a small sound when he powers up. Or Danny heartbeat or breath could change when he focus.
  • The glow of the Iron Fist is probably accompanied by heat, which is something that Matt could definitely pick up on. It's also possible that the sound made by Danny when he's summoning the Iron Fist is audible to the characters present, not just the audience. Regardless, there are probably a lot of signifiers for Matt to pick up on. Hell, after getting out of prison during the "Devil in Cell Block D" arc (where Danny temporarily took up Daredevil's mantle to take suspicion off of Matt), Matt didn’t suspect that the Daredevil impersonator was Danny until he summoned the Iron Fist.

How do they know who can tank what?

• Jessica wasn't there when they mentioned Madame Gao, so she just decked an old lady in the restaurant.
  • Jessica was there when Gao entered the room and was clearly identified as a Hand member. Gao also shot a man in the head so Jessica knows that little old Chinese lady is dangerous even without seeing her chi telekinesis.
  • That doesn't mean she knows she can take a full out punch, like all the other goons she saw shooting were just tossed around but she straight up punch the lady that walks with a cane.
  • Madame Gao just shot one of her own goons in the back of the head. At that point, Jessica has reason to assume she'd do the same to anyone else and is perfectly justified in decking the old lady in a cane who just murdered someone in cold blood right in front of them. And considering how desperate the brawl was up until that point, Jessica was justified in assuming that the little old lady in the middle of the group of armed thugs trying to kill or kidnap them was dangerous and putting her down anyway.
  • A lot of the Hand muscle tried to shoot them with automatics. They aren't any less ruthless than Madame Gao, like she only punches her everyone else get soft takedowns, even if it's desperate or the other people showed that they are willing to shoot everyone that isn't Iron Fist. And it's not only her. Elektra doesn't use her enhanced strength against Danny or the Hand people during training.
  • Did we watch the same show? Because Jessica threw a car into the restaurant and repeatedly hits people hard enough to launch them across rooms, and at one point, literally hurled someone up into the ceiling hard enough to break their back. Jessica definitely isn't holding back here, and she's certainly got no reason to hold back against one of the Hand's leaders, regardless of age.
  • She only hit Elektra with the car, and Elektra survived it despite Jessica having no clue. And if she didn't hold back on henchmen, they wouldn't be tossed across the room, they would have had their chests caved in like when Diamondback murdered Officer Albini and several of Domingo's men with his powered gloves.
  • Jessica didn't know at the time that Elektra could survive getting hit by a car. Jessica generally doesn't hold back too much when hitting Hand mooks, and keep in mind that the Hand minions are tougher than normal humans due to the resurrection process and are able to take blunt trauma more effectively.
  • Would Jessica CARE if Madame Gao can withstand her punches? No. Gao is one of the bosses of these goons, and had just murdered someone right there. At that point, it doesn't matter.

The Hand's fear of DD

• After his attempt on Trish fails, Murakami bringing up that the Iron Fist and Jessica Jones are getting help from Daredevil is enough to get the other Hand members scared, even though the Iron Fist is their sworn enemy and Daredevil is an outsider who only caused headaches for their ties with Fisk and later helped Elektra take down a single Hand capo (Nobu) and the men who worked for him.
  • Matt was trained by the Chaste, who are loyal to the Iron Fist.
  • Because Daredevil is Elektra's ex boyfriend which kind of complicates stuff since last time she joined them even with Stick telling her not to, but not Matt. Also Nobu is pretty much on their level. He just wasn't a Finger because they were already full and there is no Asskicking Leads to Leadership. Matt de-stabilized the Hand's work with Wilson Fisk, first through interfering with Nobu's first efforts to attain a Black Sky (prior to their decision to target Elektra) and later exposing Madame Gao's heroin operation. Then in season 2, Matt exposed them to the public when they took Karen and those other hostages.
  • Murakami even flat-out says he's less concerned with Matt's fighting abilities than he is with his past relationship with Elektra, which he (rightly) assumes will interfere with their mission.
  • There's a reason the Hand are afraid of Matt. As outlined on Fridge Brilliance, Alexandra isn't fazed by Danny's threats because the Hand know the Iron Fist is their sworn enemy, and has been for the several centuries the Fingers have had to build the Hand. They know how to defeat Iron Fists, but the Devil of Hell's Kitchen is essentially the boogeyman because they know nothing about him beyond him being trained by the Chaste.

Karen and Matt

• In Daredevil, Karen was one of the biggest advocates for the Devil of Hell's Kitchen even when Foggy expressed doubts and Wilson Fisk was painting the Devil of Hell's Kitchen as a terrorist ("He didn't hurt Ben and he didn't hurt me. I'll take the Devil of Hell's Kitchen over Fisk any day. Plus, he kicks ass!"), and she was also one of Frank Castle's biggest supporters during the trial. So why does she react so negatively to Matt starting up Daredevil again and treat it like an addiction? You would think she'd be totally content with Matt going out to finish off the organization that kidnapped her in the past and were connected with Fisk.
  • There's a few things going on: first off, a lot of the issues people have with Karen's behavior in The Defenders would have been cleared up if the flashback that we had at the start of Daredevil season 3 to Matt revealing his secret to Karen had been moved up to The Defenders. We don't know how much Matt told Karen about his senses, about Stick and Elektra and whatnot, but he said "I'm giving up Daredevil because I'm not making a difference." At the start of The Defenders, Matt has retired from Daredeviling. When Karen tells him at the diner, "I think you should know I really think Daredevil made the city a safer place", she's genuine. She's trying to reassure Matt that he did make a difference. Matt likely told Karen that he ultimately thought being Daredevil was bad for him, as he feels he got Elektra killed, and he drove Karen and Foggy away. It seems that Karen very much took him at his word that he was giving it up. Again, if we had actually gotten to see that conversation, a lot of people's problems with how Karen was portrayed in The Defenders wouldn't have been nearly as bad.
    Thing is, Karen didn't get much room to grow and kinda got pushed to the side, in part because of timing and scheduling issues. Whereas the solo shows save for Iron Fist season 2 have been 13 episode outings, The Defenders was only eight episodes. The writers had a huge cast to work with and wanted to keep it mostly about Matt, Jessica, Luke, and Danny coming together to solve a problem. Unfortunately, that just didn't leave a lot of time for the supporting characters who weren't Colleen or Misty to contribute much to the plot. And in Karen's case, it must be noted that Deborah Ann Woll was simultaneously filming The Defenders and season 1 of The Punisher (2017), and shuttling back and forth between the two sets^note It's this tight schedule that is probably the reason Karen's presence in The Punisher is also very minimal. So between Deborah Ann Woll's shooting schedule, and the Defenders writers having to work all of the supporting actors into the show, there was really only so much they could work with on the subject of Karen in The Defenders, thus the important elements regarding how Karen reacted to the reveal had to be relegated to Daredevil season 3, where there's more room for said elements.
    Anyways, on Karen's negative reaction to Matt starting up as Daredevil again. Well, is it really unreasonable and out of character for her to react negatively, and be worried about him? She cares for Matt very deeply, and knows he's starting something up again that could very well get him and Foggy disbarred if he ever gets exposed (as well as cause Fisk to come after them), and she doesn't want to see him lose everything again. Matt originally revealed his secret to Karen after he had, in fact, lost everything: Karen, Foggy, Nelson & Murdock, Elektra, etc. So when Karen says to Matt before he, Luke and Jessia break out of the precinct that "You're finally just getting your life back," that's the truth. Matt's practicing law again, he and Foggy are repairing their friendship, he and Karen are trying to repair their relationship. And keep in mind, just like Foggy from "Nelson v. Murdock" onwards, this is all still pretty new information to Karen. So she's still processing everything and doesn't fully understand yet just what Daredevil means to Matt...
    ...which is not helped when Matt is sending Karen mixed -not to say false- signals. Like with Foggy, he at some point proclaims that Daredevil and Matt Murdock are one and the same, and that there's no dichotomy there, but his behavior towards Karen detriments her from grasping that. He wears a confident smile while assuring her that Daredevil is his past and that he does not crave to assume this identity anytime soon, then he suddenly he is back on it a few days later because "he has to" and then he tells her that "this is his life". Consistency doesn't sit well with Matt after all. So is it that Karen doesn't accept Matt for who he really is? No, what's going on is that Karen doesn't really know who Matt is, considering how he's pivoting on his attitude about Daredevil. It's like he made a huge step forward by sharing his secret, and then took two steps back by being dishonest with her once again, and maybe with himself too. Matt is still highly confused and indecisive about how to proceed with his life. So how can Karen have any sense of clarity in regards to their relationship? This confusion -from both parties- is pretty evident in all their scenes.
    • While it would have been nice to see the reveal scene in detail, it was never going to happen in Defenders, as much as Matt and Karen both deserved and needed that scene. The Defenders really was just not the place to show it, and the showrunner probably didn’t want to step on anyone's toes by doing so, especially since there probably was not a good way they could've incorporated the reveal scene without bogging down the start of The Defenders. Another possible reason is that the writers may have felt that since they dedicated an entire episode of Daredevil season 1 to Foggy's reaction, it would've been repetitive to have another reveal scene that would basically be a rehash of "Nelson v. Murdock" just with Karen instead of Foggy, and much of which would just be spent repeating information the audience knows. But alas, not only do Matt and Karen never get that scene (instead having it happen off-screen), we can only assume that Matt and Karen actually had relatively little contact since then which means that Karen has not even had the benefit of getting used to Matt’s powers that Foggy got in between seasons one and two^note understandable, since Nelson & Murdock has just broken up, and Karen, being busy with her new job and trying to deal with the sting, probably doesn't have much free time to spend with Matt. This is suggested by a minor throwaway moment in "The H Word" when Matt and Karen are at the diner. Notice that Karen looks really uncomfortable when the waitress explains the layout of Matt’s plate setting, which seems to suggest that she feels really iffy about the level of pretense Matt has to go through (understandable), and whatever conversation they may have had about what he can and cannot do may not even have been particularly in-depth. Foggy, on the contrary, seems to have perfectly adjusted to the knowledge of Matt’s heightened senses by the start of Daredevil season 2, but that's because they were still working together as Nelson & Murdock. We ultimately do get a flashback to the rest of the scene in Daredevil Season 3, which shows that Matt did tell Karen at minimum about the extent of his abilities and wanted to make amends for his past actions.
  • It's really unfair and odd that people blame Karen's and Foggy's inability to accept Daredevil as a necessary part of who Matt is when Matt only just recently accepted this himself. Not to mention their perception that Daredevil is unnecessary is absolutely because Matt has kept that part of his life a secret from them for the entire time they've known him (again until only recently). Matt did that on purpose, yes it was to protect them, but it doesn't change the fact that the information they had to build their perception of who Matt is didn't include a fundamental part of him, ie. Daredevil. That's on Matt, and while I think they're both trying in their own way to come around on this new perception of who he is, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that accepting constant danger and possible death for Matt as regular, let alone necessary, is really, really difficult.
  • There's also the fact that Matt needs to learn to treat Karen like a partner he wants to share his life with, not as a victim he needs to shield from it. Matt needs to respect Karen's choices and trust her to know her own mind. After everything that happened with Fisk and Wesley in season 1, Karen knows what it feels like to be treated like a pawn in someone else's game. Matt constantly trying to take her off the board isn't the answer.
  • On a related note, during the 2016 Con circuit, Charlie Cox was already saying that the lessons Matt learns in The Defenders will carry over into Daredevil season 3. In The Defenders, we see Luke, Jessica and Danny all immediately call Matt out when it came to light that he had been withholding some pretty vital information from them, which means hopefully in Daredevil season 3, he won't be quite so quick to shut Karen and Foggy out. Especially since Fisk as a threat means Matt, Foggy and Karen will need close ranks, which means a lot of conversations Matt has been procrastinating on are going to have to take place because they will be in close quarters and need to work together, and with Fisk coming after them, Matt's going to have no choice but to bring Karen and Foggy into it.
  • Karen has always been supportive of the concept of Daredevil. The concept of someone who fights for justice and does what the cops and legal system sometimes can’t. And there’s no indication in The Defenders that this has changed, as Karen says "I really think that Daredevil may have made the city a safer place." Her issue is with Matt himself, and there are two factors involved: the events of Daredevil Season 2, and Matt’s own attitude toward his Daredeviling at the time when Karen finds out about it.
    Karen’s conversation with Matt in the diner at the beginning of The Defenders indicates that she didn’t know he was Daredevil before he told her his secret. But she was still there all through Season 2, watching from a front-row seat as Matt's life fell apart. As much as Karen liked Daredevil the superhero, the fact that she now knows Daredevil is Matt Murdock who she cares deeply about, means her investment in him is now personal. She saw firsthand the negative effects that this lifestyle actually has on the person behind the mask, with his neglecting work in Frank Castle's trial, his random disappearing acts, his fights with Foggy, etc. It must be pointed out that being Daredevil does not always negatively impact Matt’s life, but it has for most of Daredevil, and that is all Karen has seen. She cares enough about Matt that, in spite of all of the good work Daredevil has done, and as much as she advocates for Daredevil, she also doesn’t want Matt to suffer.
    This ties into Matt’s own, seemingly vocal opinion on his heroics post-Season 2. After Elektra’s death, he decided that he wanted to stop– and he made this clear to Foggy and Karen. He saw his Daredevil career as pointless and destructive, and he set himself the goal of putting all that aside and focusing on his legal career. Foggy and Karen, as good friends, saw Matt’s seemingly desperate desire to stop doing this thing he feels compelled to do, and thus became invested in helping him. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Despite his short-term disgust, Matt does actually want to be Daredevil, but he doesn’t make this clear to his friends. Thus, after the incident fighting those looters after the earthquake, and after the fights in Midland Circle and the Royal Dragon, Foggy and Karen treat Matt almost like a drug addict who is trying to sober up, because that’s the impression they’ve received of the situation from Matt.
    So when Karen learns that Matt has– well– fallen off the wagon and started Daredeviling again, she’s not upset that Daredevil is back in action, she’s upset that Matt has been dragged back into doing this destructive thing he’d told her just days ago he didn’t want to do anymore. Either that or he’s been lying to her again. Karen is additionally upset that Matt is being so irresponsible about his secret identity, since she knows that there will be hell to pay if Fisk figures this out. And she is also upset that Matt has put her in danger again, which is also understandable.
    Karen's cold reaction to Matt’s behavior throughout the show and acting like he's an addict who relapsed, is somewhat also explained away by the fact that her flashback episode in Daredevil season 3 reveals she used to be a junkie herself.
  • Karen's issue isn't that Matt is going back to being Daredevil. Her problem is that Matt is dangerously close to getting exposed. This has to do with Wilson Fisk. Most of Nelson & Murdock's work at putting away Fisk was evenly split between what Matt was doing as Daredevil and what Karen was doing working with Ben and the Bulletin. So Karen is aware that if Matt is exposed, all the hard work they did to expose Fisk will be useless. It would be Fisk's ticket out of jail, which for Karen is exacerbated by the fear that he'll find out that she killed James Wesley (even though that's very unlikely).
  • Karen is terrified of Matt getting exposed. She was 100% correct when she told him that "you're just getting your life back." Remember that when Matt first revealed his secret to Karen, it was when he had nothing left from his regular life: he had lost Karen, he had lost Foggy, he had lost Nelson & Murdock. Since then, he’s started practicing law again (and kicking ass at it), he and Foggy are on much better terms even if they’re not 100% there, and Karen is at the very least ready to be friends again while they continue to “figure themselves out”. Both Karen and Foggy recognize that Matt’s two lives are VERY close to colliding here (and they’re not wrong; it really shouldn’t be that hard to figure out who Daredevil is at this point if the right people are paying attention). Karen simply does not want to see him lose everything that he’s finally just getting back for a second time. Karen is not anti-Daredevil, she has always recognized his value even before she knew who he was, and when he tells her it’s something he has to do her response is “I know.” But all she was hearing from him was that he was done with that life, so it’s pretty understandable why she was so confused he was taking it up again. She’s not anti-Daredevil; she’s anti-Matt lying to her.
  • Karen is trying to protect Matt from Daredevil. Her reaction to Matt being Daredevil is actually quite different from Foggy's because unlike Foggy, Karen has a darker side, and she's like Matt in every way with one big exception: Karen has crossed that no-killing line that Matt refuses to cross, first when she shot Todd, and again when she killed James Wesley. It's where she fears things are going to go: that one day Matt will finally snap and kill someone. That's why Foggy's issues with Daredevil are different from Karen's issues. Foggy doesn't think Matt is capable of murder, but Karen knows from her experiences with Todd and with Wesley that anyone is capable of murder. So Karen doesn't want Matt to be Daredevil, and she's speaking from a place of experience, not ignorance. She wants Matt to be better than her, a murderer. It's not about her love life. It's about trying to save his soul, the thing that makes him Matt Murdock. She puts Matt on a pedestal because she knows Matt's a genuinely good man: he took her in for a few nights when Fisk had her framed for murder, he believed her innocence when not even Foggy did, and as Daredevil he's saved her life twice. She expects Matt to be better than her, and based on what she's seeing, Matt's slipping and making big mistakes (first in mentioning that bad guys who did business with Fisk might be aware of Matt's identity, and then Matt getting essentially arrested alongside Luke and Jessica following Stick's death), and she doesn't want to see Matt land hard on his ass because the fall could kill him. Not to mention the risk to his professional career if this information falls into the wrong hands (like when Fisk ultimately found out later in Daredevil season 3).
  • It's a little heartbreaking that Foggy and Karen don't seem so supportive of Matt being Daredevil, especially when it's juxtaposed with all the other Defenders and their supportive friends. But there's a reason they act this way: Matt has the whole advantage of having a secret identity. Jessica and Luke don't have a choice to fight because of obvious powers and whatnot, yet Matt still has the chance to leave the "hero" life behind. I bet if you asked Jessica or Luke, they would see things from Foggy and Karen's perspective. They just want Matt to be safe and happy, and crime fighting for Matt isn't like Luke or even Jessica. It's not a "fun" thing for him. It's something he "has" to do. Of course, that's not true, Matt loves it and Daredevil is a part of him. That was Karen and Foggy's journey in The Defenders, learning to accept that the violence and the behaviors that define Daredevil are a very important part of Matt's personality. They were just too late. We can imagine that in Daredevil season 3, Foggy and Karen will be way more supportive, especially if Matt makes it clear that Daredevil is who he really is, and we can also imagine that Fisk seeking revenge means that Matt, Foggy and Karen will close ranks, which means a lot of conversations Matt’s been putting off are going to have to take place because they will be in close quarters and need to work together.
  • Over the course of Daredevil, Karen has been framed for murder, survived two assassination attempts, had her life saved by a "masked hero", got tangled in an organized crime investigation, got Ben Urich indirectly killed because she couldn't let go of her investigation into Fisk, shot James Wesley to death and covered it up, befriended and then cut ties with a known mass murderer, and then found out that her crush and potential future boyfriend is secretly a vigilante. No surprise her worldview and behavior would go through some rapid shifts, too.
  • Foggy and Karen are both conflicted about Matt being Daredevil for different reasons. For Foggy, it's because he and Matt have been close as brothers for years, so he is basically worried about someone he pretty much considers "family". For Karen, well, it’s one thing to be in favor of the guy risking his life for you when he’s a stranger or nearly so, and quite another when it’s a loved one putting himself in danger of death for you. The closer you are to the person, the harder it can be to watch them take risks. But since Foggy and Karen are secondary characters in an already crowded storyline, this just couldn’t be explored in the time given. This hopefully will be something that is resolved in season three of Daredevil, hopefully with Matt reconciling his two lives so neither drowns out the other. And for Karen, it's a lot more complicated since between season 2 and The Defenders, Matt hasn't been doing anything Daredevil-related.
    • Admittedly, though, Karen, with her past actions and own secrets, probably is the one person who could fully accept both sides of Matt once he lets her in. Because Matt doesn't allow Father Lantom to know the whole truth; Claire distanced herself from Matt because of how bad things happened to her when she was in his orbit (getting kidnapped by the Russians, the Hand attacking Metro-General); Stick and Elektra only cared about Daredevil and had nothing but contempt for Matt's lawyer life (plus Stick is dead, and Elektra is clearly not the person Matt thought she was); and Foggy, who still cares about Matt and is willing to help him no matter how many fights they have, is still warming up to the idea of vigilantism in general.
  • Sure, it hurts that Karen berates and gets annoyed with Matt, but it's not entirely about her life being disrupted by what Matt is doing as Daredevil. Her "I'm sorry-does that mean they know who you are?!" is Karen's way of saying "Jesus Christ, Matt, do you have no sense of self-preservation here?" It'd be out of character for Karen to believe Daredevil is outright bad. She was infatuated with Daredevil from the moment he rescued her from Rance, and she was almost supportive of Frank Castle up until the diner killings and the Blacksmith's death. She also knows Daredevil is toxic enough to separate Matt from everyone, and will maybe get himself killed. Ironically, Matt has a habit of getting mad at Karen for the same behavior.
    If anything, Karen and Foggy have to be selfish...for Matt's own good. As season 2 demonstrated, when Karen and Foggy aren't around to ground Matt, he'll just throw himself into the meatgrinder every day until it finally kills him. Their selfishness is because they want him to care about them, and himself, more than random strangers. Matt's arc in The Defenders is pretty clear - learning to let other people in and learning to work with others (which it takes Father Lantom dying at Dex's hands in season 3 for him to finally come around to accept) - and part of the reason why is because of Karen and Foggy acting this way. This isn't even limited to Matt and his inner circle; we see Colleen get annoyed at Danny for similar reasons. Danny is the most important person in Colleen's world since he freed her from the Hand, and she's also crucial to his world, yet to Stick he's just a thundering dumbass.
  • Foggy and Karen seem to often kind of undersell the living shit out of the threats Matt's fighting to almost comical levels. Sure, they have reasons for it - Matt really really needs to keep less secrets from them - but their reactions are almost as selfish as Matt's, particularly Foggy (who seems to fully realize the city needs Daredevil leaping across rooftops but still insists Matt stops doing that and pretty much throw the city to the wolves just so that Foggy can have his friend back). It's only towards late in The Defenders they both seem to grasp the gravity of the situation (what with Foggy delivering the suit to the precinct), but then Matt "dies" which clearly will set things back a bit.
  • Karen has a deep fear of losing Matt. Even if she supports Daredevil, she doesn’t want it to be Matt because of what might happen to him. She is not fully aware of how much that persona means to Matt. How much a part of him it is. She at some level does not yet understand it, because, just like Foggy beforehand, she thinks he can just turn it off, and thinks that that would be a good thing. Which suggests Karen doesn’t fully get WHY Matt does it, meaning she may not have gotten the same talks that Claire and Foggy have gotten, about the things that Matt hears and how responsible he feels. And because she relates to violence in a very different way. In addition, she's projecting her reactions to her own violent experiences onto Matt and thinking of what it was like for her when she killed Wesley, and wanting to protect Matt from that.
    In addition to that, Karen doesn’t like what the Daredevil persona does to Matt's lawyer persona. Karen and Foggy went through a lot in season 2 with Matt losing the balance in his life and leaning too heavily on Daredevil. A lot more went into why his life and relationships fell apart than just him being Daredevil (more specifically, a combination of his complicated relationship with Elektra, his complicated relationship with Stick, Frank Castle challenging his no-killing beliefs, the existence of the Hand challenging his religious beliefs, Foggy’s anger adding on to everything, and just Matt's own introverted personality and the way that it makes him interact with others and deal with interpersonal conflict), but Karen isn't privy to what the audience knows. From where she is standing, Matt's problems are all tied up in the idea of Daredevil. And she doesn’t want Matt to be that person, and she’s angry at him for having become that person and hurting her (and Foggy) so badly. So she gets this idea that if Matt can stop being Daredevil, he can stop being all those other things as well and she can fix him. That's why there’s such distance between Karen and Matt at the beginning of The Defenders. She’s still hurt and angry over everything he put her through in season 2, and she’s still working through what she believes and so she distances herself from Matt. And she believes that if he can just deny Daredevil for long enough, he can detox and get his life back on track and be the person she loved again. And even then she’s not sure if there will ever be a chance for the two of them again because of everything that’s happened and because of her unresolved issues with Frank and his unresolved relationship with Elektra. So there’s sort of this boundary, "I care about you, but right now I can’t be around you."
    • It's pretty clear that both Karen and Foggy see Daredevil very much as something Matt does, when Matt sees it as something that is part of who he is. Matt’s Defenders arc was set up as him breaking away from that mindset to realize that Daredevil is a part of who he is. The reason Karen thinks that IS because of her limited perspective. Because Matt hasn’t talked with her much about this. And, the reveal of him being Daredevil came after a real low point where Daredevil did seem to be destroying Matt. And let's also remember that Karen's only real look at the other side of vigilantism was Frank Castle- which is a very different situation and arguably one that does NEED to be given up.
      Therefore, what The Defenders presented was both Foggy and Karen viewing Daredevil as a vice, and Matt as an addict that they had to help quit. When Matt expresses any sort of doubt about that, talks about doing it again, they push back strongly rather than hearing him out. Karen is clearly annoyed with him when he comes to her office and tells her he’s doing it again. And later she tells him that it’s destroying his life.
      However, the ending to The Defenders has at least moved Foggy toward a place of accepting Daredevil because he has that gesture of bringing the suit to the precinct, which is clearly a big deal. And Matt’s statement of “this is my life” to Karen will be something that really weighs on her and affects her perspective. Of course, then the Hand dropped a building on Matt and their worst fears that Daredeviling would eventually kill Matt came true. So the start of Daredevil season 3 will likely explore how that affects Foggy and Karen, because it could be a "see we told you” type thing that really locks in their view of having to protect Matt. Or it could head the opposite way (more likely) and be a thing where, the worst has happened, we see what things are like without Matt around, he died and came back, and he still wants to keep being Daredevil, so it must matter a lot, and it becomes a catalyst of growth for the three of them coming to an understanding about Matt's need to be Daredevil. Also, just losing someone and then having them returned, they’re going to work harder at maintaining that relationship.
  • Karen’s position-shift on vigilantes seems to be a very human reaction. In season 2 of Daredevil, she saw the necessity for the Punisher, because that’s always what Frank Castle was to her: the Punisher. As she got to know Frank better, she actually did try to steer him away from his vigilantism because it was bad for him personally, no matter how much good it did the community. She's still doing it in Frank's own show (where her steering Frank away is now colored by the failures of her experiences concerning Matt). What she was doing with Frank there is exactly the same thing she's doing with Matt in The Defenders. She knows that Daredevil was a necessity, at least when so many of the cops were being paid off by Fisk, but with the rise of others like Luke Cage (who Karen almost certainly reported on, and who Foggy just defended) and Jessica Jones (who Karen may know by reputation), Daredevil has become much less necessary, and on top of that, she’s worried about the safety of her friend / past and potentially future lover.
  • Karen's attitude towards Daredevil is very in line with how she acts in the comics. In the comics, she supports Daredevil 100%, and she supports Matt 100%, but when she learns Matt and Daredevil are the same person, she flips out and wants him to stop Daredevilling, because she's in love with Matt and fears losing him. While The Defenders doesn't really explain it that well, that appears to be the angle the show is going for as well. Obviously, Karen has yet to tell Matt that she's in love with him, or anything about Wesley's death, for the same reasons, but she has essentially put Matt on the shelf while they 'figure things out'. She's not setting him free yet, and definitely is pushing Matt to embrace a normal, settled, safe life as he's walking out of the precinct to go back to Midland Circle. It's that last-ditch effort where Karen is trying to stop him from going, when she knows full well Matt is capable and can save lives out there but is trying to hang onto him. It's both super selfish and super understandable, as almost any spouse or relative of someone who participates in occupations with a high-risk of on-the-job injury or death like soldiers, police officers, and firefighters.
  • It is really hard to interpret and analyze Matt and Karen's scenes in The Defenders without knowing what Matt told Karen about being Daredevil^note Does Karen know his whole backstory, and everything including his training, Stick, and his relationship with Elektra? Does Karen understand why Matt chose to be Daredevil? What was her initial reaction? It’s just so difficult to understand their interactions and Karen’s point of view and attitude without seeing their prior conversations about Daredevil. It's no surprise that Charlie Cox has said in interviews that he wishes we'd get a flashback of their conversation, or at least some way for us to know exactly what Karen knows and what Matt told her, so that Karen’s stance can be made clearer. One interpretation is that Karen is against Matt as Daredevil because of what it does to him. Remember that Karen was Locked Out of the Loop for all of season 2. From what she saw, being Daredevil made Matt damage his friendships with Karen and Foggy, and also really hurts his ability to be a good lawyer, culminating in Nelson & Murdock breaking up. He really just didn’t show up for Frank Castle’s trial, something that was very important to Karen. Sure, the trial was lost due to Frank actively sabotaging his own case so he could meet with Fisk, but imagine that it was the kid Matt represented in the first episode of The Defenders. If Matt was still Daredevil, there is no guarantee that he would have been able to show up and adequately represent his client. What if someone needed to be saved? And being Daredevil puts Matt’s life in grave risk (something proven by the end of The Defenders, especially from Karen’s point-of-view). So a large part of Karen being against Matt as Daredevil comes from how, from her point of view, it really ruins his life, professionally, personally, and physically. Karen has always been a big supporter of Daredevil, but it was different when he was just the anonymous masked savior who saved her from Fisk's assassins. She never stopped supporting the concept of Daredevil and vigilantism; she just doesn’t support Matt as Daredevil because she cares about him and wants him to be happy and healthy and have a full life and she doesn’t think, based off what she’s seen, that he can do that if he’s Daredevil. It's also possible that Karen doesn’t really understand how big of a part Daredevil is of him. Just like Foggy did for a good portion of season 2, Karen probably saw Daredevil as something Matt did, rather than a large part of who he is, largely due to her having an idea of him that’s based on solely what he told her (and vice versa).
    • Not only that, but the reason Matt's life fell apart in season 2 is because Elektra, or more specifically Matt's feelings for Elektra, sort of dragged Matt to a place where being Daredevil took over and became an addiction. We don't know if Matt told Karen about Elektra (he most likely did, given that we know Foggy is aware of her death), but Karen would have known that Matt had a way to be a very effective vigilante by night while remaining a functional lawyer (and person) by day. At the diner she almost seems to encourage Matt not to judge his activity too harshly by telling him that he greatly helped the NYPD in exposing all the cops that were in Fisk's pocket, and he’s the one who shuts that down. When he finally tells her “This is my life”, she's not distraught or angry, she simply acknowledges it. There’s probably a part of Karen that agrees the Daredevil thing went too far (that's why she and Foggy discuss it as if it were a drug addiction), but it doesn't make her disapprove of him wearing the mask, because it would be hypocritical for Karen to not be okay with Matt being Daredevil while also somewhat condoning Frank Castle for killing people. It should also be considered that Foggy found out about Matt's Daredeviling in the midst of their work taking down Fisk, whereas Karen got to find out at a time when Matt was giving up the Daredevil life.
    • Of course, it actually makes sense that Karen would liken Daredevil to a drug addiction, given that her flashback episode in Daredevil season 3 showed that she used to be a heroin addict.
  • Karen and Foggy have a point simply because they were outsiders to everything, and they're not privy to everything the audience knows. Matt told them only half truths and not the whole story. So for Karen and Foggy, the right answer was "if you don't get involved, they will leave you alone" (like what Matt told Jessica before they went into Midland Circle) but that was not the case. For them it was like an "I told you so" moment and while it looks unfair for them to think like that, from their perspective, where they have seen their friend injured and in pain, they don't want Matt to suffer.

Did Matt have to be left behind?

• Did Matt really need to stay behind to deal with Elektra at Midland Circle? Something tells me Matt should have just ignored Elektra and returned to the surface with the other three, or the other three went back for him after the building fell. I just don't understand why Matt has such strong feelings for Elektra that he's willing to stay and die with her in an attempt to save her, even through he had seen her kill Stick and lead the Hand. In retrospect, it just made Matt seem very selfish and suicidal to stay behind. I know Matt is a Catholic and forgiveness is a big deal, but Elektra has passed the point of forgiveness for her actions that she willingly chose to make. It could be that the resurrection made her bad traits even worse but still...
  • The biggest problem is that Elektra is Matt's ex-girlfriend. She was also trying to sabotage the elevator to thwart their escape. In order to not have to leave Matt behind, they would have all had to beat Elektra to within an inch of her life, which for obvious reasons Matt would be very reluctant to agree to.
  • That and, y'know. The bomb.
  • Also? Dude's got a bit of a martyr complex, and some issues. He probably saw 'go out with her' as a good way to go.
  • This is what would've happened if Matt had made it out alive.
  • Matt didn't go into Midland Circle actively expecting/planning to die or to fake his death. Matt may be a thrill-seeker, but he’s not suicidal. However, toward the end of the fight down in the hole, when he sees how dire the situation is, he makes a decision. But what exactly that decision was, depends on information the audience is not privy to. What is known is that he wants to spend some extra time trying to rescue Elektra, and is willing to risk his life to do so. He failed Elektra once– he doesn’t want to fail her again. His words to Danny indicate that he’s pretty sure he’s going to die, but he may think there’s a chance he and Elektra could still get out.
  • Elektra took out the elevator after they already made it pretty far up. They wouldn't have gone anywhere if Elektra wasn't occupied.
  • Had the charges not been prematurely activated due to Bakuto's body falling on the arming device, it's likely they could've made a trip back down to get Matt out.
  • If Matt didn't hold off Elektra, she could've cut them down even sooner from the elevator and its possible all of them wouldn't have made it out.
  • Matt stalling Elektra and only allowing her to stop the elevator, not also attack them while climbing is a huge difference. Even worse, if Matt is with the other three, she really has a reason to stop them. And unless someone stayed with her to make sure she's down, they'd have no way of knowing if she was down for good. None of them were willing to kill Elektra, or anyone else for that matter. Matt stayed behind to make sure the job was done and to give the others time to escape. He felt he had to be sure that she was gone and the only way to do it without lopping off her head was to go down with her.
  • In an Entertainment Weekly interview, Marco Ramirez said that this was precisely the point of Matt's storyline and ending in The Defenders: He needed closure from Elektra. He needed proof that they were incompatible. By sacrificing himself to defeat her, he gets enough closure that he can happily put away any notions of the two of them being together because she has gone full baddie.
  • Matt has an insatiable need to save people from danger, including cases where the greatest danger to that person is themselves. And both in the comics and in the shows, Matt has continually shown complete disregard for his life, especially if someone he cares about is in danger. Had he left with the others and left Elektra to die that would have been completely out of character for him. Also Matt believes that everyone can be redeemed. Couple that with the fact that he is known to be make some pretty poor decisions and can be rather self-destructive, it's logical to think that Matt's thinking was that if he could save Elektra and bring her back to the light, even if that meant he might die, it would be worth it.
  • Matt blames himself for Elektra's death, especially since that's also how the Hand acquired her body. Once he knew she'd been brainwashed, he didn't want that to happen to her again. When he, Luke and Jessica went to Midland Circle, they planned to rescue Danny, and then blow up the building to fill in the pit, and on Matt's end, make one last-ditch attempt to break through to Elektra, if possible. But it was then that Matt found Elektra was still carrying out the Hand’s plans, so he likely changed his resolve to, "if I can't save you, I will have no choice but to stop you." And then he ran out of time because the explosives went off early.
  • It would have been a much less dramatic ending if Matt had returned to the surface with the others. Now in terms of cold logic and disregarding established canon, no, Matt didn’t need to stay behind with Elektra. But that would have required stifling fundamental elements of Matt’s character. He is the only one of the four Defenders who chose to become a superhero, while the other three kinda had it forced upon them. Matt will always risk his life to help those in trouble, and if there’s even the slightest chance of saving someone, he will take that chance. And Elektra is one of the most important people in his life– someone he has very strong feelings for, who he has already lost twice before. Matt would never willingly abandon Elektra to die, even though it's also pretty clear that Matt has blinders on when it comes to Elektra's true colors and that what she needs saving from the most is herself. Matt's decision to stay behind is not a suicidal choice. It’s one made in a moment of courage and desperation. Obviously, he doesn’t want to die. But he risks his life to save Elektra, and fails (to a degree of “failure” that we haven’t yet learned). It’s possible that Danny, Jessica, and Luke went back to look for him afterward. In fact, they probably did. But he was buried under a massive amount of rubble, and/or had already escaped… however he escaped, so their chances of finding him would have been slim.
  • This might be a writers' flaw, as while Matt would most definitely be willing to die along with Elektra, there seemed to be very little incentive for him to make it out of there without her either, and perhaps more development of Matt and Foggy's friendship (and to the same extent, Matt and Karen's) would have given him more of a reason to make it out of there alive.
  • To play it out any other way would risk losing the full emotional impact. For the other Defenders, Matt is making that choice because he's that kind of guy, and because this is Elektra we're talking about. If there’s anyone that makes this choice foolishly personal, it’s Elektra. And putting aside that strategically, he probably is everyone’s best shot at talking her down and not getting killed immediately. He's not giving up on her, even though realistically, once Elektra killed Stick right in front of him, that should have told Matt that she was never going to be the person he kept trying to convince her to be. Obviously, if Matt had common sense, he'd have abandoned her to die, but like Foggy said in season 1 of Daredevil, "You don't necessarily show the best judgement when beautiful women are involved, Matt." Matt tends to throw away common sense and act on pure emotion and instinct when matters concerning her happen (of course, this isn't an exclusively Elektra related thing; staying behind with Elektra to die is up there with paying a visit to Fisk in prison, or his later visit to talk to the Albanian boss).
  • Matt would never have left that pit willingly, because he would never let Elektra die all alone. But in theory, Jessica could easily have knocked Matt unconscious and carried him out. And even after the elevator cable was cut, Jessica, Luke and Danny could have hauled Matt the rest of the way up the shaft. Sure, Matt would have felt guilty about it later, once he woke up, but what else is new? If that fight was supposed to give him some sort of closure with Elektra, well, he really should have found his closure already by that point. Once Elektra killed Stick right in front of him, that should have told Matt that she was never going to be the person he kept trying to convince her to be.
    Of course, the real reason Matt had to stay down there and “die” was for the purpose of setting up a specific plot line for season three of Daredevil. But The Defenders was supposed to be about all four of them equally, not just Matt. Structuring the finale around the narrative needs of Daredevil seems a bit unfair to everyone else. It makes it look like Matt was the real hero of The Defenders, and the others were just along for the ride. Admittedly, going into The Defenders, Matt had more issues left over from his own show that needed resolving than the others do. So there was always going to be some Matt/Elektra drama in this show. But making that storyline the climax of the show passed up some potentially interesting storytelling opportunities.
  • Matt blames himself for Elektra's death out of survivor's guilt. Most of us would feel the same way if someone else died saving us. But that doesn’t make her death his fault, or something he caused, or something he let happen. I mean, Matt tried his best to convince Elektra to stop listening to Stick, or to the Hand, and to choose her own path. So yeah, in that sense she was doing what he wanted her to do. Nevermind that Elektra died because she chose to join Matt in that fight, despite knowing that it was a trap. And the moment of her death was also her choice, as she ran in to stop Nobu from killing Matt.
    It makes sense that Matt feels compelled to try and bring Elektra’s memories back. That's actually a pretty noble thing to do: he’s trying to give her back her own identity, her own life, by undoing the Hand’s brainwashing. Unfortunately, like later happens with Jessica's mom in Jessica Jones season 2 or with Harold Meachum in Iron Fist season 1, Elektra in The Defenders is really just a ghost of the person Matt dated in college. Elektra has no interest in going along with Matt's tidy little redemption narrative, and she doesn't care what he thinks of her anymore. If Matt had accepted that fact sooner, and hadn’t insisted on trying to take responsibility for her death, there would have been no need for him to stay down there with her in the first place. The show tries to frame it as a sacrifice to save the city, but if anything, Matt was down there for personal reasons. Because saving the city only required that none of the Hand manage to get on board the elevator while the heroes made their escape, so they’d be trapped down there when the building collapsed. Despite being the Black Sky, Elektra never demonstrates any major supernatural abilities. She’s just a really good fighter with a little superstrength courtesy of the substance. And if she were trying to board the rising elevator from below, Matt, Jessica, Luke and Danny would have had the advantage of height. All four of them working together could have fended off Elektra. In fact, that’s exactly what would have happened, if Matt didn’t have a personal connection to her. If Elektra were just the Hand’s strongest fighter, and Matt had never met her before, he would have been getting on that elevator with the others. Instead, he chooses death, turning his back on everyone who actually loves him. And he is expecting to die even before the elevator cable gets cut and he’s trapped, otherwise he wouldn’t have told Danny to protect the city. Foggy and Karen are heartbroken, and the other Defenders probably feel pretty rotten, too, even though they’ve only known him for a few days. It'd be one thing if Matt's staying behind was necessary to save the city, or if he had truly intended to escape but Elektra trapped him down there. But the way things go, he hurts all of his friends, as well as refuses until the last possible moment to acknowledge Elektra for who she really is, out of a misplaced sense of responsibility for her death. And now the others are left with their pain, and their grief, for however much time passes in-show until Daredevil season 3.
    • Yes, it was infuriating to see Matt sacrifice himself for no good reason. However, in some interviews, Charlie Cox said that Matt was “deluded” when it came to Elektra. On the other hand, the show was not trying to sell the viewers on the story that Matt “died to save the city.” Jessica, Luke and Danny know that isn't the case, because they heard Matt say he was staying behind to try to reach Elektra. So the claims that “Matt died to save the city” were more for the survivors, to allow them to believe Matt’s (apparent) death had some purpose and meaning. And maybe it was for Matt, too. After all, it sounds a lot better to claim that “Matt died to save the city” than to claim that “Matt died trying to save his crazy, homicidal, formerly dead ex-girlfriend from herself even after she told him she didn’t want to be saved.” It would've been a lot worse for Karen and Foggy (and to an extent, Claire) if they learned Matt had basically thrown his life away for nothing. And if Matt had been thinking (which he wasn’t), he would have wanted his legacy to be that he died to save the city. So the “he died to save the city” story was a kindness to the survivors, and perhaps a parting gift to Matt.
  • As good as Matt and Jessica's interactions were, as good as Matt's interactions with Luke and Danny were, they didn't care if he lived or not. Luke said it himself, he felt bad for Matt and those who he left behind but he was glad it was him and not Jessica... and that's a very understandable reaction because they'd only known Matt for a couple days. They took Matt's advice and are working to make their city a better place, as is happening at the time of Luke Cage season 2, but they didn't really understand Matt.
  • Matt does not know when to give up. Catholics at their core believe all life is sacred and that allow an innocent person to die is tantamount to killing them yourself, which is interesting when you think about his later efforts in Daredevil season 3 to help Ray Nadeem get out from under Fisk's control. Matt still believes Elektra can be “saved”. He hopes he can be the one to do it. Add his father’s influence and Matt will fight till the end, a la Emmerson. The problem is, Elektra wants Matt all to herself. Exemplified with her and whatever they called the elixir of life. She wants to it to be them against the world. It's not healthy. It’s a romance that's doomed to end in tragedy like Romeo and Juliet. It is also Matt’s choice, he does not want her to die alone, so he is also an active participant throughout Daredevil season 2 and The Defenders.
    That said, it's unlikely Matt could ever have a healthy relationship with Elektra. Elektra likes killing too much. The woman is a sociopath at best. Matt can not do that. She will keep pushing until she gets him to kill, which would break him.
    At the same time, Matt is also pretty impulsive. He does not think about Foggy or Karen who are waiting for him back at the precinct. He wants to stay with Elektra so he does. In a weird way Foggy, and to a lesser extent Karen, may be partially responsible for Elektra and Matt becoming so close in Daredevil season 2. Foggy trying to get Matt to give up being Daredevil, and even the the thought of Karen knowing he is Daredevil, just pushes him into Elektra’s arms, because he thinks the only people he can truly be himself with are Elektra and Stick. They know all about him, and accept him. Foggy, because he's scared for Matt’s wellbeing, tries to get him to stop. But Matt does not want to stop. And obviously Karen doesn’t know what her presence is doing, so Matt is completely projecting his fear of rejection upon her. He wants to cordon her off from that part of his life, because he thinks he is trying to protect her, but he is really trying to protect himself (as Karen points out in Daredevil season 3 while they're hiding from Dex in the crypt). One of Matt’s most interesting flaws is that he likes to project his own feelings onto people, to protect himself from any possible rejection.

Matt's love life

• Who is Matt actually into? Elektra or Karen? Seems he's juggling both of them.
  • Daredevil was primarily about about Matt's struggle with his dual nature: Matt Murdock loves Karen but Daredevil loves Elektra.
  • Matt is kinda romantically indecisive. At the end of Daredevil season 2, his budding romance with Karen had been derailed by his superhero life, and Elektra was dead as far as he knew. So, he commits himself to not being Daredevil anymore to try to get his personal life on track. As an aside, it's not clear what finally made Matt give up the suit. Most likely, it's something of a multifaceted reason, much like Matt processing his grief over Stick's death: it's a combination of his guilt over having lied to Karen, the loss of Nelson & Murdock, sadness about Elektra's death, all rolled into one. So The Defenders starts, and Matt hasn't been Daredevil in a while. He bumps into Karen after winning that case in court. Karen, who Matt realizes he still has feelings for. At this point, their relationship seems to be, at best, strained friendship sprinkled with awkward sexual tension. Then his dead ex-girlfriend shows up out of nowhere at Midland Circle and nearly kills him. And Matt doesn't really have time to sort through his feelings about all this, since the whole show takes place over only a couple days while he's also busy dealing with superhero problems. So he's got a very natural emotional confusion, given the circumstances.
  • Romantically, it seems Matt's into Karen. In the present day, he loves Elektra in that way that you could love a friend or family member. It's definitely more than that, but it doesn't seem that Matt is in love with Elektra anymore so much as he loves her and cares about her wellbeing.
    Matt made it pretty clear when Elektra first showed up at the start of "Kinbaku" that he didn't really even want her around. Plus, she's incredibly manipulative^note something no doubt passed down from Stick and has no respect for Matt's boundaries by constantly getting into his life without his permission, from calling the restaurant while Matt is on a date with Karen^note Which is even creepier when you consider that Elektra calls Matt on the restaurant phone, not his personal phone, even though she does know his personal number as it's the one she uses to contact him at the office in later episodes, to sending her hired driver to the hospital to pick up Matt while he, Karen and Foggy are interviewing Frank Castle, to sabotaging the witness in Frank's trial to ruin his friendship with Foggy. She was even in the alcove listening in on Matt and Karen as they discussed the trial in his apartment.
    Not to mention, Matt and Elektra's relationship is really unstable and they both want something out of each other that the other can't give: Elektra likes to think Matt has some bad in him and that's all she's ever wanted from him, is someone like her. On the other end, Matt thinks Elektra has some sliver of good in her and likes to imagine she's like him when she's so clearly not, since she's gone as far as killing people in front of him right after he says stuff like this.
    Hell, their last scene in The Defenders is pretty telling too, with how Elektra says she doesn't believe in good or evil, she just pretty much does what she wants. That doesn't really fit with Matt at all in the sense that he still has his ideals and the sense of good.
    It had already been shown twice in Daredevil that Matt and Elektra could never sustain a long-term relationship, and in The Defenders, it's even more chaotic than before. Not to mention him even suggesting before her death that he could run away with her would never have worked. Matt and Elektra are clearly both unreliable narrators in the sense that they lie to themselves and others all the time. Remember what Matt said when he visited Wilson Fisk in prison? When he threatened Fisk with the possibility of never getting to see Vanessa again, Matt remarks about how he and Fisk were similar in how they could never leave New York because it's their home. It is quite telling about his actual feelings on the city and even in the comics, those periods of time where Matt leaves New York City never end up being permanent.
    As for Karen, she loves his Matt side but it seems she does understand his Daredevil side as well. They just really have to work things out and he needs to stop lying to her while she also needs to come clean about what she did to James Wesley so he can stop propping her up as someone better than he is and she can also see they're not that different after all. Karen's the more stable, organic relationship that actually works.
  • Karen and Elektra are both halves of Matt's life. Karen is the right woman for Matt Murdock but is still having some time wrapping her head around him being Daredevil. Elektra is the right woman for Daredevil but corrupts Matt. Sure, Elektra loved Matt, but she wasn't good for him. While they were dating, he nearly failed out of law school, he was fine with driving around in a stolen Ferrari, and broke into Roscoe Sweeney's mansion and smashed up the kitchen as sexual foreplay before Elektra tried to get Matt to kill Roscoe. She isn't right for the Matt Murdock side of him, threatening witnesses and all. Matt loves Elektra and Karen both, but each is only the RIGHT woman for one side of his life.
  • From a logistical standpoint, Matt wasn't in love with Elektra. Sure, they kiss as Midland Circle collapses on them. But if that was meant to be a soulmate thing, it most likely wouldn’t have been established while a building collapsed around them, as pointed out by both fans of the comics and by some Matt/Karen shippers. Elektra isn’t the one for Matt and never will be. She can never be part of his world; not the one while he’s an attorney. He can never have anything stable or healthy with her, not while she enjoys the thrill of murdering, and besides that isn’t what she wants. Elektra lives for danger and carnage, this is something that Matt hasn’t grasped yet. He thinks she can be saved and tries to change her but the thing is she doesn’t want to be saved. Elektra knows who she is and embraces it fully. In order for Matt to grow and accept good things into his life, he will have to let go of his affiliation with Elektra and everything she stands for; darkness and destruction. If Matt was supposed to end up with Elektra they wouldn’t have portrayed that relationship to be as toxic and abusive as it is/was. She was his first love, yes, but not his true love. Like Matt confessed to Father Lantom, Elektra brought out the worst in him.
  • Within the confines of Daredevil, the relationships were at different stages: Elektra and Matt were reconnecting after already having shared a dating history, while Karen and Matt were building something from scratch. Obviously, the latter is going to require more narrative work. A few key moments established that Matt and Elektra had deep feelings for each other, so in their present day scenes, we have the knowledge of this past connection.
    • But then there’s also the nature of Matt’s story arc in Daredevil Season 2, which favors his time with Elektra. Having established himself as Daredevil, he is now forced to choose which side of his life to prioritize. He picks his superhero work, because of course he does. It would have felt out-of-character if he hadn’t. By privileging his time as Daredevil, he also privileges Elektra. Because of their past, because of who Elektra is and what she knows, she and Matt have relatively few secrets between them, and this adds to the sense of intimacy. At the same time, they don’t start out this way. Matt wasn’t initially intending to tell her he was Daredevil, and is shocked when she reveals that she knows. Elektra is forced, through changing circumstances, to admit to Matt that she has been manipulating him, and they clash on the subjects of killing, and Stick, and dealing with the Hand. However, they are connected through their past love, their shared training, and Elektra’s understanding of Matt’s life as Daredevil– a life that, by the end of the season, he has decided is more important than his legal work. Of course they feel more intimate and genuine. They should. Matt has nothing like that with Karen… yet.
    • Again, Matt and Elektra have known each other a long time, and already share a lot. Matt and Karen are building something new, and they’re doing it very slowly. They didn't have much in the way of on-screen interactions in Season 1, and after the first episode most of their moments together are business-related and distant. They are both involved in their own separate plotlines, and don’t get much casual bonding time through which we might see their friendship/romance form. However, they did see each other every day at the office, and hung out with Foggy at Josie’s on a semi-regular basis. We see the similarities in their personalities and get a sense of how much they have in common. There are also a few hints that Karen is attracted to Matt, such as Elena Cardenas's remarks, but it’s all very subtle and takes place in the cracks between the action. Which is a refreshing thing in a world full of media containing rushed, unnecessary, overemphasized romance plots.
    • In Season 2, Matt and Karen's relationship is brought more to the forefront, as we are caught up on all of the bonding that took place since between seasons 1 and 2. We finally see Karen and Matt together, and their friendship and attraction toward each other are given some actual screentime. But since this is taking place in realtime, we can’t just be told “okay everybody, now they’re in love”. Time needs to be spent establishing this bond, and in such a busy season time was hard to come by.
      Karen and Matt did have some very intimate moments together, as they discussed their lives and their pasts and their interests. Their closeness feels tangible and real. But their relationship is still in its early stages, and this comes through in the initial awkwardness of their first date and the unwillingness to share certain things with each other. They are both carrying a lot of secrets (Matt learned his lesson with Elektra in college and is nervous about opening up that much to someone new, and Karen is still too close to her own traumas over killing Wesley to handle sharing them), so all of their interactions have an element of distance. And then all it ends very quickly, because they’re both focused on other things and because Matt isn’t emotionally ready to prioritize his civilian friends over his superheroics. While Elektra and Matt hit the reforged connection stage before her death and resurrection, Karen and Matt only hit the initial break-up. They weren't as close because they had no reason to be.
      But if the last moments of Season 2 tell us anything, it’s that both of these are ongoing relationships, with the promise of further evolution. In a way, if you think about it, they’re both beginnings. If there was any goal in emphasizing Matt’s bond with Elektra over Karen back in season 2, it was because of the inherent difference between their current dynamics, rather than a privileging of one over the other. Matt just knew Elektra better than Karen at this point.

Gao's heroin racket

• Is it a retcon or she did it for some extra money? Because Colonel Schoonover shouldn't have been able to take her turf if she had that much resources present like she said in Daredevil Season 2.
  • The heroin racket was probably nothing serious for Madame Gao. If anything, perhaps the racket was one she implemented solely as a vehicle so that she and Nobu could get Fisk to assist the Hand in acquiring Elena Cardenas' building so they could build Midland Circle. Once Fisk got them the property, it's obvious that Madame Gao doesn't give a shit anymore and lets the whole street heroin operation collapse without batting an eye and moves on to other drugs she's having distributed through Rand.
  • In season 2 of Daredevil, she mentioned that the heroin racket was a small part of her empire. Considering she didn't seem all that bothered by Colonel Schoonover and sent Matt a clue that implies she could have taken out that operation long ago, it wasn't that important to her. As mentioned above, she was probably was just after Midland Circle the whole time.
  • Here’s Marco Ramirez’s insight, from his Entertainment Weekly interview:
    “Gao operates in the background of New York with drugs made from [the substance] ground into powder. It felt like we could make back alley drug deals in New York and dragon mythology all part of the same story, so that was my way of trying to tie them all in.”
    • Like with the Hand's alliance with Fisk, Ramirez clearly had to do some retroactive worldbuilding to make everything fit together, but there's a small problem: this connection was never fully explained in the show itself. Obviously, not everything should have to be spelled out to the viewer, but this detail wasn’t clarified nearly enough. And it's never explained why Madame Gao was making the drugs. Why would she use the Hand’s rapidly-diminishing substance supply for this? Why was this drug enterprise so important to her? Because she was clearly serious about it– it was her main motivation in both seasons of Daredevil, while Iron Fist established that she did massive amounts of work cultivating her presence at Rand Enterprises because of it, and again– she wouldn’t have used the substance for something that wasn’t important.

Matt and Daredevil's disappearances

• Why does everybody keep saying Matt and Daredevil disappeared at the same time? Daredevil was inactive for months between Daredevil season 2 and The Defenders and was only back for like 4 days, during which time he didn't really make his presence known to much of the world outside of the Hand other than Trish when he saved her at the restaurant. As far as the public is concerned, Daredevil disappeared and then 4-5 months later, Matt Murdock disappeared.
  • Misty saw Daredevil with the group during the climax. She knows for a fact that Daredevil was still around after his supposed disappearance months ago. That earlier disappearance of Daredevil can be chalked up to a temporary vacation.
  • The general public has no reason to suspect a connection between Daredevil disappearing and Matt Murdock disappearing, but that's assuming that Daredevil wasn't spotted by any civilians around Midland Circle. However, as far as the NYPD knows, Daredevil has disappeared for a second time, under a crumbling building, at the same time as Matt Murdock, who the NYPD believe were taken with Luke and Jessica after they busted out of the precinct. Luke and Jessica, who were also involved with the crumbling of that same building. The NYPD should realistically be able to figure it out, which they probably couldn't have before. And that's assuming Brett Mahoney hasn't yet figured out Daredevil's true identity by virtue of how identical Matt's and Daredevil's voices are. It's possible that the only thing keeping Matt and Daredevil separate on the NYPD radar is the general belief that he must be blind, but Misty seemed like she wasn't buying Matt's excuses. There's a theory out there though that Brett and Misty have figured out Daredevil's identity but keep it a secret. Certainly the case with Misty, given the conversation she has with Claire when she's in rehab at the start of Luke Cage season 2, in which Claire uses Matt's name rather than Daredevil when Misty is telling Claire that she doesn't want pity from her. So yes, Misty knows that Matt is Daredevil. It won't be established until Daredevil season 3 at the earliest whether or not Brett knows.
  • With the benefit of hindsight, it's apparent that the Marvel Netflix writers had Matt's role as a working lawyer be tenuous and crumbling by the time of The Defenders. Because of this, his disappearance doesn't have much impact on that many people, and incidentally, Matt's disappearance requires less explanation and there is little need for Karen or Foggy to spin hard-to-swallow cover stories for either Matt's or Daredevil's absence (like is the case for the countless times Matt fakes his death in the comics). Because of this, there aren't too many guaranteed cases of people figuring it out, as most other people don't really have enough of a reason to notice the coincidental absence, with the exception maybe of Marci Stahl, Foggy's girlfriend. There doesn't seem to be anything to suggest Foggy has reason to believe Matt's still out there and coming back, so there is no secret to really keep from Marci at this point unless he's like Karen and he's really holding out some unbelievable hope against hope.
  • Conversations in Daredevil season 3, such as when Ray Nadeem is questioning Karen after Fisk frames Matt as being an accomplice of his, and the conversation when Donovan is informing Fisk about being jumped by Daredevil in the Presidential Hotel's parking garage, suggest that Matt was reported missing around the same time as Daredevil was at Midland Circle.

Matt and Jessica's cat-and-mouse

• So in episode 3, when Matt was tailing Jessica on that crowded street, I gotta wonder, how exactly did Jessica turn the tables so that she was the one tailing Matt? Because the cinematography didn't make it clear.
  • Matt wasn't following her. She was ahead of him, noticed he was there, got suspicious (it's Jessica, after all), then circled around and tailed him. If he was actively following her then she never would have been able to do that.
  • It's pretty clear from the cinematography and the way Jessica is constantly looking over her shoulder that she knew she was being followed. Remember that Kilgrave had Malcolm secretly take photos of Jessica for months without her noticing. She probably got used to knowing if she were being followed and being able to evade them. Matt was following her footsteps and/or heartbeat. It doesn't appear that Matt "loses" track of Jessica per se, but he's just caught off guard about her managing to slip around him so quickly. Matt realizes this and tries to get away from her as fast as he can.
    • Or Jessica's just paranoid, which is entirely understandable. Matt has no reason to be tailing her, specifically, especially not in a way that would make him that blindingly obvious. Most likely Jessica noticed him, because she habitually scans her surroundings, and then started following him because she's suspicious.
  • When the camera cuts to Jessica's feet, the camera stops, a few pedestrians pass by, and then Matt enters the frame. The camera then fixates on Matt as he slows, pauses and tries to search for Jessica's heartbeat. Then, after he exits the frame, some more pedestrians go by and then Jessica resumes walking from about the spot where we last saw her feet, which suggests that she ducked in to one of the storefronts while Matt walked by, and with the large crowd of pedestrians and heartbeats, Matt was unable to single out Jessica.

Are The Fingers natives or outsiders?

• Its stated that the Hand leaders were originally from K'un-Lun before they were exiled, but they also mention that they returned to their birthplaces after that, implying that Sowande is African, Alexandra is European, Gao is Chinese and Murakami is Japanese. So which one is true? Because if its actually the latter case, I wonder how Bakuto, who is supposedly South American, manage to find his way into K'un-Lun located somewhere in Asia.
  • Davos is Indian (at least on his mother's side, according to Iron Fist season 2), so K'un L'un is more diverse than one would expect. There are also likely other gateways to K'un-L'un that we don't know of. Arguably, the differences in accents could also be attributed to each Finger spending enough time in a certain regions that they ended up picking up the local accent along the way (which could explain why Bakuto has a Japanese-sounding name yet is played by a Puerto Rican actor who is using his native accent).

Luke's lawyer

• I can understand how Foggy ended up being Luke's attorney instead of Matt, and it's great to see Foggy grow some independence. But it sometimes makes me, wonder, what if Matt had been Luke's lawyer instead of Foggy? And how that would have changed the events of The Defenders?
  • Not much aside showing that Matt's career might not be top notch, I mean Claire asked a lawyer to help Luke, and with Foggy working at Jeri it seems like those guys are nice people. With Matt it shows that he can't get a lawyer job anymore. Besides Matt's lawsuit was more touching than a wink at future team up could be.
  • It wouldn't have changed things that much if Matt had been Luke's lawyer. Matt and Luke would have just gone their separate ways, until inevitably meeting up at Midland Circle later on, to mass confusion on both their parts as to what the other was doing there, and "my lawyer is now working with my ex-girlfriend?" There wouldn't be much bonding between Matt and Luke before Midland Circle even if they were lawyer/client. It's still likely that Foggy would still have pulled in Matt when Hogarth determined that Jessica needed a lawyer since Foggy was trying to keep Matt busy, and it’s not like Matt wouldn’t have had time to defend Luke and defend Jessica, considering Luke’s getting out right away in the first episode.
  • There's two reasons why it was decided for Foggy to be Luke's lawyer instead of Matt. Out-of-universe, there's forced character separation. The only Defenders who have crossed paths before The Defenders were Luke and Jessica during season 1 of Jessica Jones. With the exception of Luke and Jessica, the writers want to avoid having these characters meet prior to their investigations into the Hand all converging on Midland Circle. The in-universe reason is less clearer. Obviously Matt would've been a cheaper and more available choice for Claire, given Foggy's new job, and Matt almost certainly would've happily taken Luke's case pro bono. There's also a number of reasons why Claire would have picked Foggy instead of Matt: 1) she's actually seen Foggy use his lawyer skills, since she got to see him lawyer those two thugs who tried to pick a fight in a crowded emergency room, and 2) by the end of season 2, Claire was kinda fed up with Matt and maybe she decided that in hiring Foggy, she'd avoid the drama that might ensue if she hired Matt to defend Luke. 'Cause think about it: at that point in time, bad things happened to Claire every time Matt came into her life. She fished him out of her dumpster, and got kidnapped by the Russians. At Matt's request, Claire took in a bunch of kids brainwashed by the Hand for treatment; the Hand attacked the hospital and took them right back and killed one of Claire's coworkers in the process, and Claire then lost her job because she refused to go along with the hospital's cover-up of the attack.
  • Claire only knows Matt as the vigilante. She meets Matt because she fished him out of a dumpster. She walks away from any romantic potential with him because of the insanity of his life. When Foggy got shot in the Reyes assassination, Claire even tried talking Matt into being more of a regular person and going inside the hospital to visit Foggy instead of hanging around on a rooftop in costume. Is it really that unreasonable that she would rather prefer not to hinge the future of a person she cares about on an unstable individual whom she only knows is a lawyer by a single exchange of dialogue? In the meanwhile, during the time when Matt was being held captive by Frank Castle on that rooftop, Foggy went to see Claire, and ended up talking down those two rival gang members from fighting in the emergency room. He took control of the room, prompting a little "whoa" reaction from Claire. She commented later about how good Foggy is with people, so if she's looking for a lawyer, she could either A) go with the straight-laced people person, or B) the complicated vigilante who might be beaten and lying in a gutter.
  • The only way in which Matt would have ended up being Luke's lawyer would be if Nelson & Murdock hadn't broken up in Daredevil season 2. If that had been the case, Nelson & Murdock would have defended Luke, instead of Foggy doing it through Hogarth Chao & Benowitz. Which would have also changed how Matt got involved with Jessica, as that would've involved Marci asking Foggy to look after Jessica, and Matt taking that case.

Elektra during the Midland Circle fight

• Why exactly does Elektra take a long roundabout route to enter the hallway where the four heroes are by going out the boardroom doors and then around the corner, rather than save a few seconds and just go through the hole Luke and Danny had just created in the wall during the first part of the fight?
  • The Hand sealed off the group's escape by coming at them from either side of the hall. The henchmen were coming up the stairs, blocking the elevators. Elektra came out of the boardroom and around the corner to make sure they couldn't escape to a different part of the floor.

Contradictions regarding resurrection

• The Defenders seems to be at odds with Iron Fist regarding how resurrection actually works. Some points in specific: according to The Defenders, the dragon bone substance is required for each resurrection. But then how did Harold Meachum come back without it in IF episode 9? Also, the other Fingers of the Hand are peeved when Alexandra uses the last of the substance on Elektra; but didn't Bakuto need some after Iron Fist? And if the substance isn't required every time and the Fingers could resurrect indefinitely (barring decapitation) as Harold did, then why are they making such a big deal of running out?
  • Because Harold got the dollar store version of coming back, where each time you die you become more and more insane and kill your loved ones for no reason, the substance is probably how the Fingers are still alive for centuries, sane and get superpowers out of it. Bakuto probably survived or simply required human blood to heal faster given he can take bullets without flinching.
  • Alternatively, the the dragon bone substance has the exact same effect on the Harold as it does on the Five Fingers. It's not explicitly stated that the substance is needed for EVERY resurrection, only that the Hand (or at least Alexandra) has Run Out Of Continues and need more of it. The simplest explanation is that they lied to Harold that he would continue to resurrect indefinitely, and that the substance only resurrects you a finite number of times per dose, and Harold had simply not run out yet. It also implies that the human body will eventually die of natural causes after it is killed and resurrected a certain number of times, as is happening with Alexandra. This also makes sense, as the Hand could not possibly predict when and how each of the members would die, or how many times, and hoping that their followers were on hand to administer the substance post-death is not reliable. It is much more reliable for the substance to automatically resurrect one a finite number of times, the Hand would know the exact number, keep a strict count, and then painlessly commit suicide when they were on their final life, in the company of followers who could safely administer the substance, at which point they would resurrect again and start the cycle over. They are all sociopathic enough to not care about getting more homicidal per death.
  • Or, even simpler: The Hand have no idea how the substance actually works. They know it brings you back, afterwards you don't age or get sick, and seem to resurrect indefinitely. This makes it exceptionally useful, so they start mining it to stockpile for loyal followers (Nobu) or as an effective bribe (Harold), destroying several cities along the way. However, they don't properly ration it, thinking each person only needs it once. Then Alexandra gets sick, which should be impossible, and they go into panic mode, accelerating the digging in New York when they realize they are all potentially vulnerable. This makes sense because if they knew they had a finite number of resurrections from the start, it would be exceptionally stupid to give it to Harold or the unnamed soldier in the story in Iron Fist, instead of just hoarding it all for themselves.

Shao-Lo is in New York

• Why is the dragon Danny punched in Asia buried under Midland headquarters? Like someone moved him there or it's like his past bodies teleport while he regrow a new one for the next Iron Fist?
  • It's not Shao-Lao the Undying. It's a totally different dragon.
  • Didn't Gao say "you punched him in the heart"?
  • Danny asked if it was Shao-Lao and Gao mocked him for expressing concern since he punched him in the heart, then explained that dragons once roamed the earth. The implication being that there were dragons under Pompeii and other cities they leveled.

Matt in the climax

• So how did Matt survive Midland Circle? As agile and strong as Matt is, he doesn’t have super-strength, and there’s no way he dragged himself up through several hundred feet of rubble.
  • There's a theory going around that the underground pit and dome had a secondary exit (which in part is the reason why some have theorized that Madame Gao also survived). By detecting a second escape route and not telling the others about it, Matt could ensure that Jessica, Danny and Luke got out the fastest way possible, while giving him the freedom to stay down and deal with Elektra a little longer without guaranteeing death. Regardless of that, having survived, it's possible that Matt will either make contact with Foggy and Karen right away once he's well enough to access a phone. It's also possible that he might decide to wait a while before announcing his return. He may conclude that this will finally allow Foggy and Karen to stop worrying about him, while giving him some room to sort his life out. This could either be really interesting or a major narrative step backward, depending on how it’s handled– but knowing Matt, it’s a possibility worth mentioning.
  • Season 3 of Daredevil establishes that he got spit out a sewer grate near the Hudson, got found by a cab driver, and he talked the driver into taking him to Father Lantom.

Where was the Punisher during all of this?

• Where was Punisher during the events of this series? The Hand was plotting to destroy New York City, and he already knows Daredevil personally...is there any good reason why he never showed up? His firearms and his willingness to kill are exactly what's called for in this situation. One bullet to Elektra's head coutesy of Frank Castle,and there, no more Black Sky (and Frank has plenty of bladed weapons he could and would use to chop off Elektra's head). And yeah, the other Netflix heroes have a code against killing, but try convincing the freaking Punisher to not kill his enemies when the fate of all of New York is at stake.
  • Frank Castle has his own war, against the guys who killed his family, and the last thing Matt needs is someone with guns showing all the Defenders how easy and good it feels to kill. Also how do they contact him? He didn't give Matt his phone number and aside from the earthquake, the Hand kept most of their action secret. So unless his crime sense is canon, Frank has no way to go "crime is happening there, I'll grab my gun and shoot everyone".
  • Matt already disagreed with Frank’s methods when they first faced off and I doubt the rest of the group would be any more accepting of his methods. It’s possible that they could work together, but they’d be keeping Frank on a short leash. In the comics, Frank usually works well with those who are able to tolerate his methods or resort to similar methods themselves, like Elektra, Ghost Rider and Wolverine.
  • Frank isn't a team player. Plus, the events of The Punisher (2017) take place after the events of The Defenders (given that Ellison is seen holding a newspaper headlined "CHAOS UNDER THE STREETS" - referring to the climax of The Defenders), meaning that at the time of The Defenders, Frank was hiding out on a Brooklyn construction site as Pete Castiglione, only going into Manhattan to meet up with Curtis.
  • The war between the Hand and the Chaste is a war between two top secret ninja conspiracies fighting each other in secret. Sure, Frank can mow through ninjas as well as anyone, as demonstrated when he gave cover fire to Matt in the season 2 finale, but he's not really designed for the kind of tracking you'd need to really hunt down the Hand. As demonstrated in Frank's own series, he's vulnerable to manipulation and subterfuge, and nearly died a bunch of times to an operation that was pretty hamfisted. Not that the Hand's been much better. If anything, Frank's a solution to a problem the Chaste didn't really have: like Matt is facing both times he's up against Wilson Fisk in Daredevil seasons 1 and 3, it's not killing the Hand leaders individually that's the hard part, it's pinning them down long enough to cut off the head, literally and metaphorically. Not only that, but the Hand have the advantage of numbers, and they can split up. One Finger provides a target for Frank, allowing the others to go on about their business as usual.
    In addition to that, Stick probably wouldn't want Frank's kind of exposure either. Because again, like the Hand, the Chaste also operate in secret, and they commit criminal activity themselves. Elektra murdered ninjas in Matt's apartment. Stick himself flat-out murdered that Black Sky boy that Nobu and his men were bringing in. Sure, that kid was the Black Sky who preceded Elektra, but would Frank Castle of all people care about that logic? Not that Matt or Stick would have to tell him, but that boy at the docks almost certainly was not the first or last kid Stick was prepared to kill (since he did try to kill Elektra, his own surrogate daughter; and he was also prepared to kill Danny to keep the Hand from using him), so if and when it came to that, it'd probably be best to not have a wildcard like Frank to cover your back. Best to stick to those with actually useful skillsets: Matt and Danny's martial arts training, and Luke and Jessica's superstrength.
  • Frank would laugh at Stick's warnings of mystical ninjas who want to lay waste to New York City by digging dragon bones from under Manhattan, and dismiss Stick as a psycho. Remember Matt doesn't wholly believe Stick's words, and both Jessica and Luke were very skeptical of it too. Even if he did believe Stick, this version of Frank is mostly focused on revenge. There aren't many instances across Daredevil or The Punisher where Frank targets random thugs who had no involvement in the Central Park shootout: just the child porn pawnshop owner, Lance's crew, and the thieves at the chop shop. Worth also asking is, did Stick even know about Frank? Everyone considered the Punisher dead, there were only three people (Matt, Karen, and Curtis) who know Frank is still alive (four if you count David among them). If the Hand couldn't track Frank down, Stick wouldn't either.

Mention the bodies, Danny!

• Luke and Danny's "privilege" argument, and Luke giving Danny the riot act, is powerful. But Danny probably could've been persuasive to Luke about his own arguments if he had mentioned the bodies that he had just caught Cole in the act of hosing down with acid.
  • Cole was in a hazmat suit and yells "I don't know! We are just the clean up!" Unless Danny assumed Luke is brain dead he already knows what Cole was doing. Even his "he was just looking for a job" excuse fell already flat when Danny says he works for a death cult. And it's already ridiculous to call Danny out for not using his money for good when that's all he did in Iron Fist, like maybe Harlem wasn't that riddled with Leishmaniasis or worked at the plant that was foreclosed with workers still on payroll but that shit does makes thing better and can avoid a bunch of crimes. Luke is kind of being an asshole saying your money can keep black people out of jail.
  • Luke isn't saying Danny's money can stop black people from going to jail. He's saying a super rich businessman can do a lot more by using his connections to stop money flow to corrupt companies instead of beating up poor people who have no idea the full extent of their employers motives and abilities.
  • Sowande is making money selling weapons and performing terrorist act in Africa, Gao is in the heroin business (and Danny did try blocking that legally too in his series), and the faction Nobu belonged to didn't seem to make any money in New York, just brainwashing kids with magic and setting up the Black Sky resurrection. Even Midland Circle isn't a real company; it's just an assassin hideout where they pose as businessmen but all pack guns and nightsticks. Like, Luke dismisses the mystical element but think Danny should start a legal battle against said mystical element.
  • To be fair, at the time Luke doesn't necessarily know that Cole was cleaning bodies, I'm pretty sure he only figured that out when he spoke to Misty, and after that, Cole. Honestly though, that whole argument could've been handled better; his speech to Danny about him being a rich businessman beating up on a kid who's poor is really more of a class thing than a race one. And struggling to get by or not; Cole loses quite a bit of sympathy when his new job involves getting rid of bodies (and judging by how his apartment is filled with some fairly expensive things, it's clear he'd been in the Hand's employ for a good amount of time, probably having started right after Candace was killed). Granted, by the time Cole realized what he was doing, it was too late to back out, but still. Bottom line; Luke doesn't really have much of a moral high ground in that argument when he doesn't even know what Cole was doing.
  • I think the show itself is aware of how Luke doesn't have moral high ground. While the conversation was too on-the-nose, the show seemed to know that both characters had good points and handled that reasonably well: Danny did try to use his wealth and his position as the head of Rand Enterprises to hit the Hand, while Cole getting murdered in jail was the wakeup call that told Luke that the Hand were a foe that needed to be attacked with brute force.
  • With the right communication they could have been on the same page way earlier, but that's not really a flaw. In fact, it captures the characters' personalities perfectly: Luke's got a pretty big chip on his shoulder trying to steer Cole on the right track, while Danny is about as hyper-focused as you can get, so their points are very consistent given what they've each got going on.
  • The whole argument was about Danny getting new insight about how to proceed with his crusade against the Hand, because "interrogate small fish to get to the big fish" thing has played out a lot in the standalone shows, so for Danny to go right to the top is refreshing. The real problem is that Cole as a character gains no sympathy. Sure you got a little bit in his last scene, but not enough. So it's hard to feel bad for him because he made his own choices. If he had been written as scared, remorseful, and having no choice but to do things like break down bodies, then Luke's arguments would've stuck. Thing is, it seemed pretty obvious that Cole signed up knowing exactly what he was getting into.
  • It's quite ironic, because incidentally, Luke used this "interrogate small fish to get to the big fish" method when he went after Cottonmouth. As he outlined to Bobby Fish, he'd take his pawns first then his rooks (Zip, Shades, etc.) and then queen (Mariah) before taking him out directly, so that's kind of hypocrite of him to say "no you start with the big one even though they are full strength and connection."
  • Danny's attitude towards the situation is the fact that he's seen, through Colleen, that good people can easily be deceived into joining the Hand's ranks. But Cole doesn't look to him like someone who went through Colleen's situation. Therefore, Danny's mentality is that Cole is a Hand soldier, while Luke sees Cole as a scared youth who has had a downward spiral after his sister was killed by the Stokes gang, and subsequently fell in with the wrong people.
  • Luke's argument about Cole doing it for the money here, is him just presenting the situation as he understands it: as far as Luke can tell, Cole and his brother took the job for the purpose of money. There’s clearly a lot more to it than that, but Cole’s tight-lippedness on the subject makes that tough for Luke to pick apart. And more to the point, it’s not just a problem limited to Cole: he's just one of several underprivileged kids the Hand have been recruiting from Harlem, and Luke doesn’t know every victim’s story, but the one overarching motivation that Sowande seems to be exploiting when it comes to recruiting youth from Harlem, is that most of them are probably financially desperate. Danny argues that money isn’t a strong enough reason for someone to dispose of dead bodies for a shady criminal organization; Luke argues that it is. The root of Luke’s message is that personal details are irrelevant: it doesn’t matter whether or not Cole has had a horrible year with the recent deaths of both of his siblings. His reasons for taking the job are actually irrelevant too. Cole is still a relatively innocent kid with a lot of time to turn his life around, and is currently vulnerable to systemic injustice, and Luke believes that Danny should have taken that into account and left him alone. This is compounded by the fact that Luke is upset about his own failure to prevent Cole from getting arrested, and is pinning that guilt on Danny. And Luke also isn't going to admit to how he failed Cole's sister anytime soon, since Candace's death was the last thing that happened to him before he went back to prison.

Matt's apartment

• In some of the reviews I've come across a question people have been having is, how can Matt afford his apartment while working pro bono? I could understand him affording when he had the semi-irregular income of Nelson & Murdock, but now he's taking pro bono cases.
  • In Daredevil season 1, it had been established that rent prices in Hell's Kitchen dropped due to the Incident. We know that from the conversation Matt and Foggy had with the realtor when settling on their new office space for Nelson & Murdock. As Matt has mentioned to Karen and Jessica, there is the billboard across the street that lets in a lot of light (which would bother anyone who isn't a blind man like Matt). As he said to Karen about the billboard:
    Karen Page: Holy shit...
    Matt Murdock: Went up a year ago. I'm told that co-op there nearly rioted. Some oversight from the developer's agreement. Upside is nobody wanted it so I got a corner apartment at a helluva discount.
  • ..but that doesn't answer, how does Matt pay rent? Well, the best theory that I've seen going around is that Matt is living off of Elektra's money. Elektra had made a deposit into Nelson & Murdock trying to force Matt's hand. We don't know how much she paid them, but it was large enough for Foggy to utter "Holy shit!" when the bank called to inform him about it. On top of that, Elektra did admit in a later episode that Matt was a mission for her, that she was only meant to seduce Matt and bring him back into the Chaste but instead against orders, she fell in love with him. Knowing that much, it wouldn't be far-fetched to imagine that Elektra would have named Matt as the sole beneficiary of her will.
  • It also appears that Matt broke the lease he and Foggy had on the Nelson & Murdock office space. It's not exactly visible at first (you don't really get a good look at it until episode 5 when Elektra first enters the apartment), but Matt has moved his Nelson & Murdock desk into his living room.
  • Matt is lawyer broke not people broke, he can't afford adding an office in his expense but he can pay his rent and food with what is left in his account. Especially when the rent is cheap.
  • Pro bono doesn't necessarily mean "has no income." Matt could well have been receiving donations from grateful clients, for example, or worked non-pro bono cases as well. Between that, working out of his apartment, having no employees, living in an extremely low-rent apartment in a low-rent area of the city, and having no car note to worry about, Matt's got very little overhead he has to worry about.
  • Given how much of a hero reputation Matt seems to be acquiring as a lawyer, donations are a possibility. Like, when Matt takes on a civil suit pro bono and wins, the client probably throws him some of that money whether or not he asks. And while Nelson & Murdock might have been bankrupt by the end, Foggy and Matt themselves weren't necessarily broke as individuals. Wesley did pay them a substantial check when hiring them to defend John Healy, and Matt and Foggy were probably paid very well when they were interning at Landman & Zack. Even if Matt's operating at a loss right now, he's ways away from being homeless and forced to move in with Karen or Foggy.

Nobu's agenda

• Murakami didn't seem that interested in the Black Sky and Nobu tried to convert Elektra right away without the Fingers showing. Did he have his own plan or he was working with Alexandra on this one?
  • The Hand seems to have multiple, sometimes conflicting, operations going simultaneously, likely on the idea that at least one will be successful and move them closer to their goals. Gao and Nobu were both advancing Alexandra's agenda in Daredevil seasons 1 and 2, in regards to the Black Sky. Gao was moving drugs with Fisk and the Russians and working with Fisk to acquire Midland Circle, while Nobu was bringing in Black Skies. But claiming the property the dragon is buried under so they can get at it before they all die? That's the entire Hand's overarching goal, so it's an "all hands on deck" situation.
  • Murakami's more frustrated that one of his best subordinates, if not HIS BEST, died attempting to retrieve the Black Sky. He would be wondering just how much they should risk. The conversations between the Fingers imply that they originally supported Alexandra’s little Black Sky project, because they believed Alexandra's claims that it would help them all. But it was solely Alexandra's idea, and the instant Elektra showed up and their situation failed to improve (quite the opposite, it just made things worse), Murakami and the others started growing skeptical and withdrawing their support.

The earthquake

• So what was the purpose of that, precisely? It didn't really look like the earthquake gave them access to anything they couldn't access before. And how was the Hand's original plan sped up compared to what they'd planned earlier?
  • The earthquake was caused by underground detonation (the geologist that calls into Trish's radio show expresses this theory, and it was later confirmed in the architect subplot as well as Gao's statements to Alexandra). The Hand was trying to get the door leading to the dragon bones. As for the speeding up part, while that was never fully explored, I would imagine it would have involved smaller, more controlled detonations that would avoid detection.

Legal consequences for the team

• How exactly was Foggy able to let the team off the hook for blowing up a building? The last time the team talked to the NYPD, they were tight-lipped about what the Hand even is. Would they even have any proof, especially after the HQ of the Hand went down in dust? Sure, to them nobody that matters got hurt (other than Matt), but from the outside, it looks like a team of superheroes assisted by a nurse and a woman with a katana brought down a building that was mostly empty but still killed some employees whose involvement in crime was nowhere near established, and who at any rate probably shouldn't be sentenced to vigilante execution because of it.
  • The NYPD are covering themselves, because to charge Luke, Jessica and Danny would mean Commissioner Reagan having to explain to the media how they lost a shit ton of C4 they had just confiscated in a big bust just a few days prior, why these three did it, and how come Midland Circle's basement is three hundred feet deep.
  • We saw from the Trish Talk scene at the start of episode 2 that the authorities were working to cover up any questions about the earthquake, meaning that influential figures in City Hall were on the Hand's payroll (some of these being people personally put there by Bakuto). If charges are brought against the protagonists, then there would be a big trial with lots of publicity and testimony from the defendants as to why they blew up the building. That brings media attention to the existence of the Hand and puts the idea out there that they were the cause of the earthquake. From there, curious investigators (from the media or law enforcement) could make the logical step of looking at who was shutting down discussion of the earthquake and tracking down their connections with the Hand. Normal procedure for these situations with potential exposure would probably be to use the Hand's resources to assassinate or legally railroad the witnesses. However in this case: 1) The Hand's leadership is dead or missing and the organization is doubtless in turmoil. 2) The witnesses are highly resistant to assassination. And 3) One of the defendants would be Danny Rand, a billionaire with great legal representation who has already gathered evidence of the Hand's financial crimes, with a firmly established money trail. No way that isn't making it into the public record. Given all this, it's just self-protection for the local dirty politicians to pull the plug on the trial before it starts.

Judas bullets

• Considering how powerful The Hand is, and how many organizations they have infiltrated, shouldn't they have known about the Judas bullets? And easily get some of them to deal with Luke Cage once it was clear he was becoming a problem for them?
  • No one sells Judas bullets anymore after the Diamondback fiasco. And if any are found, the cops are gonna go on high alert because they are extremely prohibited, which blow their cover.
  • It's pretty possible that the Hand were trying to get their hands on Judas bullets but just couldn't in time. Even so, having the contacts to get just about anything doesn't mean that they're aware that something exists. Like I have access to the internet, but that doesn't mean that I know everything that's on it, and sometimes I don't even know how to find what I'm looking for. Or even maybe I'm looking for something totally misguided and it turns out what would actually have solved my problem was something entirely different but available the whole time.
  • They were rallies in Harlem asking cops to use Judas bullets, they aren't a secret half way through the first season of Luke Cage. So unless the Hand refused to follow that story about weapon made to kill superhuman it's more plausible they just didn't anticipate super humans despite being super themselves.
  • Judas bullets were still available on the streets at the start of Luke Cage season 2. Even if the Hand had access to them, the events of the series took place over a couple of days, and only in those last few days did they become aware that they were fighting Luke Cage. They wouldn't have had time to ship in any weapons and ammo specialized in killing Luke.
    • Furthermore, even if the Hand had access to Judas bullets, they wouldn't actually be effective against Luke at all. It's later revealed in Luke Cage season 2 that Luke's skin was actually extra strengthened by the acid bath in Dr. Burstein's barn, as Luke finds out when Arturo Rey tries to use a Judas shotgun on him and it does nothing. Misty also tries to get Arturo to snitch on Mariah by mentioning that it's a federal crime to be in possession of weaponry made from alien metals salvaged from the Incident (with a hefty jail sentence attached), which even for an organization the size of the Hand would mean Judas bullets are hard to come by. Really, the Hand had no counter-measures to Luke that would prove effective. The only reason Elektra was able to defeat Luke during her kidnapping of Danny was because, much like why Luke lost the showdown with Bushmaster on the High Bridge, he'd been drugged (of course, Elektra wasn't deliberately drugging Luke to put him at a disadvantage; she took advantage of Luke having already been weakened by Stick's incense).

Some Foggy priorities

• When Matt and Foggy are having drinks at Josie's, the conversation turns to Karen. Matt says he and Karen are, to quote the latter, "figuring things out." Foggy's response is a, "Good. After you told her your little secret, lucky she didn't freak out and have us both disbarred." It's kinda odd for me that Foggy would say such a thing like that he and Karen are supposed to be friends even after all that happened in Daredevil season 2.
  • It was mostly lighthearted, and it's not like being your friend for two years and being secretive about your past means the person is gonna take your secret well.
  • I get that he's concerned but Foggy seemed a bit more selfish this season in the sense that he kept referring to himself getting disbarred multiple times instead of his worries for Matt. I understand he's finally in his dream job but a lot of the lines just fell kind of flat. The Karen reference in particular is annoying because it's so out of character not only for trusting Foggy to say but also because Karen just wouldn't do that. The best guess that I had is that all of Foggy's talk about his fear of getting disbarred is foreshadowing just how hard Fisk is going to be coming down on Foggy in Matt's absence.
  • Foggy tends to like making fatalistic jokes.
  • Foggy believes that he's actually trying to help Matt, but he just can't help himself and act superior as hell while doing so. Seriously, on a second viewing, Foggy seems to get really passive-aggressive with Matt without realizing it. A huge part of why Foggy acts like he does, the way he only manages to see the bad side of what Matt does, the way he acts unnecessary shitty about it like in this specific situation, where this specific comment felt very uncalled for and quite absurd - I think it's about his self-esteem issues. It's very clear throughout the comics, and through all three seasons of Daredevil (moreso in season 1), that for a long time Foggy felt inferior to Matt (that Matt was the hotter, better lawyer who got all the girls, etc) and while there was a lot of admiration in that and a lot of trust, Foggy still didn't like feeling inferior. So now? He uses any situation he gets to make himself feel better. Even in the scene at the precinct, Foggy kinda sounds more like Matt's lawyer than his concerned friend, and he kinda makes it a bit about himself, instead of acknowledging that Matt has some very valid reasons for his actions and that it's actually quite admirable that he does it. It should be considered that Matt and Foggy's friendship is flawed, just like Matt and Karen's romance is flawed, which is why it feels so real.

Collecting Matt's clothes

• After Matt wakes up on the precinct couch, Foggy hurriedly tells Matt that they took his dress shirt to collect blood samples. Question: if the police had to seize Matt's shirt as evidence, wouldn't they also take his blazer? Shouldn't the blazer also have blood on it that would need to be tested?

Trish and Karen

• So how did Trish peg that Karen was a reporter when she showed up at the precinct?
  • It's established to have been many months since the end of Daredevil season 2, enough for Karen to build up a reputation at the Bulletin. It's possible Trish has even hosted Karen on Trish Talk once or twice and knows her from that.
  • We know from the restaurant scene that Trish wants to be a bulldog reporter. It's logical she'd keep aware of other bulldog reporters active in the same city.

Inconsistent Afterlife

• Alexandra and Harold Meachum before her described seeing The Nothing After Death during their times, well, dead. Yet Ghost Rider exists in the MCU, which should at least imply the existence of Hell (this troper hasn't seen much Agents of SHIELD so maybe he's missing something). So why is it that they saw nothing of an afterlife?
  • They didn't die, they might as well have just been laid out waiting for their body to recover, besides Mephisto's realm could as well be something like the Dark Dimension in Doctor Strange. Not really Hell and not really the Devil but could fool anyone a first sight.
  • Funnily enough, Robbie Reyes described his brief death exactly the same way as Harold and Alexandra; there was nothing but darkness. The main difference is that Robbie then heard a voice offering to bring him back and he took it, becoming the Ghost Rider in the process.
  • Just because they saw nothing doesn't mean there's nothing to see. They may not have died "enough" to actually make it to an afterlife before being pulled back (and getting to the afterlife may mean you've gone "too far" to be pulled back), or maybe the human mind just can't retain memories of what lies beyond when it returns to the physical world, resulting in a "blank" spot that people refer to as "nothing." That certainly seems to be what Harold had been implying that it was like for him.

Why not tell them about Elektra

• Why exactly does Matt lie about everything Elektra related? I mean, it's not like he caused her to be the Black Sky and therefore be trying to kill them all. Why couldn't he have just been like "she's my ex-girlfriend. We used to run together. We were fighting the Hand, she died, and they apparently brought her back. Thing is, she's not herself. She's brainwashed. But I think I can get through to her?" Obviously Matt wants to keep Elektra alive and get her back to her old self. Wouldn't the others be more inclined to not kill her if they knew that A) She's not really herself and she can potentially be saved, and B) Matt has a deep connection to her?
  • He doesn't know those guys, and given everyone makes fun of Danny for saying his fist is chi why do you think they'll believe the whole she was killed but resurrected and is now evil, although she was kind of evil before too and tried joining the Hand once when she was alive.
  • Danny would certainly believe the resurrection thing, given his experiences with Harold.
  • Yes but Matt doesn't give a shit about Danny since like all the others he sees him as a kid who is better locked away instead of with them so his opinion on the Elektra thing doesn't matter to Matt.
    • Matt does care about Danny. Danny would believe it if Matt said Elektra was resurrected.
  • Jessica gives Matt a hard time for lying about Elektra. Which becomes very hypocritical after Jessica Jones season 2 has her exhibit a similar moment of secrecy regarding the IGH killer being her mom.
  • To be fair to Matt, he's just met these guys, and he's had trust issues since forever. He doesn't treat any better Foggy and Karen, who are supposed to be his most trusted friends. At the same time, Matt doesn't exactly get anything out of not telling them about Elektra from the get-go. With Foggy and Karen, it was a matter of trying to protect them/not getting lectured. With these guys...he...just doesn't.
  • It's possible that Matt was going to tell Danny and Luke about Elektra after Jessica bailed on them. Danny tries to ask Matt about the last time he got involved with the Hand, but Stick speaks up before Matt can answer. Danny's question was addressed to Matt, and if Stick hadn't interrupted, Matt probably would've said something along the lines of, "Uh, well...they did some business with Wilson Fisk a few years back, until I took him down. And then a couple months ago, I assisted another one of Stick's students in a crusade she was carrying out against the Hand a few months back. It didn't end well for us. They...they killed her. And now the Hand has revived her and is using her for their dirty work. Her name is Elektra. She was the woman with the swords."
  • A big thing to remember is that Matt is very skeptical about anything Hand related, resurrection included (remember how he reacted to Stick bringing that up in Daredevil season 2). When Elektra overpowered him in Midland Circle and he recognized her heartbeat, he sounds more confused than anything, like "This can't be Elektra. I felt her die in my arms. I buried her."^note Incidentally, this highlights a disadvantage Matt has because of him being blind: if he were sighted, he'd know right away that it was Elektra Therefore, he doesn't bring up Elektra at the Royal Dragon probably because he isn't certain about it. He only realizes that it really is Elektra when Stick brings up the encounter he'd had with Elektra when being held captive. That said, if Danny had been part of this conversation, he would probably have agreed with Stick's warnings that this revived Elektra is not the same person that Matt fell in love with in college, citing his own experiences with Harold Meachum.

Who is the more experienced martial artist?

• I have to wonder, is Matt or Danny the more experienced martial artist?
  • Matt by a longshot. He has more experience than Danny because he's been doing the street scene for longer. Not to mention his fighting style is a little different in the sense that since he incorporates boxing and other styles, so Matt is bit more unpredictable than someone like Colleen who's basically been learning one given style their whole lives.
  • Unless he summons the Iron Fist, Danny is just a regular person with superior training. Matt has heightened abilities. He has better anticipation because of this and can better counter strike. If anything their strength is similar. Matt consistently fares better against opponents Danny has trouble with. Take the final episode: Matt is taking on two fingers handily while Danny gets beat on by Elektra. Then Matt proves he's at least equal to Elektra.
  • Yes but in the first episode he was on match with Elektra and at Midland he forced her to retreat with his punch. And if Matt's enhanced sense count as "Martial Art experience" so is Danny chi punch, which was shown to be able to do way more.
  • Matt is more experienced than Danny due to the diversity of his experience. It's the difference between someone who has learned how to do something in theory, versus someone who has put it into practice many times. Danny did train in K'un-L'un for 15 years but these were sparring matches, and likely within a unified style. His experience actually fighting enemies trying to kill him is very limited, with maybe the exception being the fight with Davos we saw in Iron Fist season 2 that decided who would face Shao-Lao. Matt on the other hand has shown proficiency in multiple styles and has been forced to put his abilities to the test in life and death situations multiple times. He has even grown as a better fighter since Daredevil season 1, hence his ability to successfully take on Nobu in season 2.
  • Matt was trained well after his adolescent years and he has been regularly going to Fogwell's Gym for as long as Foggy has known him if not longer. Also even though Danny might have been training for far longer than Matt, training and experience are two different things. Matt has been fighting criminals and gangs for a long time and has had more fights where his opponents were actively trying to kill him with knives or guns. Not to mention that Matt's senses are far beyond that of Danny's.
  • Danny has trained longer than Matt, but just because someone has trained longer doesn't automatically mean they're going to be better than someone else who hasn't trained as long. It's entirely possible for a gifted person with 3 years experience to beat a person with average talent and 10 years experience. There's a reason why Stick called Matt one of the most gifted fighters he's ever seen. Matt was born to fight. While Danny is obviously a great fighter too, he simply might not have the raw talent that Matt has and therefore is still below his level despite his longer training.
  • Danny's 15 years of training is worthless if he continually goes after the wrong enemies, falls for traps and walks into the lion's den with no plan and no exit strategy. Matt is reckless and he has made some mistakes like when he fought the Russians and his first time fighting Fisk and Nobu, but he is much more methodical about which enemies he goes after, why, and what to do with them if he wins.
  • Danny is probably more experienced, given he has been training for years, learned to master his chi and was the best student in K'un-L'un (and given the flashbacks, saying his life wasn't on the line during sparring matches is probably not true). But Matt's body armor, enhanced senses and high pain threshold makes him a better vigilante, but that's not martial arts. That's just him winning by endurance alone, like how his father was never knocked out in the ring but was still a rather mediocre boxer. Matt struggles against guys like Rance, Healy, Fisk, Nobu, and Dex, and would have died in his first face-offs with Nobu and with Dex. Whereas Danny went to a Hand kumite and defeated them all with his bare hands, even if they used poison and dirty tricks. Looking at their hallway fights, unless throwing a TV counts as experienced martial art moves, Danny and Davos fleeing the Hand compound was done way more skillfully while Matt just powers through with determination.
    • For those of you who believe Danny has been training longer, you forget that Matt is several years older than him and has been training since he was ten years old. And since he was trained by Stick, we can assume he learned more than boxing. And you forget that he didn't start with body armor. In Daredevil season 1 and in Daredevil season 3, he's wearing thick black long-johns which provide him with no protection whatsoever. And while he may endure a lot of pain, there's so much more to it than that. Throughout season one, we see Matt constantly improving his skills, repeating certain moves with more finesse. His style is more brutal than Danny's but no less effective. And Battlin' Jack wasn't a mediocre boxer by a longshot, since he won against Creel by a knockout, something no one else could do. And while Matt struggled with Rance, Healy, Fisk, and Dex, those men were all formidable combatants in their own right, Fisk himself also having immense strength and durability to add to his already decent boxing and wresting moves, and Dex being an FBI agent wearing a Daredevil suit procured by Fisk and taking advantage of Matt not being in 100% fighting condition. And Nobu was Murakami's second-in command, not to mention he had his kyoketsu-shoge, which gave him a major advantage. In the meantime, Danny struggled against singular members of the Hand, like King (who was only a big and strong guard), the Veznikov Brothers, Zhou Cheng and so on. And while Danny and Davos' escape from the Hand was impressive, you neglect to factor in that Danny had backup. Matt on the other hand was alone. And the fact is, throwing a microwave (not a TV), while not martial arts, is actually a good idea, considering those men were armed. The Hand generally didn't go for knives and guns, plus they were all young men and women, skilled no doubt but still inexperienced and physically weaker. The Russians and the Dogs of Hell were all hardened criminals and they did not go down without a fight. Danny's fight against the Hatchet Men who tried to snatch Joy would be a better comparison, but even then, there were only seven of them while Matt had to fight eight Russians in the first hallway fight while also recuperating from a bad stab wound; FIFTEEN to TWENTY Dogs of Hell in the second, all of them armed with machetes, some with guns, while recovering from a concussion and being chained by Frank to a chimney for hours with a gun taped to one hand, and a chain on his other, and in the third season fought his way through a prison full of Fisk's henchmen while drugged with sedatives.
  • Matt was trained by Stick for two years at most, after that all self taught and he probably had to do other stuff like studying for his law degree, compared to Danny who did have downtime but still trained until he had to kill a dragon. Murdock was a mediocre boxer has we were told numerous times he had a poor track record and beating a guy who was told "wait until the fifth to lay him out" is not that awesome (you can't fix a game with just one in on it). Add that everyone was armed in the Hand kumite but Danny (who again poisoned half-way when it was singular fight) and there is no reason to underscore those victory over Fisk's assassin (or for that matter believing King is weaker than Fisk, one is an enforcer and the other is a kingpin whose main tactic is throw a tantrum and headbutts).
  • If that's how you see it, you are wrong. Just saying. Matt may not have trained for long with Stick, but those two years were no less intense than what Danny went through. Plus, even during his college years, he could match Elektra, and the season 1 finale established that he trained in his free time (Foggy knew Matt regularly traveled to Fogwell's, but said nothing because he thought it was due to Matt's sentimental attachments to the place, which was just half the truth). Matt's father was not mediocre, far from it. The only reason Jack had a losing record was because he accepted the bribes from Roscoe Sweeney to throw some of his fights (he did it more than once). He also, as I said before, defeated Carl Creel, who was notorious for cheating and would later become the Absorbing Man. And you're excuse that Creel was caught off guard by Jack not following the plan? That may have given him two or three punches at best, and then it would become clear that he was not quitting. And I'm sorry if you don't believe that an Elite Mook of the Hand is not up to snuff with Wilson Fisk or Dex, but take a look the facts: Fisk has unnatural strength for a human, overpowered Anatoly with sheer brute force, shrugged off Owlsley's attempt to tase him, and took a great deal of hits from Matt's billy club before going down. Plus, he knows how to use his size, acting as a bull or a linebacker and he also had the same protective garments that make up Matt's suit. There's just no comparison. Dex later ends up being the same thing, him having a lot of self-training, Army training, and Fisk supplying him a Daredevil suit.
  • Two or three punches lay out a guy in most boxing match and sorry but at which point was Fisk ever said to have inhuman or superior strength, because he can beat someone forty pounds lighter than him or not be tazed through Fisk clothes doesn't mean stronger than a bunch of trained assassins part that scared Fisk (he himself asked them for a specialist to take out Daredevil from the Hand and he couldn't finish the half dead man himself). Don't tell me boxing at a gym and having a flirt fight is the same intensity as punching a dragon and say I'm the one who is wrong.
  • You ARE wrong. About everything. Real boxing fights rarely end in just two or three punches. If it was bare-knuckle boxing then maybe but it wasn't. Then there's the fact that Fisk was not tasered through his clothes, he got it right on the face. And considering it put Matt out of comission, that means it wasn't a second-rate product. And just because Fisk is afraid, that doesn't mean we can overlook his power. He benches at least 400 lbs. He snapped a pair of handcuffs without much effort. And he displayed basic combat skills, which coupled with his size make him a fearsome force to be reckoned with. Then you assume I am comparing Matt's boxing and his fling with Elektra with Danny's battle against Shou-Lao. I'm not. I said he trained for longer. And while Matt never faced a dragon, he started facing threats just as deadly in his early career.
  • Important to consider is that these sorts of "who's the better fighter?" questions require also considering the scenarios and little details of the fights, like "Are they armored or not?" "What is the win condition of the fight? Knockout? Death?" "Are they fighting with normal characterization and morals on? Are they bloodlusted?" "Where does the fight take place?" "What is the lighting like?" "What distance do the fighters have from each other when it starts?" "Are characters aware of each other's abilities?" All of these are variables that can make significant differences in advantages and outcomes of a fight.

Claire's double standard

• Why does Claire not have a problem with Luke's hero complex when she had a problem with Matt's? Luke may be reticent at first, but he takes on Harlem’s problems like no one else can do it, just like Matt takes on Hell's Kitchen like no one else can do it. Luke feels just as guilty over people he doesn’t save, but unlike Matt, Claire doesn’t make Luke feel bad about that guilt.
  • Character Development. Claire had a problem with Matt's hero complex when it looked like he was just smacking around gangsters for his own jollies. After multiple encounters with superpowered individuals, being kidnapped by the Russians, attacked by undead ninjas, and many run-ins with situations forcing her to compromise her beliefs, including getting forced out of her hospital, Claire's changed her views and thinks it's more acceptable now, especially with Luke, who is genuinely selfless and doesn't act like he's trying to do it because he enjoys it.
  • When Claire encourages Matt to continue his vigilante activity while he's pursuing the Russians and Fisk, she is speaking from a place of fear. She’s just been kidnapped and threatened, she has been thrown headfirst into Hell’s Kitchen’s criminal underworld, and she feels unsafe. She’s also seen all of the people Matt has saved through her work at the hospital, and she wants to believe that he can beat back all of the darkness she now sees around her. She supports the idea of superheroes, and she likes what Matt is trying to do. But between episodes 4 and 11 of Daredevil season 1, Claire also comes to realize that Matt really doesn’t know what he’s doing. He is nearly killed over and over again, he contemplates killing Fisk, and he demonstrates that he may be too unpredictable at this point to be someone she wants to have in her life. She supports what he’s trying to do, she wants him to survive, she likes and admires him, but she breaks up with him for the very valid reason that she doesn’t know how far he might go, or when he might break, or what kind of danger he may inadvertently place her, or himself, in next.
    By the time Claire runs into Luke in his show, she’s been around the block a few times. She’s gotten a bit more accustomed to danger, and she’s come to realize that a certain level of peril can be expected when superheroes show up. She has, to a certain extent, hardened herself to it. Heck, by this point she’s decided she wants to hang out around superheroes for a living. The idea of immersing herself in that world and all of the darkness that surrounds it isn’t as frightening as it was back in the first season of Daredevil. More to the point, Luke doesn’t have Matt’s unresolved emotional turmoil (although he does have emotional baggage with Reva). Luke questions his place in the world, he questions whether or not he wants to be a hero, but his actions and motivations are always clear. Claire supports him as a hero just like she supports Matt, but she also feels comfortable starting up a romantic relationship with him because he is generally more emotionally secure and consistent than Matt. He’s also much less likely to be killed in action, and she probably feels safer around him.
  • A lot of it probably just has to do with time passing. By the time Claire reconnects with Luke in Luke Cage, she’s had enough experiences with “special people” to know that it’s something she doesn’t want to run away from (like she tells her mom, she finally feels like she’s found her calling in helping them). When she first met Matt, the whole vigilante thing was brand new to him; he was a little confused himself about what he was doing, and Claire wanted no part in helping him figure it out, so she cut that relationship off before it even really began. There is a big change between season 1 Daredevil Claire and season 1 Luke Cage Claire, and by the time we get to Luke Cage, she didn’t resist falling for Luke mostly because of her change of attitude; she’d been through enough by now that it was no longer something to try desperately to get away from (although she probably still kind of wishes she did), and recognized that she could bring something to the equation. That change of attitude happened simply because of time/her experiences. Also, Luke is dramatically less likely to wind up on her doorstep bleeding and unconscious.
  • Well, it makes sense when you consider how Claire has always drawn a short stick every time she's crossed paths with Matt: the first time, it is to stitch him up after he's injured fighting the Russians. The second time, it is because she gets kidnapped by the Russians as bait for Matt. The third time is when Foggy has to have her stitch Matt up after Nobu and Fisk cut him up. And the fourth time is when he indirectly causes the Hand's attack on the hospital that kills her friend and gets her fired.
  • Claire's change of heart and the reasons for it require interpreting what's in Claire's headspace, which is unknown. But the situation with Luke and the situation with Matt are two different things. Claire does want to be there for Matt, and she sees that he needs help, and she does help him again and again, despite the danger this presents to both her job and her life. But there’s also a big factor in her decision to leave in Season 2: the Hand's hospital attack. Claire trusts Matt and– again– helps him in his time of need, and this results in 1. the deaths of two innocent bystanders (Stan and Louisa), 2. Claire literally murdering one of the ninjas, 3. A huge blow to Claire’s worldview (encountering Hand resurrection up close and personal), and 4. her sudden and complete disillusionment with the medical establishment to which she has devoted her life. While quitting her job and leaving Hell’s Kitchen might seem not very heroic, and yeah, maybe she should have stuck around to be there for Matt no matter what, it's also unfair to fault her for putting her own needs first. It’s reasonable for Claire to want to remove herself from the situation, to take the time to visit family and rethink her life. There’s also the fact that after quitting her job, she may have had no choice but to move in with her mother in Harlem. She mentions in Luke Cage that she's been blacklisted at every other hospital in the city. (Yes, it's only a short ride downtown on the A train to get from Harlem to Hell’s Kitchen, but the point still seems worth making.) Claire doesn’t leave permanently– she’ll certainly be back, and she says she wants to devote herself to helping superheroes, with Matt certainly included. She still wants to be there for Matt, in the long run. But she is not beholden to Matt. Her world has just been turned upside down, and she needs a break.
    • At this point it would be easy to ask the question: if she was distancing herself from vigilantism, why would she jump right into the middle of Luke’s problems (besides the obvious "otherwise we'd have a Claire-less Luke Cage")? Well, technically, she doesn't. She introduces herself to Luke when she sees him having breakfast with Bobby Fish at her mom's diner, and steps over to see if he’s doing alright after the whole incident with Jessica shooting him in the head with a shotgun. Claire has been consistently characterized as someone who will always help when needed, so when her casual conversation with Luke then turns into her having to save a dying Detective Scarfe, she has to do something. Because the situation escalates with the arrival of Diamondback (as all superhero stories are bound to do), Claire finds herself inadvertently sucked into Luke’s story. She's not in a place where she can decide, “Well okay, I think I’ve found my footing again, so I’ll just leave Luke here to die and go check on Matt”. Her decision to break up with Matt in Daredevil season 1 was out of concern for both his and her safety, and fear of his apparent shaky morality. But her decision to leave Hell’s Kitchen in Daredevil season 2 appears to be purely situational. By that point, Claire knew Matt a little better, Daredevil had become a more established figure in the community. And had the Hand's attack on the hospital hadn’t happened, she would have stuck around Hell's Kitchen for god knows how long. It’s hard to determine whether she would have regained an interest in being romantically involved with Matt, but she certainly would have continued to help him.
    • But we also need to be realistic about Matt. As lovable a character as Matt is, he can be difficult person to be around. He can be stubborn, untruthful, emotionally volatile, make poor decisions (his fights with Fisk, visiting the prison using Foggy's Bar ID), takes unnecessary risks (his first fights with Frank)… and these are all things that make Matt Murdock a fun and fascinating character, but they’re not desirable boyfriend traits unless you're someone like Elektra. Claire decided to stop dating Matt at a point when she was disturbed by the moral line toward which he was edging. By Daredevil Season 2, Claire knows Matt has stepped away from that line, but he still has a lot of his personality/lifestyle elements that initially drove her away. She has decided to maintain a platonic distance for now, but remember that by choosing to break up with Matt she is not abandoning him, or ignoring his problems. Of course, Luke is far from perfect too. Like Matt, Luke has his problems, and he certainly does have a lot of baggage. The big difference is that Luke doesn’t bring his baggage into the lives of those around him to the large degree that Matt does. His pain over losing Reva and then discovering the true nature of her feelings toward him doesn't negatively impact his interactions with Claire. (On the other hand, this does impact Luke's relationship with Jessica. However, since she was the person who killed Reva, and she was under Kilgrave's control at the time it happened, that’s a bit of a special case…).
    • But this is all debatable. Claire never actually comes out and says why exactly she’s more comfortable dating Luke than Matt, so it's up to the audience to draw meaning from it. There’s also the fact that not all of Claire's motivations can be logically extrapolated, because when it comes down to it, she’s a fictional character in a TV show. She does what she does because it’s what the writers want her to do. The show implies that Claire chooses Luke over Matt for a reason, and it’s up to each viewer to decide whether that choice seems to make sense in the context of the story.
  • The irony is, in Luke Cage season 2, she breaks up with Luke for the same reasons that she broke up with Matt, and this is after he gets aggressive and nearly kills Cockroach: not wanting to have relationships with emotionally-immature men that have anger-management issues. Suffice to say, she gets moments of very strong characterization throughout the various shows. But, her personality and development are very much dependent on 1) the writing staff and 2) the series she’s in. As a result, the people writing her didn’t always treat her like she was a fully-formed character.

Jessica and Midland Circle

• So I can get what led Luke to Midland Circle (the parking slip in Cole's possessions) and what he may have been looking for. But before Matt sidetracked her into going upstairs, what was Jessica expecting to find at Midland Circle pertaining to her case?
  • Jessica's entire detective style involves going to places and observing until something suspicious pops up. Either that or she shows up, pokes something, and sees what happens. She was probably planning to walk in, look around, and see if she could find anything suspicious or could provoke a suspicious response.

Bulletproof Bakuto

• So how did Bakuto shrug off the bullets when Misty shot him, like they were nothing? Kevlar vest or is there something about the Hand's resurrection ability that makes the Fingers able to resist the impact force of bullets?
  • Honestly, it could've been a little bit of both. A bulletproof vest so the bullets wouldn't penetrate and some sort of ability granted by the resurrection to reduce the impact force.
  • Upper-end hand agents and the Fingers have demonstrated superhuman resilience before. Nobu survived getting thrown off a building, Elektra was barely bother by getting hit by a car, Jessica punched Madame Gao across a room to no ill effect, etc. Bakuto surviving gunshots is in the same ballpark, especially gunfire from a small handgun. He'd probably be more in trouble if Misty was using a shotgun or machinegun.
  • We also saw that Bakuto escaped after being stabbed in Iron Fist, establishing his immortaliity. Even Harold Meachum exhibited resurrection abilities and even regenerated a severed pinkie finger. The process that gives people immortality gives them a Healing Factor that allows them to take quite a bit of damage. It isn't until their heads are removed that they have to worry about dying. In the meantime, bullets taken by Bakuto probably just stuck in him, kinda like we later see with Bushmaster in Luke Cage season 2.

Leave the guns behind

• If the Hand were intending to capture Danny, why did some of Sowande's men bring automatics to the Royal Dragon instead of just knives?
  • They needed Danny alive, but they knew he had three new allies, plus Stick. They didn't need them alive.
  • Suppressing fire is a useful thing when you're closing on a target, including one you want to take alive. Gao objected to them shooting once they were close enough to subdue the Iron Fist with hand weapons and fists.

The Hand and Fisk

• So Madame Gao, one of the Fingers, directly worked with Wilson Fisk. Why then did Murakami, another Finger, use Nobu as an intermediary work with Fisk instead of doing things directly?
  • Nobu was probably speaking to Fisk as a middleman for Murakami, just like James Wesley was the middleman between Fisk and most of his underlings.
  • Keep in mind that Gao is more likely to manipulate people personally. Murakami seems to be more hands-off. It's a matter of preference.
  • It's implied that Madame Gao was Fisk's mentor. She talks about how he went to her with his dreams for New York and how she was the one who backed his plans from the start. Fisk also shows a lot of courtesy and respect towards Gao. As for Murakami, he was said by Alexandra to prefer isolation, and cares little for the affairs of others. It's why the other fingers thought little of him, and he left Nobu to run operations in his absence.
    • If that's the case, Gao was probably a mentor to Fisk pretty late in the going. It's more likely that Fisk was largely mentored by Don Rigoletto until sometime just before the events of Daredevil season 1.
  • The writing for The Defenders was done after the second season of Daredevil had aired and first season of Iron Fist had been written, which is probably why there was no indication of Alexandra’s influence on Fisk, or that Gao and Nobu were connected in more ways than "they both have alliances with Fisk". Showrunner Marco Ramirez did an interview with Entertainment Weekly shortly after The Defenders aired, where he said that they were basically writing by the seat of their pants:
    “We knew in season 1 of Daredevil that Nobu wanted a specific building in New York City, and that was why it was important for the Hand to get their hands on this one building, and then in season 2, we revealed that they weren’t building up, they were building down. What they were digging toward we didn’t know, so when we started on Defenders, we knew it would be Defenders versus the Hand, and we didn’t know what they were digging for, and we could come up with anything, you know? It’s kind of a fun thing that TV writers do. Like on Lost, the whole season is about the Hatch, but what’s in the Hatch? We’ll figure that out next season! That’s how these things happen.”
    • So most likely, Alexandra had some hand in forging The Hand's connection with Fisk, but she wasn't directly involved. Her conversations with Madame Gao suggest that even before her illness forced her to rely on Elektra to do all her dirty work, Alexandra was very similar to Fisk in that she tended to be very hands-off, compared to her colleagues. She may have had the idea for the alliance, but had Gao and Murakami (and thus, Nobu) do the actual process of making contact with Fisk. Thus, Gao and Nobu were the ones who reached out to Fisk (by way of James Wesley) and the Ranskahov brothers, and struck deals. The death of Rigoletto (the mafia don Fisk had started his organized crime career in the employment of) could've even been part of those deals.

The Blood Donors

• What was the deal with the blood draining of the Hand's captives? I assume it had something to do with Black Sky, but I don't think that ever actually got explained. Especially since Colleen Wing was taken there and about to get hooked up... but wasn't that after Elektra's resurrection (which used the last of the Substance)?
  • The Hand, much like a cult, seems to have recruited a lot of people through Bakuto's compound and turned them into believers. Those that can't be used as soldiers become involuntary blood donors. Maybe the fighters had to give blood samples anyways under the guise of a drug test. The "substance" appears to be dragon bone marrow mixed with human blood. The marrow is useless without the blood. Even though the events in Iron Fist season 1 take place after Elektra's death and resurrection, it is most likely that Bakuto was now restocking their blood supply for when and if they were successful in their mission to obtain more dragon bones.

Timeline confusion in "Take Shelter"

• So, the heroes go to grab their loved ones the night of the Royal Dragon fight. It's explicitly after midnight when Matt arrives at the Bulletin to grab Karen and persuade her to come with him for her own safety. So how come Karen doesn't arrive at the precinct until the following afternoon, and after Trish had been brought there following Jessica and Matt's fight with Murakami (which happened at lunchtime the day after the Royal Dragon)?
  • Seeing how Karen has the same clothes at the precinct that she's wearing when Matt grabs her from her office, she may likely have spent the night with Matt in his apartment.

Arresting Matt, Luke, and Jessica

• So why were Matt, Jessica and Luke taken back to the precinct after they were found in the abandoned building instead of taken to the hospital? Plot contrivance or what?
  • Why would they be sent to the hospital? They got no lasting injuries, that's like wondering why the police brought people who passed out from drinking in a crime scene to the precinct instead of the hospital.
  • Paramedics on-site cleared them as not being badly injured enough to go to the hospital. That and with their association with the violence of the last few days, and being found with two dead bodies, the cops would have wanted to keep them somewhere safe.
  • Well do the cops even know what exactly was in that drug was Stick used? Matt at minimum should have been in the hospital, 'cause compared to Luke and Jessica, he's a fragile bunny. Plus, he's a freaking lawyer! The NYPD is lucky Matt's very forgiving because he could easily have sued the city for this one bad decision! Also, why was he left alone in that office when he woke up panicking? Somewhere in that building are Foggy and Karen, who care about Matt, why aren't they in the office keeping an eye on him?
    • You apparently don't know anything about how the police would handle such a situation. To put it simply, the cops wouldn't be making the call on whether to send someone to a hospital or not. That would be the decision of the paramedics called to the scene where they found several people unconscious and one person dead. Those paramedics would have checked the injured for signs of any sort of injuries or drugs that would have required hospitalization. The fact that we can clearly see that Matt doesn't actually have any wounds that are serious enough to require hospitalization means that the paramedics on-site found no signs of serious injuries requiring hospitalization, and cleared the police to move him to the precinct. If Matt had major blood loss or a broken leg or showed skin discoloration indicating poisoning, he would have been transported to a hospital, but if he's simply unconscious but otherwise healthy and other people exposed to the drug are also healthy, then Matt would have been transported to the police precinct instead.

"What about the ones you still love?"

• Sowande threatens the heroes' loved ones at random, but he only calls out "the nurse" (Claire) and "the woman on the radio" (Trish). He never calls out any of Matt's connections at all, yet Matt goes straight to Karen and involves her in this. Now clearly Matt had a bit of a leap there and assumed that the Hand might know more than he thought otherwise, but it's a bit of a leap given Matt doesn't seem to have spoken much to Foggy or Karen during the months since season 2 ended.
  • This is dependent on whether or not the Hand know that Matt is the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. It seems they didn't, so Matt was a bit overreactive warning Karen and Foggy about what happened. It could just be plot contrivance executed to get all of the heroes' supporting cast (Claire, Colleen, Foggy, Karen, Malcolm, Misty and Trish) into one room.
  • Matt has no way of knowing that the Hand doesn't know his identity when Elektra sided with them, as he doesn't know they just blanked her previous memory. It's amazingly lucky for Matt that every Hand members that saw him without his mask died and that Midland Circle didn't have cameras in the lobby to see him prior to wrapping Jessica's scarf around his face.
  • Matt has more experience than the others knowing that the Hand will go after people close to you to get you. They kidnapped Karen and a bunch of people Matt had saved as Daredevil as bait for him and Elektra. Remember what Matt said to Danny at the Royal Dragon: "You don’t get second chances with these people. All right? If you’re not careful, next thing you know, you’re - you’re dead! Or worse, you’re holding the people you love the most in the world and you get… you get the privilege of watching them die." While he was clearly talking about Elektra's circumstances, Matt could easily imagine it being Karen or Foggy who died instead of Elektra. Matt is in love with Karen, and he doesn't want to remotely take the chance that she gets hurt again because of her association with him either as Matt Murdock or as Daredevil.

Sheltering instead of actively helping

• I could chalk this one up to scheduling conflicts perhaps, but seeing how Karen is smart and formidable - given how she found Wilson Fisk's mother despite Fisk's efforts to hide her and uncovered Reyes' cover-up of Frank Castle's family - I feel it's a bit out-of-character that Karen would willingly lay low in the precinct away from the action instead of offering to provide Matt with assistance. I mean, she's got a similar disregard for her own personal safety that he does for crying out loud, if her handling of Todd, James Wesley and Colonel Schoonover mean anything. Plus, like Colleen, she kinda has a personal stake in taking down the Hand because they kidnapped her once before. I mean, look at Trish. She's asking the tough questions and trying to find out more about who tried to silence her attempt to cover the tremors on Trish Talk. Why isn't Karen looking into that?
  • Organized crime like Fisk is no small problem for Karen. Undead ninjas? Here, she knows it's better sitting this one out. Plus it's not like Karen's encounters with Wesley and Colonel Schoonover happened at the best of times. With the former, she had nightmares that Fisk would come for vengeance. With the latter she had a nervous breakdown when Frank used her as bait at the diner and later left her in the woods to execute the Blacksmith.
  • The reason why Karen chooses to huddle in the precinct instead of going out there digging may have to do with the fact that she wasn't a part of Matt's investigation into the Hand. When Matt had been dealing with the Hand, Karen was dealing first with helping Foggy defend Frank Castle, and then with trying to get behind Reyes' covering up Frank's family. Her only taste of what the Hand do was when Nobu and his people kidnapped her as bait for Elektra. Anything else Karen knows about the Hand would be limited to what Matt told her during their reveal conversation following the blackout, as he undoubtedly did explain to Karen his training, the mysterious people who she'd seen in his apartment, and what he'd been doing while she was busy running around with Frank and playing dodgeball with bullets. Knowing that, Karen would almost certainly want to take police protection from a threat she hadn't assisted Matt in dealing with in some form. If this were Fisk or people like the Blacksmith, then Karen would've refused police protection given her past experiences with Wesley and whatnot.
    • There's also an argument to be made that Karen probably did think of the Hand as something right out of a horror film based on what Matt told her. Karen does point out to Trish the photograph on the board from Nobu's hostage situation and sounds somewhat broken when she says, "They took hostages. I watched someone die," which indicates she may not even be over the trauma of her encounter with the Hand, which one should recount was at a period of time when Karen witnessed enough violence to give her lots of nightmares: getting shot at by Frank in the hospital when he was going after Grotto, getting shot at by the Blacksmith's men in Reyes' office and her own apartment, witnessing Frank brutally kill those two men at the diner, being taken captive by Colonel Schoonover (and getting injured when Frank crashed a truck into her car, leaving her with a cut on her forehead) and being unable to talk Frank out of killing Schoonover, and lastly getting taken hostage by an insane ninja cult.

Skewed priorities with the Substance

• It's said the Hand blew the last of their reserves of the Substance to revive Elektra. Logistically, wouldn't it have made more sense to the Fingers to use that Substance reserve for themselves before considering using it to revive Elektra?
  • Alexandra kept the fact they were running on fumes from Gao and the others. Why she rushed the whole plot. Having already lost one Black Sky, they were not ready to lose another.
  • Aside from Alexandra, none of them were in immediate need of re-upping. Madame Gao was still full power. Bakuto can recover from severe injuries. Sowande doesn't look too old or sick. And Murakami looks like he retired and let Nobu run the show while he goes hunting.
  • That and, as far as they were concerned, the Hand weren't about to run out of it, since none of them outside of Alexandra needed a resupply, and they were about to get a new supply in a few months anyway and the Chaste, their main threat, was being wiped out wholesale, leaving the Hand perfectly safe. Alexandra only needed a resupply because she learned she would be dying soon after she spent the last of it on Elektra, so she had to push up the timetable to stay alive, which was what triggered the plot and put the rest of the Fingers at risk.

Stick's death

• When Elektra pauses upon Matt's arrival, is the reason she snaps and kills Stick because she sees Jessica? Sure, they're snooping for info, but is it because Elektra automatically assumes Jessica's with Matt on a romantic level or is that just me overreading things?
  • You're over-reading it. She snaps because Jessica is entering and may be a threat, but not necessarily because of Jessica herself. She would have responded like that to anyone entering, because anyone entering becomes a threat and breaks that moment of distraction that stopped her.

"You deserve better"

• When Matt is picking up Karen at the Bulletin, he says after helping her with her coat, "You deserve better, Karen." To which Karen replies, "So do you." What does Karen mean by that?
  • In Matt's case, he's essentially saying that as he sees it, Karen doesn't deserve to be constantly put in danger as a direct or indirect result of his activities as Daredevil. Karen's "so do you" is a different story: it's because she hasn't yet opened up to Matt about killing James Wesley. Now that Matt's secret is out, she probably feels even worse that she's still keeping Wesley's death a secret from him.
  • That, and Karen feels a lot of unresolved guilt over the deaths of her brother and Wesley, the former of which has made her think no one would find her credible when going up against Fisk.
  • Matt and Karen's relationship at this point is kinda in a bit of an imbalance. Because while Matt has come clean to Karen about his secrets, she has yet to disclose what happened with Wesley or with her brother. It's important to consider that despite her innocent appearance, Karen isn't as perfect as Matt thinks she is. Matt doesn't know the whole picture of what constitutes Karen Page. Matt and Karen have an awful lot in common. And just like Matt hid Daredevil from Karen for two whole seasons of his show, Karen's been hiding this whole other side of her life from Matt and Foggy. Matt doesn't see the true picture because Karen is lying to him and possibly Matt is also deliberately lying to himself about what Karen is.
    Consider the whole conversation the two of them had when they were in Matt's apartment during Frank Castle's trial. Karen is not being honest with Matt the same way Matt wasn't being honest with Karen, and for the exact same reason: she's afraid of being judged by Matt, because Matt is just as judgmental as she is, maybe even more. Karen's anti-Daredevil attitude in The Defenders comes out of her own unwillingness to be whatever it was that she was before she moved to New York City. We saw a bit of that person come out when she killed Wesley. She expects Matt to be better than that. Better than her, a killer, when all signs indicate that if Matt continues down this path he will eventually kill someone just like Karen did.
    Meanwhile, Matt thinks "how could Karen possibly understand me. She's perfect and good and wholesome unlike me, a filthy no good asskicking sinner with lots of repressed Catholic guilt." If these two knuckleheads just sat down and talked to each other honestly they'd realize they have way more in common than they initially believe.
    Matt and Karen are not "too good for the other," they're actually perfectly matched and that's their problem: They're both two flawed people who expect the other to be flawless and perfect because they put each other on a pedestal. They're simultaneously looking at each other saying "no, you shouldn't be LIKE me, you should be BETTER than me."
  • It could also be Karen saying that Matt deserves better than a life of constant fear, guilt, and danger that comes with being a vigilante super-hero.
  • Karen agonized over killing Wesley and hid it from Matt and Foggy, which in season 3 is established to be because she knew he had a strong moral code and she was afraid of him rejecting her over her perceived lapse in morals. Matt, meanwhile, has had no idea of Karen's feelings of unworthiness or her morally grey position, but he keeps the reality of his life from her not necessarily because he fears judgement, but as a kind of self-sabotage (something passed down from his mother, as Karen observes while she and Matt are hiding from Dex after the church attack). Matt has deep feelings for Karen that he hasn’t really acknowledged. With the identity reveal, Karen now knows that Matt does not have a moral high ground of any kind over her, not just because he treated her and Foggy so poorly while he was helping Stick and Elektra fight the Hand, but also because he’s not nearly as squeaky clean morally as he’s been pretending to be this whole time. He's no better than her. Karen knows that shooting Todd or killing Wesley doesn't make her unworthy of Matt, and he doesn’t have the easy excuse of Daredevil to fall back on anymore if he gets nervous. Especially given Karen has become a journalist at the Bulletin, and is stepping into Ben Urich's shoes, and thereby has an ideal vehicle to better understand Matt's Daredevil side.

Use the Fist, Danny!

• Danny used the Iron Fist to heal Colleen when she was poisoned in season 1 of Iron Fist. Why do he, Luke and Claire have to take her to the precinct to treat her cuts when Danny could have tried using the Iron Fist to heal her first? Or does the Iron Fist only work at healing poison and not at healing knife wounds?
  • He has yet to fully master his Iron Fist, like he can only do one punch a fight after that he needs to refill his chi, the healing fist took even more as I think he passed out from it.
  • Besides, those healing powers are still something fantastic and weird. If someone is bleeding from a very real injury, the most reasonable thing to do is to do is to try to heal it in a way that is known to work (such as the Boring, but Practical first aid), instead of wasting time with that fantastic healing that may or may not work.

Sowande's questionable recruitment practices

• Why exactly would Sowande be hiring youth off the streets of Harlem to do dirty jobs like destroy bodies? Isn't that way too risky to get some random people to clean up for you? What if one of them would have gotten squeamish and started talking to the cops? You'd think the Hand could use their own professional cleanup crews for that.
  • Getting rid of bodies is not like Pulp Fiction. It's not the smooth guy who does it and look cool it's the criminal garbageman duty. You don't have professional clean up for that. You have the new guys do it, and since Sowande's goons are still undead ninjas, chances are even they feel above that even if the boss asks. And the whole point of hiring delinquents from Harlem is that they don't go to the cops and want to prove themselves and will never crack under police interrogation (knowing that they'll get their throats cut if they talk).
  • Perhaps a better question is why Sowande limits his hiring to Harlem youth, rather than widen his net and recruit from all over the city and possibly from Nassau or Westchester Counties, given that by the time Cole's brother died, the police were firmly aware that someone was recruiting youth from Harlem for late night duty. A wider recruiting net would guarantee Jurisdictional Friction between NYPD precincts and outside police departments, keeping anyone from noticing a pattern.
  • What pattern? The police are just gonna blame it on Shades and Mariah anyway and Sowande's looks works better in Harlem than anywhere else.
  • It's not terribly risky for them to hire those people, because the Hand are good at hiding and using their connections to scrub themselves clean. Remember also that the events in this series are not the Hand's normal operating procedures. They were aggressively attacking the Chaste and needed someone to clean up their work very quickly.
  • The very unreliability of the angry young gangbangers from Harlem is probably why they're the perfect place to go hunting for labor: they need leadership after the disorganization of so many gangs thanks to Diamondback's actions, and they're also very expendable, enough to the point that they're on Misty's radar by the time Luke gets out of prison.

Foggy and Karen

• Thinking about the whole scene in 1x05 at the precinct, I have to say, Karen and Foggy must have had it the worst. How would they explain how Matt, their blind lawyer friend, got mixed up with the more publicly known Defenders? (And Foggy must have freaked out at seeing that Malcolm and Trish were there because of Jessica Jones, the very client Foggy had thrown Matt's way).
  • They don't have to explain anything. If someone asks Foggy, he is already related to Luke and Jessica, and Karen was involved with the Hand once so they don't have to say more than that.

What happens to Matt's stuff?

• With Matt presumed "dead", what happens to his stuff? What happens to his apartment? Part of me thinks Foggy and Karen might keep up the appearance that he's alive (from telling lies to his clients about why Matt is not available to paying the rent on his place^note because as Bobby Fish said in Luke Cage when discussing the future of Pop's Barbershop in "Who's Gonna Take the Weight", no one asks questions as long as things are paid for on time), but I'm not sure.
• Why the fuck would they do that? Who lies about your lawyer being dead, that's creepy, Pops had a barber shop to keep open but people knew that he was dead, Luke didn't pretend he was still around and ready to shave someone on schedule. Matt only has an appartment and his stuff, one just go back to the owner and the rest to next of kin.
  • Well they kinda have to lie. No one can know that Matt Murdock and Daredevil disappeared on the same night. True, they could delay filing a missing person's report with the NYPD, and Jessica and Luke could lie that Matt left them before they got to Midland Circle, but there's a lot of complicated pieces here, like making sure there's nothing that could allow Fisk to link Matt to Daredevil, and assuming Brett doesn't already know Matt is Daredevil, providing an explanation to him about Matt's disappearance.
  • The people he left/got kidnapped by in the precinct blew up a building, it would actually be harder saying Daredevil died that day than Matt since no one knows where Daredevil was and he already went inactive for a few months earlier. With Matt you just have Jessica Jones or Luke Cage saying " we started running and since he was blind he went the wrong way".
  • As for the fate of Matt's stuff, that depends on whether he wrote a will or not. I don't recall any mention of it, but with him being a lawyer and risking his life on a daily basis (and with a second lawyer who would advise him on such details), it wouldn't be strange that he had already thought about it (probably it would be half of his stuff for Foggy, and the other half for Karen, depending on how recently he updated it). But, if he died intestate, then all his stuff would be for the state, as he died without a spouse, civil partner, parents, children or other relatives. That is, unless Foggy and Marci can pull some legal trick to make it seem as if there was a will after all. Or not. So, the most likely outcomes: 1) Matt's estate now belongs with Foggy and Karen, until he returns^note Something similar had happened in Iron Fist with how Jeri Hogarth had tended to the Rands' estate and upkeeping for their graves between the plane crash and Danny's return, 2) Matt's estate is sold, except for a couple of important things that Foggy and Karen managed to keep (probably just that box with his secret and private stuff), or 3) Matt's estate is about to be sold, and then he makes his grand return before the sale can take place.
  • It's possible that Karen may have taken some of Matt's stuff. Call me crazy, but when we see the inside of Karen's new apartment in The Punisher (2017), is it me or does her place look a little cluttered?
  • In absence of credible evidence of a person's death, Matt would have to be missing for seven years in order to be declared dead. But for all intents and purposes, the landlord doesn't care if Matt's alive or dead. He just cares about whether Matt's paying his rent on time. The place can sit disused for thirty years as long as the checks come in on time, but if Matt's missing for long enough to miss payments and nobody steps up to make them in his place, then he gets the boot.
  • Karen and Foggy both have steady jobs now. In fact, The Punisher established that Karen was able to afford a slightly nicer apartment thanks to her new job at the Bulletin, after having had to downgrade partway through her time at Nelson & Murdock. If Matt was able to pay the rent on his own before, Karen and Foggy certainly can afford to keep doing so for him (more likely Foggy, given his new gig with Jeri Hogarth). This will all depend on how Matt’s “death” is treated at the beginning of Daredevil season 3, and whether Karen and Foggy consider it necessary to pretend that Matt is still alive and living in that apartment, which is difficult to speculate about in the absence of evidence. Of course, we must also remember that season 3 of Daredevil will be borrowing some elements from “Born Again”, and in that story arc, Wilson Fisk blows up Matt’s building, so there’s a chance Matt will be losing this apartment anyway.
  • Another answer in the speculation department is that Danny has solved the problem in his own Danny-esque way by buying Matt's building, making the issue a moot point, kinda like what he did with Colleen's dojo. Possibly because Danny would feel the strongest responsibility of everyone in wake of what happened to make sure things are smoothed over quickly and quietly. Which would include financially keeping things stable so that no one realizes Matt is dead (as that's not meant to be public knowledge).
  • When it comes to the apartment, it will likely still be there when Matt comes back, for no other reason than that Danny seems to like to pay people’s rents for them, usually a few months at a time. It could be something as simple as not wanting to put any stress on Foggy, in particular, to go and clean it out right away. Not to mention, Matt said to Karen and Jessica on different occasions that got a great deal on the apartment because of the annoying light-emitting billboard across the street. Which means the apartment will likely still be available for the same reason he got it in the first place: almost no one else wants it. Combine a reluctance to clean it out immediately, the possibility Matt might have paid some rent in advance, and sighted people not being eager to rent the place, it stands to reason that yeah, Matt will still have his corner apartment whenever he comes back.
  • What happens to Matt's stuff may also be dependent on how long he's gone. At the very least, we’re probably looking at something like several months of absence on Matt’s part. Up to six to eight weeks seems most realistic as to how much time Matt probably will spend on his recovery (though that'll all likely be happening offscreen), but considering when some of the shows set in the interim take place, we’re still going to be left with a rather big gap for the writers to try to address in terms of why Matt is not announcing to even his closest allies that he’s alive. And that's dependent on how serious his physical injuries are. When we see him at the end of The Defenders, he’s not on life support or in an ICU. His visible injuries don’t look any worse than those he sustained in the fight with Nobu and Fisk in Daredevil season 1. Of course, he could have more serious internal injuries, or a head injury, that we can’t see.^note And he had sustained a head injury hours before Midland Circle from Elektra attacking him at the theatre But if that is the case, surely they would be doing more, treatment-wise (he doesn’t even have an IV). So if Matt doesn’t reappear within a few weeks, either he’s more seriously injured than he appears to be, or he’s decided to stay “dead” for some reason. (That being said, the show’s creators may simply have decided to use a famous image from the comic books to show that Matt survived. It may not have been intended to give the viewers any meaningful information about the extent of his injuries, or how long his recovery might take.)
  • The fate of Matt's apartment is ultimately revealed at the start of Daredevil season 3: Karen, refusing to believe Matt is dead in the absence of a body, is paying his rent and keeping the place clean so it's waiting for him for when he comes back. Although it's a bit of a stretch to believe that Karen can pay for the rent of two apartments on her Bulletin salary, it seems like narrative-wise the writers did this on the belief that Karen took Frank's advice from the diner conversation of "Hold on with both hands and don't let go" to heart. Of course, Matt doesn't move back into his apartment until the end of the season after Fisk has been defeated. He does visit the apartment once, to get a suit and tie for his visit to the prison, and (presumably) again after he and Karen pick up Jasper Evans to take him to the Bulletin, but otherwise he stays at St. Agnes (which is somewhat necessary since part of that time, Matt is having to deal with the fact that Fisk has convinced Ray Nadeem that Matt was an accomplice of his).

Stick's death, Part II

• So in Stick's death scene, circumstances forced the heroes to fight Elektra one-on-one and lose badly. Which begs the question, had they won the fight (say, Matt hadn't let his guard down, and thus he, Jessica and Luke were able to tag-team Elektra), what would they have done with Elektra? Handed her over to the police? Isolate her somewhere like Matt's apartment or Colleen's dojo?
  • They probably would have done the same thing they did to Sowande, with Matt trying to deprogram her.
  • Most likely, if they had captured Elektra, they would have isolated her to a trusted secret area, and they continue to debate what to do with her. This would result in a situation that Elektra would likely slowly manipulate in her favor and rear her newly villainous head by taking advantage of Matt.
  • Matt would try to reason with her, Danny would want answers, Jessica would beat the the crap out of her, and Luke would try to understand. Of course, it would culminate in Elektra fooling Matt into thinking he talked her back to "herself", forgetting that "herself" is the woman who brought him to Roscoe Sweeney's to kill him. She would offer to infiltrate the Hand, then she would kill Alexandra and still decide she wants the substance for herself. Matt and Elektra may have shared history and he can truly be himself with her, but Elektra doesn't have Matt's sense of right and wrong.
  • If they captured Elektra, Matt would have wanted some quality time with Elektra to fully undo the mind wipe and help her recover. Luke would have wanted her locked up. Danny would have wanted her dead, as would Stick (if Stick survived). And it’s tough to say which option Jessica would have argued for, considering how torn she was when faced in Jessica Jones season 2 regarding her mother, but she would have definitely argued. Meanwhile, the Hand would have split. Murakami and Alexandra would have tried to kill each other. If neither succeeded (which seems likely, as they’ve all done assassination attempts on each other for centuries), they would have been divided about whether it was worthwhile to risk their own lives and the lives of their henchmen to get Elektra back. This discussion likely would have concluded with them attacking the heroes as a group in order to capture both Elektra and Danny. Which would result in a big climactic fight, with Elektra maybe siding with the heroes in order to protect Matt and get her revenge on the Hand.

Whatever happened to Cole's crew?

• Cole wasn't alone when the police picked him up. We know from the pictures on the corkboards at the precinct in later episodes that the bodies of the former Chaste soldiers were discovered and processed by the NYPD. So what happened with the other guys in gas masks that were with Cole when he was arrested? Did they all keep their mouths shut or did the Hand have them all killed off just like Cole?
  • Presumably they kept their mouths shut and disappeared into the shadows afterward like most lower-end Hand employees tend to. It's unlikely that the Hand killed them, since the Hand pretty much imploded a few days later when their entire leadership was wiped out. And as James Wesley said in "Rabbit in a Snowstorm", it's important to keep the body count down because bodies leave trails for the police to track.

Colleen's skewed judgement

• At first, Colleen was all about working with allies. Then she questions all the people Danny comes across, even Stick, who like Shaft, was a member of the Chaste and a guardian of K'un-Lun? And this is after Luke has captured Sowande, a finger of the Hand! Why does she think it's "not their fight" or that they're a liability? Is she being stupid or what?
  • Chaste did terrible things and they totally are liabilities, they tied up Danny. Like a lot of the Evil Plan worked because the other vigilantes got involved, shamed Danny into going head on in Midland, and ignore his warnings that the Hand aren't regular criminals.
  • I'm sorry, but the Chaste was the only reason Danny had not already been captured. They gave their lives for him. And while tying Danny up was not smart, he attacked them first. Also, this happens AFTER Colleen said what she said above. What was going through her head THEN?
  • No, the Chaste are the only reason why he is back in New York, one of their member was murdered by Elektra while Danny was attepting to save him and told him they are in New York. By the time Danny showed up they were all dead except Stick who was captured.
  • Colleen was most annoyed at being told to stay out of the fight. Think about it: she left the Hand, and started a romantic relationship and working partnership with Danny, travelling the world, investigating the Hand, trying to work out what happened at the gates of K'un-L'un. Then suddenly, just after they return to New York City, Danny gets all these new superfriends and Colleen is relegated to having to shelter at the police station^note Although to be fair, Colleen had just been cut by Bakuto, and the precinct was the safest place they could go to to stitch her up since the hospitals weren't an option. Colleen is not the Clingy Girlfriend archetype trope, but like Danny, she also has understandable trust issues based on what she's gone through, given the ways in which Harold and Bakuto exploited their trust. Colleen doesn't like how, from her perspective, Danny is ditching her to go play with his new friends, because she gave up everything for him and subconsciously or not, she kinda expects him to do the same for her.
  • Colleen is in such a place of uncertainty and conflict in The Defenders. She doesn’t like the fact that she and Danny are isolated and bumbling around looking for answers. That isolation is both physically and psychologically dangerous after all the upheaval they’ve been through recently. Colleen, like Danny, longs for a family to replace the one she’s lost. But when Danny actually does acquire allies, she becomes instantly paranoid. The Chaste at least had some credentials, but Matt, Jessica and Luke are random weirdos who appear out of nowhere. Even Stick, who claims to have been a member of the Chaste, is mysterious enough to be suspect. Both Colleen and Danny have suffered major betrayals recently with Bakuto and Harold, and Colleen is nervous about the danger of that happening again. They’re also a threat to her relationship with Danny, because she wants support and a family, and Danny is all she has at this point. She’s clearly worried that he might go off with these people and leave her behind. Logically, we know Danny would never do that, but again– she’s extra jumpy, thanks to recent life experiences. She never imagined that Bakuto would abandon her either.
    The idea of them being a liability, and of it being “not their fight”, meanwhile? Well, Danny and Colleen have been chasing after these guys with such desperation. They have been personally attacked by the Hand, and feel it is their duty to enact payback. That is literally Danny’s job as the Iron Fist, but Colleen has also given herself that duty. As a former member of the Hand, who was then cast out and nearly murdered by them, she feel personally responsible for their continued existence, and needs the closure of helping to take them down. Bringing other people into the situation who are not directly involved (note: unlike the Chaste) complicates the situation, puts other innocents at risk, and threatens to undermine Colleen and Danny’s personal missions. So Colleen wants allies, but is very picky about who those allies should be, and doesn’t need them to be the same people as the hypothetical friends. But she also needs a personal victory over the Hand that isn’t interrupted or threatened by anyone who shouldn’t be taking that risk.

Jessica at the precinct

• Why do Matt and Luke get to recuperate on comfy couches and camp beds, while Jessica gets handcuffed to the table in the interrogation room? I would think that to be fair to the detainees, Misty would let Trish and Malcolm look over Jessica until she regained consciousness, and then attempt to question her.
  • Because one was interrogated while the other weren't they would send him to the comfy place and take someone else after but priority wise the girl who found a kiloton of explosives is the one you want to talk to. As for Karen and Foggy, why would they be allowed in a room with Matt, cops are on the fence if he was a victim or part of the crime why would they allow his friends to be nearby? So they give him the Daredevil costume and help hi escape?
    • Even so, Jessica could have had a concussion. As could Matt. They never mentioned whether or not Jessica was even checked over.
    • It doesn't need to be shown. In an incident like that one, paramedics would have been called and would have checked them. That's not something that needs to be shown or mentioned onscreen, anymore than the characters being arrested.
  • Matt probably got put up in the office at Foggy's request (the office in question is the Captain's office, given Thomas Ridenhour is shown working from this space in Luke Cage season 2; as does Priscilla Ridley at times). Foggy's known Matt the longest, he knows Matt's heightened senses. So he probably requested when Matt and the others were brought in, "Hey, is there a private room you can put Matt in? Preferably away from the bullpen? He's blind and...he just can get easily overwhelmed or disoriented if he wakes up in a strange environment,” plus maybe some threat of legal action under the ADA. Also, remember that when delivering the suit to Matt, Foggy says, "the people in this building need to always, and only, see you as a lawyer." This means that putting Matt up in a private room was the only way Foggy could change Matt's shirt without any cops in the room who'd definitely notice the scars on Matt's chest. And Foggy didn't leave Matt alone. He's holding a coffee cup in his hand when he comes in, and he's walking to the door, not running to it, which implies that it just a stroke of bad luck that that phone rang to startle Matt awake while Foggy had stepped out for a stretch break.

"Hey, enough"

• So when Jessica stepped in front of Matt trying to break up his fight with Danny in 1x06, what was she doing? Trying to stop Matt from going at Danny (figuring that she could talk more sense into Matt, given Danny's freakout), or trying to protect Matt from Danny (since after she got between them, Danny shoved her aside to get to Matt)?
  • She was breaking up a fight. It doesn't matter which she was trying to do.
  • Jessica told Matt it was enough. But as Danny was already committed to opposing them, he has no reason to listen to her. Honestly, with his enhanced senses being what they are, Matt should have easily been able to pick up on the fact that Danny was nowhere close to listening to Jessica and was still ready to make aggressive moves on him. It was an attack of opportunity. Danny's not the one who called a time out, Jessica is and at the time she called it, Danny was opposing her and Matt. He had no reason to back down, just because Jessica said so.

Did Matt get through to Elektra or not?

• Right before they kiss and the hole comes down, Elektra did apologize to Matt. However, I'm having trouble trying to determine whether or not Matt truly did get through to her in the end. It certainly looks that way, but since Elektra has pretty much embraced her darker side, that alone made it confusing for me.
  • Kind of, I mean she could have killed him easily or at the very least push him away and escape. Like she more or less agreed to die here with Matthew instead of being a villain. Plus she didn't embrace her darker side she just killed the people that used her as weapon for a war she didn't even wanted to take part in and decided to be in charge of her life for once. Like Stick used her as much as Alexandra.
  • It's unclear. There's a level of vagueness surrounding Elektra’s “true” identity. It's hard to pinpoint any big, climactic moment in which a breakthrough is made, Elektra remembers herself, etc. because it's not clear who this so-called “real”/“good” Elektra is that Matt believes in. We don’t know who Matt was trying to find, because it was revealed partway through Elektra's arc in Daredevil season 2 that the impression Matt had of her in college was mostly an act. She was the same person then that she is now, she just wasn’t honest with him about her true intentions. And while Elektra and Matt did share some wonderful genuine moments during that initial relationship, they didn’t suggest some alternate, contradictory identity. Elektra has always been the Black Sky to some degree, so in that final scene we don’t know what, exactly, Matt wants to uncover. And it's unclear why Elektra is fighting him. So in that final moment, when the building starts collapsing around them and they finally stop fighting, it's not made clear whether Matt has gotten through to his elusive All-New, All-Different Elektra in some way, or if Elektra has decided on her own to stop fighting him. One thing for certain: this scene, and their moment of peace at the end, parallels their final conversation at the end of Daredevil season 2, when they think they’re going to die heading into that warehouse to rescue Karen and the other Hand hostages, and in spite of everything, desperately try to imagine a future together. The only difference is that this time Elektra has the chance to survive, yet still chooses death for reasons undetermined.
  • What further complicates things is how much Elektra remembers of her past, especially considering she blames Matt for her death ("Before you let me die?"), even though her death was due to her own choice to join the fight and her choice to stop Nobu from killing Matt. In the earlier episodes, when Alexandra is telling Elektra that Daredevil let her die, it makes sense, because Alexandra has an obvious agenda: keep Elektra as ignorant of her past if possible, and if not, make damn sure she sees Daredevil as an enemy. So of course she would frame it that way. But here in the final fight, when Elektra says it to Matt, it’s harder to parse. It’s unclear how much Elektra remembers of her past by that point. If she remembers how she died, then she knows damn well it was her own choice, and given her determination to live her own life, you would think she would defend her own autonomy rather than buy into Alexandra’s victim narrative. Although it is also very possible Elektra said that just to mess with Matt (this is Elektra we’re talking about, so deliberate manipulation can never be ruled out). But it’s also possible she doesn’t remember, and she’s just repeating, and apparently believing, what Alexandra told her.

Matt totally crossed the line

• In Season 2, Frank objects to Matt using his methods because doing it just one time is not possible, you step in and don't come back. Yet Matt is the first to agree about blowing up the Hand and didn't even consider the possibility of casualties ( or small time criminals like Cole or Grotto, who while horrible don't deserve dying, that might be in the building) so when he comes back how is he gonna keep his no kill rule? Like it was already iffy because he killed Nobu twice but it was heat of battle but now there is not much excuse aside they are slightly enhanced people in a world where enhanced people jail exist thanks to Civil War. Hell from what screen time he had Murakami was just a guy who used his immortality to hunt wolves and he is gonna die under rubble for it.
  • It's important to understand the role that Fisk plays in Matt's thinking process. The reason Matt had considered killing the Blacksmith was because he'd seen that working within the system hadn't done anything to stop Fisk. If working within the legal system didn't stop Fisk from simply gaining power in prison, then surely it wouldn't work to stop the Hand either. On top of that, when Matt comes up with the plan, he's still processing the fact that Elektra killed Stick, so his judgment isn't going to be perfect. As for the subject of legal consequences, well, Foggy mentions in the epilogue that the NYPD covered everything up. Even then, the Sokovia Accords wouldn't be a problem for Matt because they don't apply to him, they don't apply to Jessica, nor Luke, nor Danny.
  • Dude, don't act like Murakami was some innocent guy who only hunted bears. He was the leader of the Hand faction that Nobu was a part of, which we saw murdering people and hostage taking in both seasons of Daredevil. He is complicit in organized kidnapping, torture, murder, and drug trafficking at the minimum.
  • So is Turk and even Frank let him walk. Don't act like they are Thanos level of no choice to kill them, they can be put in normal jail in fact.
    • No, they can't. The Hand have the kind of connections that will let them walk out, evidenced multiple times across three different series. If they could casually arrange to have Cole killed simply because the name of their organization was dropped, just as easily as Wilson Fisk could have Detectives Blake and Hoffman do the same to people like Piotr, then they can definitely arrange to get their leaders out of prison without anyone being the wiser.
  • That has nothing to do with Sokovia accords, if there are installations that can detain Scarlet Witch they can detain Gao, so there is no reason to say killing is the only way when metahumans are well enough known to be locked in jail. And Fisk was stopped until Frank killed his rival in prison, even at full power he has no influence on the city like before, that Daredevil sees "not being a prison bitch" as excuse to just start killing any gang lords without caring about the collateral it causes means he is just another Punisher who wears red now.
  • In regards to killing the members of the Hand, considering that a considerable amount of their membership are basically zombies, you could make the argument that Matt didn't kill anyone who wasn't already dead. I mean, it's clear that most of the leadership have experienced death at some point, and considering how old they all are, their original identities have died long ago. It's not a perfect solution, and it'll be hard to make that stick in a courtroom, but technically, Matt never broke his no-killing code.
  • The miners that didn't made it out in time probably didn't get their undead gift, like some might just be assholes like Cole that wanted a quick buck.
  • One of the thematic questions Daredevil season 2 and The Defenders wants us to think about is, "are we completely sure Matt himself isn't one of the antiheroes?" Is he effectively straddling that line, or does he just think he is? The whole team has personal flaws, of course, but Matt is the only one strangling Sowande until he passes out. Yes, Matt has been set off by the reappearance of Elektra, but that's also just kind of the way he does things. (Something that's underscored every time he tries to fight one of the team) But then we get Stick executing people with his sword and disappearing the parts, to remind us that, well, okay, Matt could be much worse. Like Frank Castle said, "you're one bad day away from being me." This is one of the reasons labels and questions of "Who Was Right?" become so difficult around Matt: everything is relative.
  • Just like it's debatable in Daredevil season 1 whether Matt intentionally killed Nobu or not by setting him on fire, Midland Circle is a bit finicky. Matt did take the time to discern that the building was empty, however, and he wouldn't have signed off on blowing it up if it hadn’t been. And the plan was for them to go down into the hole and rescue anyone there who needed rescuing (Danny, Elektra, any willing henchmen…) before detonating the bomb. The fact that this didn’t end up happening was out of Matt’s control. As far as the rest of the Hand is concerned, this was, like with that first fight with Fisk and Nobu, an extreme situation, in which Matt’s no-killing policy might waver. As far as Matt could tell, the Hand were unreformable (they’d been bad guys for centuries), extremely powerful and dangerous, and a direct threat to at least the population of New York City, if not the world in general. They couldn’t be locked up, and they’d already caused a ton of damage. If blowing up their base was going to take them out of the equation permanently, Matt decided it was worth it– and that didn’t seem entirely out-of-character for an extreme situation. His standard no-killing rule that is used for Fisk and regular street thugs persists into Daredevil Season 3, except in moments of desperation (once Fisk hires Dex to impersonate him). It’s a key element of his character. It's no different from how Karen killed James Wesley only because he forced her into a corner.
  • In the comics, it's stated clearly by Matt, probably to coincide with the Netflix shows, that killing the Hand doesn't count as killing people. It's not killing because they're not alive.

Why don't they let Misty in?

• There is actually little reason for Luke to not tell Misty what is really going on. I can get why Matt, Jessica and Danny wouldn't want to let her in, as they don't know Misty, but Luke should know better. She is already looking into the Hand's criminal activities, including Cole's murder, which is the whole reason Luke is involved in this mess.
  • First off, Luke is an ex-con who literally just got out of prison a few days ago. As Jessica pointed out at the Royal Dragon, they're committing "trespassing, aggravated assault and vigilante bullshit". Luke would be putting Misty in an impossible position if he straight-up told her what they were doing, because either she essentially becomes as corrupt as Scarfe by looking the other way, or she endangers herself and other cops by going up against people that are far beyond what even the ESU teams are trained for. Secondly, Misty is the one "loved one" who didn't experience the Hand by herself. It's not easy to sell a story about "ninjas in New York" to someone who's not seen them firsthand, compared to, say, Karen, who has seen the Hand for herself.
  • Matt of course has a very legitimate reason for being reluctant to cooperate with Misty here: when he brought Brett Mahoney into his investigation of the Hand during Daredevil season 2, the Hand found out, threatened Bess, and got Brett to give them information to kidnap Karen and a bunch of other Daredevil survivors as bait for Elektra, a trap that ended with Elektra dying.
  • Let's say that Luke tells Misty what is going on, and she believes him. And Then What?? Will it be the "four Defenders plus a complete ESU battalion against The Hand?" Or, better yet, just an ESU team facing off against the Hand? Not going to happen. The ESU teams would be Cannon Fodder for the Hand, or at least the heroes would consider them to be that. There's also the part that their plan is to sneak into Midland Circle and blow it up. No good cop would ever agree with such a plan, because it's just plain and old-fashioned terrorism. Even the dirty cops that Fisk paid to kill the Russians would frown upon this, because Even Evil Has Standards. But let's say that, somehow, the heroes convinced the NYPD that this is the best way to solve the crisis, and that helping them would be worth going through all the Internal Affairs red tape that would ensue. If so, say goodbye to stealth the moment an ESU team got sent in. Misty alone is just one cop, with no special powers and no experience with The Hand, so having just her joining the team would be having The Load. That in part is what led to her losing her arm when fighting Bakuto.
  • On the flipside, Misty does have some valid grounds. Namely, that being super-powered doesn't automatically mean you are right. There are plenty of super-powered bad guys in the shows: the Hand leaders, Bushmaster, Davos, Kilgrave, Jessica's mother, and Trish to a degree. It really isn't a good policy to simply ignore every super-powered person as being outside the purview of the police simply because they are super-powered. Misty knows Luke is a good person who tends to operate outside the law. She knows nothing about Jessica except that she is strong and sassy, people have a habit of dying around her, and she stopped Kilgrave who may or may not have been a strange hoax (cops probably can't prove it either way). She knows nothing about Matt and has no idea he is a superhero. She trusted all three enough to believe they had good intentions and to agree to protect their friends. But that trust isn't infinite and shouldn't be infinite if you don't have all the facts. Even people with the best intentions can make horrible mistakes and she didn't know if Luke and the team were doing the right thing or the wrong thing because no one would tell her what they were doing or why.
    At the same time though, Misty didn't know that the NYPD couldn't handle this because again, Matt, Luke and Jessica (understandably) were reluctant to let anyone else get hurt (extra so in Matt's case given what happened with Brett). She might have agreed that sending in Luke, Jessica, and Matt was the best option if she had all the facts. And the NYPD could have potentially provided support. Even something as simple as surrounding Midland Circle with ESU teams to prevent innocents from going in and arresting baddies who try to leave. I mean, Misty's job is to enforce the laws and find out what is going on.

Why did Elektra kill Stick?

• What exactly was Elektra's motive for killing Stick? Was it out of personal hate or was it for something else?
  • There's three main things going on here:
    • 1. At this point in time, Elektra has regained her memories and enough free will that she has some concrete goals of her own: like power (why she kills Alexandra later) and the substance, and as she says to the other Fingers, "Nothing will stand in my way, not even death," which indicates she wants autonomy instead of being someone else's attack dog. That requires capturing Danny, because the Iron Fist is the only thing that can break down the wall, and Stick was trying to keep Elektra away form him.
    • 2. Elektra now fully remembers Matt and Stick. Seeing her former sensei again likely conjures back all of her conflicted feelings about him, most specifically, the fact that she's angry at Sick for betraying her and trying to have her killed by Jacques.
    • 3. It's important to note that Elektra would have still killed Stick even if Matt hadn't shown up. But there's a noticeable change in her attitude when Matt arrives. Elektra looks momentarily caught off-guard. She acknowledges him ("Matthew...it's so good to see you"), then ignores his pleas and kills Stick right in front of him. She’s happy to have Matt around, and even pauses to let him know, but she’s focused on her own goals and her own personal hatred of Stick, and isn’t going to let anyone distract her, regardless of her feelings for Matt.

Who knows Matt is Daredevil?

• Did anyone beyond Colleen, Claire, Jessica, Luke, Danny, and Misty witness Matt in Daredevil armor at Midland Circle? Sure, the public apparently thought Daredevil was dead or retired, so maybe no one would connect Daredevil dying at Midland Circle to Matt Murdock disappearing on the same night. But they must have had some explanation lined up for how Matt got separated from them before reaching Midland, just to keep Matt and DD apart, right?
  • Matt had already been inactive as Daredevil for several months, ever since telling Karen his secret. There were a few chances for people to catch him in action later. It's unclear whether or not there were any witnesses when Matt and Jessica rescue Trish from Murakami, but it’s possible someone could have caught a glimpse of him there. At the very least, someone must have seen him strolling around town in the armor with Luke and Jessica because New York City is still a very happening place, even at night. There’s no way to be subtle about something like this, especially with Matt practically stripping naked in the middle of the street to change into his armor.
  • It's possible therefore that the public may have had some confirmation that Daredevil was still around prior to Midland Circle...or maybe they believe his “death” is code for another temporary vacation, and nothing to be concerned about. All of Matt's friends and allies would all have to have come up with some explanation for Matt’s pre-"death" disappearance lest they face the police treating them as murder suspects… but if someone did see Matt power-walking around with Jessica and Luke, that'd be a bunch of awkward questions Foggy and Jeri couldn't keep quiet.
  • This means that all of the circumstances surrounding Matt’s "death" are vague. Of course, we know he made it to a convent. If someone official found his body in the rubble, Matt's secret identity would have been blown right then and there because he had the armor on at the time. So we don't know if anyone outside of the heroes' inner circles know Matt is "dead". They obviously would have to tell some lies, because if they say Matt was killed in the Midland Circle explosion, then that means someone like Brett Mahoney would consider Luke and Jessica– Matt's “kidnappers”– as primary suspects. It's also possible that his "death" was kept a secret, with Karen and Foggy holding a private funeral for Matt, and them spreading false stories to keep up the appearance that Matt is alive but he's moved away to another city and is unreachable. We don't even know if the NYPD or Matt's clients think he's just missing.
    • It's publicly known that Daredevil died in Midland Circle, as evidenced in Daredevil season 3 by the way Fisk says "So the devil is back" when Donovan tells him about Matt attacking him and the FBI agents in the hotel parking garage. As for Matt himself, well, publicly it's known that he'd been missing for months, and Karen was paying his bills, as Nadeem points out when he questions her after Fisk leads him to believe that Matt used to be an "accomplice" of his (and even harder to say is whether Matt gave Nadeem the full story of what happened to him when he unmasked himself).
  • It's also very possible that Matt's disappearance is easy to bury because he has a very small inner circle to begin with. Clients can be fed some bullshit, while the landlord issue can be solved by just having Danny buy the building. Given the NYPD's eagerness to cover up their part in what happened, they were probably going to accept a half-baked story about Matt's "disappearance" as fact. However, even with the NYPD being eager to keep the public from learning about the Midland Circle incident, they still know that a bunch of dangerous vigilantes just blew up a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. The view of the NYPD and the district attorney's office toward superheroes has been steadily skewing negative throughout the Netflix shows preceding The Defenders thanks in part to the propaganda put out by Fisk, Reyes, Mariah, Senator Ori and others like them, so if there was any chance that Jessica, Luke, and Danny were involved in Matt’s mysterious disappearance post-”kidnapping”, that seems like something the NYPD would want to dig into, given that with her line-of-duty injuries, Misty may no longer be able to defend Luke to her superiors (there's still tension between Luke and the NYPD as his first interaction with Ridenhour in Luke Cage season 2 shows). This wasn't addressed in Daredevil Season 3, given the immediate issues with Fisk. And if this was to have some impact on the follow-up shows, Detective Costa would've brought it up at some point in Jessica Jones Season 2 as well, but it didn't. Meanwhile, Luke Cage season 2 establishes that the NYPD's way of covering up the mess was also to give Misty a Purple Heart award (which we know that some cops, like Thomas Ridenhour and Nandi Tyler, are not exactly happy about).
  • Matt is still a blind guy, even if he died on the same date as Daredevil, it's gonna be hard to prove he was not just an innocent caught in an explosion. Or Luke and Jessica can just say the Hand killed him and most people will believe them. Even if Brett has questions the police don't want to investigate this case because of how bad it makes them look so he won't ask much questions.
  • If you want a run-down of who learn Matt's secret identity:
    • Daredevil season 1: Claire, the boy he saved from the Russians (not by name though), Father Lantom, Stick, and Foggy.
    • Daredevil Season 2: Elektra, Frank Castle^*Though hard to determine as Frank has never brought this up in conversation with Karen, neither in DDS 2 nor in The Punisher, and Karen
    • The Defenders: Jessica, Luke, Danny, Colleen, Trish, and Misty^*Misty getting it confirmed through dialogue between her and Claire at the start of Luke Cage season 2
    • Daredevil season 3: Sister Maggie, the other Sisters at the convent, Ray Nadeem, Wilson Fisk, Big Ben Donovan, and Vanessa Marianna. Brett Mahoney and Marci Stahl are implied to have learned the truth^*Brett was summoned to the climactic three-way fight between Matt, Dex and Fisk because Foggy had tipped him off about what Matt was going to do. And even if they were too busy dealing with Fisk, there's no way Brett didn't ask any questions to Matt about where he'd been when Matt and Foggy brought Nadeem's family to his place, especially when Matt was wearing his Daredevil shirts from the church attack. As for Marci, we know Foggy has been having nightmares about Matt at the start of the season, but we don't know the details of them or whether he's decided to just tell Marci because he figures there's no real secret left to tell.

Police breaching Midland Circle

• When Misty first catches up to Matt, Jessica and Luke in the Midland parking garage, she lets them go and Luke jams the door. The ESU team that arrives then try it and it won't budge, so they rush to another entrance. Okay, fine. But then Misty goes BACK there, just shoots the door and gains entry without any trouble what so ever. Why didn't the ESU team try and breach the door? Especially when they knew Matt, Jessica and Luke had fled through it seconds before. Seems like if one person other than Misty had the idea "let's just try and get this door," they'd have gotten inside a whole episode quicker. Actually that begs the question why no ESU cops were left guarding it in case they came back.
  • The ESU officers may have had orders to attempt a stealth entry, which would involve trying to find an open entryway that they could get inside without making any noise. This is a common police tactic used for volatile situations where a noisy, dynamic entry may result in catastrophic results, i.e. a group of people with a bomb inside a building who might blow it if they hear the police entering.

Foggy wasn't searched?

• So I can understand why Foggy had to bring the Daredevil suit to the precinct inside the gym bag Matt usually takes to Fogwell's, but question: wouldn't Foggy have to hand the bag over to an officer to be searched prior to being allowed to bring it into the precinct, just in case he was carrying something more nefarious than metal armor?
  • Depends on the precinct and their behavior. Lawyers, especially trusted lawyers like Foggy, would likely just get waved through, especially if the police are busy. That certainly is how things go at the 15th, where not only does Brett work, but Nelson & Murdock's lawyers are a pretty regular sight.

Why detain Matt, Luke and Jessica?

• Why are Misty and Strieber giving Matt, Luke and Jessica such a hard time? "Hey, we have superpowers and some other superpowered chick stabbed a dude we were trying to save and knocked us all out." Why would they be kept for that? They were assault victims. Take their statements and let them walk.
  • Questioning and protective custody. They don't yet have a full understanding of their involvement in a capital crime, so until its all sorted out they're staying in the police station.

So what happened to Matt's gym bag?

• Since Matt never emerged from Midland Circle, did Luke and Jessica go back for the gym bag with his civilian clothing or not?

Uh, hypocritical, aren't you Luke?

• Luke harps on Danny for roughing up Cole and going after bottom feeders. Doesn't he forget that "going after the bottom feeders to get the big fish" was how he went after Cottonmouth?
  • There are many logic gaps on Luke's side of the conversation. Much like the "Cole needed a job" argument. Luke is extremely sensitive to the issues that he may perceive as a racism, much like Danny is to people who look down on him. It has been two days since Luke got out of prison, after serving a sentence he did not deserve, during which he experienced horrible trauma and cruelty that he is still dealing with. He just had an extremely upsetting conversation with Cole, whose siblings Luke could not save, and who now seems doomed to suffer their fate. And now Cole is in jail and as Luke had expressed to Claire right before this scene, he feels bad because he was unable to prevent it. He’s horrified. He’s upset. He’s furious with himself, and the situation, and the world. He’s not in the proper headspace to think about the bigger picture. He probably doesn’t hear half of what Danny says to him. He just hears an opening (Danny’s assertion that he wants to help) and leaps at the only person around he can vent at. Danny got in the way of his rescuing Cole, and Luke needs an outlet, and so he rants at Danny. He’s not forming logical arguments. He’s not fully informed about the situation. And he’s not angry at Danny specifically. He’s just upset, period– and frankly, given the trajectory of his recent life, he is long overdue to let off some steam. Some of the attitude that Luke shows here regarding Cole's situation still lingers on though, if some of his conversations in Luke Cage season 2 mean anything.

So what happens now with Elektra?

• Elektra was a highlight of Defenders, but is basically doom for Matt. I was hoping that we’d finally see a reason, by the end, for Matt to be able to reject her, but instead we got more “I can make you good” conversations. The only way Matt will ever be able to move on would be if she becomes fully evil. What could happen with Elektra?
  • It’s really tough to say where they’ll go with Elektra from here without any evidence (there's no evidence she's even alive, but since rule of thumb is "never count someone dead until you see the body", there's also technically no evidence she's dead either). Matt is always going to have feelings for Elektra because of the power of their time together, and due to the fact that Matt is a very clingy person who has a hard time letting people go. The solution here is not for Matt to outright reject her– which would be out-of-character and negate all of the time that’s been spent solidifying their bond– but to give them some time apart so that they can focus on their own lives. This is to say, Elektra’s presence should not overrule everything else in Matt’s life, and he needs to accept that she is who she is, that maybe having a long-term romantic relationship with her won’t work, that she needs to be able to live on her own terms, and make his peace with that. Otherwise, they’re just going to have the same interactions over and over again. Now Elektra can't be simplified to concepts of “good” and “evil”. That is a massive oversimplification of a character whose appeal comes from her comfortable existence within a moral grey area. Matt’s continued use of “good/bad” terminology in The Defenders suggests that he doesn’t fully understand her yet, and still wants to change her– something that you'd think he'd realized was wrong by the end of Daredevil season 2...
    ...but part of the problem here, of course, is that the audience doesn’t fully know who Elektra is, and the fact that the Black Sky concept was never explained makes it tough to analyze her identity. All of the rhetoric surrounding Elektra suggests that the Black Sky is a force within her that gives her the capacity to kill. But is that inherent to Elektra? Who is Elektra without the Black Sky? Have we ever seen her? Has Matt? Where is the point of separation, if there even is one? When Matt talks about there being “goodness” within her… what, exactly, is he talking about? And when Elektra says she knows and accepts who she is… what is she talking about? There are three different factors at work here: Elektra’s “real,” possibly “good” self (whoever that is), the Black Sky (whatever that is), and the negative psychological influence of being resurrected that was established by Harold Meachum during Iron Fist (and which was never brought up in The Defenders). By the end, Elektra is a knot of these elements and it is impossible to pick them apart.
    This means that at the end of The Defenders, it's hard to determine Elektra’s exact state of mind or thought processes. Her progression is possible to track during the rest of the show, however.
    • Like Harold Meachum, her knowledge of her past life and sense of self return gradually. For Elektra, it’s a particularly slow process. It’s possible this has something to do with how long she was dead, but there’s also a hint that Alexandra might have used Hand magic to do some extra tampering with her memories.
    • After her first encounter in Midland Circle with Matt (someone who isn’t Alexandra and knows who she is!), Elektra starts to become interested in uncovering her identity, and reclaiming the memories that she has been assured she no longer needs. Having met someone from her past, achieving this suddenly seems possible, and so she starts questioning Alexandra’s lessons.
    • It’s a small act of rebellion, but the first foreshadowing of Alexandra’s weakening control over her. Elektra begins acting on her own. We see her examining the sai in the weapons room unaccompanied. (Elektra does this again two episodes later, right before skewering Alexandra with them.) And of course, in the fight at the Royal Dragon, she nearly kills Murakami in order to protect Matt, and because he interrupts what could have been a breakthrough moment for her. Evidence suggests that she doesn’t fully know Matt yet at this point– those memories have yet to surface completely– but she is now aware that there is some deep connection there, and that he is the only key she has for unlocking her past.
    • This is the point at which Elektra starts deceiving and undermining Alexandra. While maintaining the illusion of obedience while around other people, she ventures out on her own, going so far as to sneak out of the Hand base and break into Matt’s apartment in her quest to recover her memories. Alexandra knows something is up, but remains confident in her ability to keep Elektra under control. This overconfidence, and lack of perspective of how quickly the brainwashing is unraveling, weakens her against Elektra, who– as of Episode 6– has recovered her memories/love of Matt, and enough of her identity to solidify her conviction to free herself from the Hand. And learning that Alexandra is growing weak and can be killed empowers her to take the next step. Her delivery of Danny to the Hand is a power play not for Alexandra, but for herself. It seems that she wants three things at this point: power and autonomy, to avoid ever dying again (via acquiring the substance), and to be with Matt in some capacity– as her happiest memories are likely associated with him, and he’s one person she knows she can trust.
    • Elektra brings Danny down into the hole and starts manipulating the heck out of him in order to get the substance. She asserts her dominance over the surviving members of the Hand to solidify her power. And when Matt shows up… you would expect her to try bonding with him, rather than trying to kill him. It could be argued that she sees her attachment to him as a weakness, and thus wants to destroy that– but there’s no evidence of that during their fight. She wants to be with him… but she also wants him dead, and is in fact willing to die alongside him rather than escaping with him. But this negates her desire to avoid death, which is the only reason she went down into the hole in the first place.
    • The reading of her final fight that makes the most sense is that Elektra is raw and conflicted, and operating based on pure emotion. She wants to live, but she doesn’t want to have someone else engineer her survival. She wants to be with Matt, but remembers her death and his involvement in it and is still processing that horror. She has achieved power and freedom, but doesn’t know where to go from here, so she follows her most basic instinct: she fights. And when death seems imminent, she accepts it, because ultimately it’s her choice, and at least she’ll be with Matt, so it might not be as horrific this time.
    • It should be pointed out that we don’t know if all of Elektra's memories have returned by this point. Since Matt and Stick are the only reminders of her past life that she has available, those memories would be easiest for her to access and the first to return. But we lack to information to discern if the rest of her past returned with them. There’s no evidence to prove either option. Elektra could very easily be back to her normal self, but in a raw, frantic, uncontrolled form (as you’d expect, considering what she’s been through and the fact that she’s literally just had to rebuild herself.) And again, the question of who Elektra really is. As mixed-up and confused as she seems at the end, she’s confident in her identity. Matt tells her she’s Elektra Natchios, not the Black Sky– but she already knows that. That’s been the whole point of her narrative arc in this show.
    • When Elektra says, "I appreciate the sentiment Matthew, but I know who I am", that can mean one of two things: option A) that she has been completely consumed by the Black Sky (whatever that is), or option B) she has finally overcome her identity issues from Daredevil season 2 and embraced who she has always been: Elektra Natchios, someone who’s really good at martial arts and killing people. The latter reading makes more logical sense, since it creates a much more satisfactory bit of character development. Elektra herself states that she’s embracing her true identity. But since her point-of-view is unreliable thanks to the hypothetical Black Sky influence, and since Matt seems so convinced that she is no longer herself (and claims she is lying), it’s really tough to figure out Elektra’s actual status in this scene. If we only knew more about the symptoms of being the Black Sky, and could thus separate those out from the rest of Elektra’s personality, it would be far easier. As it stands, this scene is vague and completely up to personal interpretation.
    • While Elektra is not in Daredevil season 3, and the shows' cancellation after that leaves her fate unresolved, it does stand to question where she'd stand with Matt if she survived. Most of this stemming from the fact that since last seeing Elektra, Matt has learned about Karen having killed her brother and Wesley, and that's given him a stronger foundation on which to rebuild his relationships with her and Foggy. That could pose a problem for Elektra, because she doesn’t care for anyone else except Matt and that is a twisted type of caring. Because Karen is trying to do good to atone for the mistakes of her past. Elektra isn’t. She kinda tries to for Matt, but even then she doesn’t commit to it. She doesn’t want to be good. She wants to be herself, which is a trained killer who enjoys killing. Elektra is twisting herself into being something she’s not, to try and appease Matt. Even though Elektra’s true self is a killer it’s still not fair to her. Which could be problematic to Matt.

Faking his own death?

• Would Matt have had enough actual presence of mind to fake his death? He doesn't seem to have a plan, other than try to save Elektra and/or just die. And making out with your ex-girlfriend as the rubble comes down is a very good indication you're okay with dying. Matt may have super senses, but he’s definitely not super powered, so that would be a tough escape to make (Matt has gotten out of a lot of impossible situations but that’d be such an awesomely bad idea, to wait until he’s buried under rubble to get out of dodge).
  • Matt did not go into Midland Circle actively expecting/planning to die or to fake his death. Matt may be a thrill-seeker, but he’s not suicidal, and he doesn’t have any major motivation to want the world to think he’s dead at that point. However, toward the end of the fight down in the hole, when he sees how dire the situation is, he makes a decision. We don't know what that decision is because it requires knowing information we don't have but Matt has. Matt is willing to risk his life trying to spend a few extra minutes trying to rescue Elektra because he doesn’t want to fail her again. His words to Danny indicate that he’s pretty sure he’s going to die, but he may think there’s a chance he and Elektra could still get out.
    Of course, agile and strong as Matt is, he doesn’t have super-strength. And when he's spit out on a vacant lot as shown by the start of Daredevil season 3, he's barely conscious and able to push long enough to ask the cab driver who finds him to take him to Father Lantom.

Case deferrals: impulse or planned?

• When Foggy was passing those case files off to Matt, was that something he'd planned to do (with meeting Matt at Josie's being the pretense for this) or was that something he impulsively decided to do when he saw the bruising on Matt's knuckles?
  • It was planned. At first, it seems unclear whether Foggy was giving Matt braille files or the originals. Had it been the originals, Matt could have scanned them and used OCR software...but when Matt meets Jessica, the files are already in braille. Meaning Foggy must have spent the past day or so looking through his case files and then went by whatever copy business Nelson & Murdock had used in order to have them converted to braille.

Matt finding his loved ones

• When Sowande threatens the heroes' loved ones, Matt goes to Karen's office to grab her and tell her what's going on. How did he know she would be there? And why not also personally track down Foggy rather than give him a phone call?
  • Even though Matt and Karen are taking a temporary break from each other since the end of Daredevil season 2, it's clear they do keep tabs on each other. Matt knows that Karen is really throwing herself into her new job at the Bulletin, and he might even secretly spy on her from time to time, so it stands to reason that he figured it was very likely she'd be working late in her office on a story.
  • As for Foggy, well, this is no different from past moments in the first two seasons of Daredevil where Matt's willingly opened up to Karen compared to his reluctance to open up to Foggy (like the fact that Foggy learned Matt's secret by finding him bleeding out in his apartment, compared to Karen, whom Matt willingly told his secret to). Matt and Foggy are like brothers, but Karen shares a special connection with Matt that they've had since the day they met in that police station. It not only stems from affection but also a desire to protect her. This is why he was both afraid to be honest yet at the same time wants to be honest with her above all. Karen brings a light and warmth to Matt’s life that he’s never known; she’s the first person he’s ever felt normal and vulnerable with. And Matt can almost open up to Karen about anything, like when he breaks down in her arms after being in Gao's drug lab. And he hates lying to Karen, as his confessional with Father Lantom illustrated. Trust is clearly significant to Matt. He trusts Foggy and Karen but they each have a different relationship with him. When Matt finally came clean with Karen about being Daredevil, part if his reasons for coming clean was that he realized Karen was a person he wanted to be completely honest to even though he still struggles with that. She’s someone he cares a great deal for. Not to mention, Karen's also supportive of vigilantes like Matt himself and Frank Castle (and she probably wrote the Bulletin bylines about Luke Cage), especially when Matt has saved her life twice, compared to Foggy who cares for Matt but also wishes Matt had never taken up Daredeviling. This means that it's easier in this case for Matt to reach out to Karen first and trust that she'll get Foggy up to speed when she meets him at the precinct.

"His name is Matthew"

• Isn't Elektra basically revealing Daredevil's secret identity? I know that the only ones present in that room were the leaders of The Hand and that they are dead, but...what if Gao survives and tells Fisk about this? Or is Daredevil's first name not enough information?
  • It does seem like Daredevil's real identity is something they should know, especially considering how much time Madame Gao has spent around Matt, and how astute she's shown herself during interactions with the other Fingers as well during interactions with other associates/enemies like Fisk, Harold, and Danny. It's possible a few of the Fingers did know, but just pretended they didn’t because they didn’t want anyone else to have that information, kinda like Fisk handled this in the comics version of "Born Again". ^note When Fisk found out Matt's identity, he kept his knowledge of this a secret from even his closest henchmen because he felt the info was too valuable. In time, this led to members of his inner circle revolting and overthrowing him But if the Fingers were all in the dark on this (as the show seems to imply), and assuming Gao did survive, it would be enough information for her to figure it out, considering how easily the Hand had earlier pieced together Daredevil's association with Brett Mahoney. The question is whether or not Gao would care enough to do so, if she survived Midland Circle. She has shown an interest in Daredevil in the past, and she could certainly use that knowledge to blackmail Matt and/or win back favor with Fisk, but it's more likely she'd just move on to greener pastures, depending on her future goals, not to mention that after her part in poisoning Vanessa, there's no way Fisk would've remotely considered doing any more business with her.

The cops finding the theatre

• So how did the cops locate Matt, Jessica and Luke at the theatre? They gave no indication to anyone of where they were.
  • When Elektra is escaping with Danny, she jumps out the window and lands on a car parked on the street below, crushing the roof and setting off the alarm. Depending on what security features the car's owner installed, the system probably sent out an automated dispatch to the police. A single unit was sent to check it out. When they got there, the officers likely saw the broken window, and realized the crushed roof was from someone jumping out the window. So they summoned a few more patrol units, and did a sweep of the theatre, finding Sowande's body first, and then finding Stick's body alongside the knocked out Matt, Jessica and Luke.

Claire doesn't acknowledge Matt?

• Claire mentions all her other super powered friends to each other (gets Luke and Danny to meet) but she doesn't mention her Matt at all? Was this her way of trying to keep him out of the fight with the Hand?
  • Since the show is so packed with side-characters, most of them were going to have a reduced presence. Unfortunately, for a few of the side characters, this actively weakens their characterization. This is very much the case with Karen, whose existence on the sidelines of the action rather than right in the thick of it (despite having more personal motivation for going after the Hand than Jessica or Luke have) is kinda odd. Claire is another example, as she hangs out in the background for most of the show, handing out clumsy advice and reminding the other characters how important and special they are. She doesn’t even get to perform her standard plot function of providing spectacularly daring medical help (unless you count her treating Matt offscreen). She's kinda been reduced to being just Luke's love interest, with no real significance to the overall plot (and how she was handled in Luke Cage season 2 didn't help this view of her for many fans).
  • In addition, it's likely that the showrunners didn’t want to further confuse first-time viewers who hadn't watched any of the previous shows if they introduced Claire as one of Matt’s exes when the A-plot already involved Karen (Matt's current girlfriend with whom he's pressed the "pause" button) and Elektra (his not-dead ex-girlfriend from college). At the same time, some acknowledgement that Claire knew all four of the Defenders could have been scripted in the first four episodes. Even if it was just Claire in the car with Colleen, Danny and Luke being all, “Wait, Matt’s wrapped up in this bullshit too? Nevermind. Of course he is. He’s Matt,” or Foggy mentioning helping get Claire’s super-powered boyfriend out of jail when he and Matt meet at Josie's, or Luke bringing up Claire after Danny mentions Colleen at the Royal Dragon. Obviously, it was never going to happen in the second half because there, it would have slowed things down, especially when so much of the back half was busy juggling a huge cast of both leads and supporting characters and making sure that everybody on the phone tree has the information they need to keep the plot moving forward.

Trish forgot how to fight?

• When Jessica comes to get Trish, they are attacked by Murakami. But Trish just stands on the side looking scared while Jessica fights Murakami and almost loses until Matt shows up to rescue both of them. Seems kinda odd considering Trish's krav maga training, and her later remarks in Jessica Jones season 2 about wanting to be the one to save Jessica, and she passed up an opportunity here.
  • Trish was just too far away from Jessica to help her. She was on the ground and by the time Trish got up and got over there, Jessica would have been dead. Even if she was close enough to rush Murakami, there's a difference between training and actually putting your training to use in a real world situation against someone trying to kill you, as evidenced by how Trish lost to Will Simpson when he fought her while under Kilgrave's control. When she fought him again later in the season after taking his pills to give herself a boost, Simpson still had the upper hand on Trish until Jessica was able to recover enough to give her an assist. Although Murakami is not a trained Special Ops soldier like Simpson was, he is a practitioner of multiple disciplines of martial arts. So it's unclear how Trish would've fared against him.

Stick's plans for Danny

• Why didn't Stick kill Danny earlier? He had perfect openings on a few occasions before Danny got tied up.
  • Killing Danny was on Stick's mind at the start of the conversation that immediately followed Sowande's death. You can tell because he puts his hand on his sword when they're discussing how the Hand need Danny for something. But then the others speak up about keeping Danny there in the theatre, and he stayed quiet. While it does seem odd that he'd wait to make his move, but it makes sense in retrospect: Stick was probably expecting to have to fight Matt, Jessica, and Luke in order to kill Danny, but when he realized they were going to incapacitate Danny in some way themselves and hold him there, he took the opportunity to wait until he had fewer of them to deal with before making his move, a moment he got when Matt and Jessica left to go talk to the architect's family.

Luke's release from prison

• I get the out-of-universe explanation for having Foggy greet Luke when he's being released from prison (to establish who Claire's "lawyer friend" was), but was there an in-universe reason for this? I mean, it sounds like a bit much for Foggy to go down to Savannah to pick up his client, and that Hogarth would be willing to foot the bill for airfare, lodging and whatnot. Why couldn't Claire go down to Seagate to pick up her boyfriend? After all, she drove this route before when she needed to get Luke to Dr. Borstein.

What if Matt had survived Midland Circle?

• I know it's hypothetical more than anything, but how would the shows between The Defenders and Daredevil season 3 be impacted if Matt had returned from Midland Circle rather than "dying" down there in the hole? Would he be getting involved in any of the intervening shows?
  • These kinds of questions are always tricky, because if we’re approaching this from a writer’s perspective, Matt probably wouldn’t have been involved anyway. Most of these stories are very personal to the protagonists, and it would have felt wrong to stick Matt in the middle of them. But here's the most likely guesses:
    • With regards to the events of The Punisher, well, Matt would most likely have focused on the more public events (the bombing) and Karen. Given how he reacted to Sowande threatening the heroes' loved ones, Matt would have gone after Lewis the moment Lewis threatened Karen on the radio, and he probably would have tried to convince Karen to get out of any situation remotely involving Frank. He probably would've been there in the hotel episode and worked with Frank to subdue Lewis, possibly even talking Lewis into giving up and getting arrested.
    • With Jessica Jones season 2, it's open to debate whether Jessica would have turned to Matt. Her investigation of IGH was a very personal situation. Much like Matt, Jessica isn't the sort to ask for help, and she doesn’t know Matt that well yet. Pulling Matt into the situation would have, from her perspective, been both putting him in danger and revealing to him how messed up and out-of-control her life is. It's possible that he would've gotten involved via Foggy and Jeri. He would have offered both legal and butt-kicking help– though whether Jessica would have accepted that help is another matter entirely. It does seem likely that she would pick Matt to defend her mother, in which case he would have been the one to deal with Alisa being mistreated by Dale Holiday (he'd probably deal with it by going out as Daredevil and intimidating Dale, and if that doesn't work, make a petition in court for Dale to be reassigned away from Alisa, etc).
    • With Luke Cage season 2, Matt would probably be taking Foggy's place in representing Luke when he's being sued by Cockroach. He might try intimidating Cockroach as Daredevil into dropping the suit, or, if he decided that the gig at Piranha's party was a better option, would've done that. If Matt had been at Piranha's party, he'd have probably stayed by Luke's side for the duration of the night fighting off Bushmaster's men while getting Piranha to safety.
    • With Iron Fist season 2, it's likely that there would've been no changes to the overall story, since it's unlikely Danny would ever call up Matt and ask for his help in fighting Davos.
    • With Daredevil season 3, there wouldn't have been a convenient disappearance for Fisk to take advantage of when scapegoating Matt to Ray Nadeem; Fisk would also not have as big an opening to get a Daredevil suit readied for Dex. Matt, Karen and Foggy would've probably been able to figure out Fisk's conspiracy much sooner.

Jessica's ability to tow a car

• Did Jessica get a power boost between her first season and The Defenders? She could barely lift Gregory Spheeris' car off its back wheels, and here, she's able to pull Trish's Hyundai off a tow truck and shove a Hand SUV through the Royal Dragon's doors with relative ease. Am I imagining things or not?
  • Lifting Spheeris's car was more impressive than Jessica made it look, because she wasn’t just picking up the back end– she was also fighting the engine and preventing him from driving away. And the obvious lack of effort this took suggests that if Jessica wanted to, she could’ve picked it up higher, maybe dragged it around a bit…but she didn't because she only uses her powers to the amount necessary to do a job.

Where were Bailey and Nandi?

• Where were the other cop characters from Luke Cage at the time of The Defenders? The 29th precinct became the hiding place for the heroes' loved ones, yet we only see Misty, and the new captain Strieber, but we see none of the other Luke Cage cop characters of Misty's rank, like Mark Bailey and Nandi Tyler.
  • Priscilla Ridley's absence is explained in Luke Cage season 2 as being because she was promoted to Deputy Chief and moved downtown to One Police Plaza. She doesn't come back up to the 29th until after Thomas Ridenhour is killed. Thomas Ridenhour, meanwhile, is established in the first episode of Luke Cage season 2 to have been transferred up to the 29th after Strieber got reassigned to the 15th Precinct (where he's seen in Daredevil season 3 overseeing the police who respond to Dex's attack on the church). As for Nandi and Bailey, they were probably offscreen handling the crime scenes left by the fights that the heroes were having with the Hand (it was the police who found Matt, Jessica and Luke at the theatre).

Why didn't they shout a warning?

• From where they were standing, Gao, Bakuto and Murakami clearly could see Elektra sneaking up behind Alexandra. Why didn't they say anything to warn Alexandra?
  • Given how Alexandra put them in this dire position by expending the last of their reserves of immortality juice on reviving Elektra, they probably figured Alexandra deserved it, and that this would temporarily get her out of the way and allow them to handle this situation through more rational means. Maybe they even thought it poetic given how Alexandra had gone to great lengths to isolate Elektra. They didn't expect that Elektra would know to decapitate the body to ensure Alexandra would never come back.^note something that Elektra probably learned from Stick

Karen's reaction

• When Matt goes to grab Karen from her office, Karen's reaction doesn't make any sense. Has she suddenly forgotten about being kidnapped by The Hand as bait for Matt? And how come she's more upset about Matt going back to Daredeviling? She should be having a more horrified reaction akin to how she reacts in Daredevil season 3 when she hears that Fisk has been released from prison.
  • Going off what's shown from the flashback in the first episode of Daredevil season 3, Karen seems to be upset that Matt lied to her again. Maybe she could read it as evidence that he'd been doing Daredevil stuff behind her back prior to the Hand returning (counting the looters he beat up after the earthquake). That said, the way it's written does make Karen come off like she's being unreasonable and a little silly. Read the room, Karen. Matt's here saying the Hand is back, the Hand who kidnapped you, so you're possibly in danger, you should go with Matt and ream him out after he's gotten you to safety. Granted, what we later learn of Karen in Daredevil season 3 does give some justification for her behavior and reasons behind why she said some things, but The Defenders was written and filmed before the Daredevil season 3 scripts would have even been written. So Karen's position is understandable, but the way the scene is written does make her come off more like she's another "superhero's girlfriend who doesn't understand her boyfriend's issues". Plus, at that juncture, without the context of Daredevil season 3, it almost comes off like Karen made Matt give up Daredevil to have a chance at fixing their relationship.

Sokovian Accords

• Why weren't the Defenders under S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar? The whole point of the Accords was to force metahumans into either retiring from super-heroics/vigilantism or working for the government.
  • The Accords don't apply to the Netflix heroes. The Accords were about regulating the Avengers.
  • Who says they are not? Check Jessica Jones Season 2.
    • Again, the Accords do not apply to the Netflix heroes. From what we see of the Accords in Civil War, they were drafted specifically to deal with the Avengers. That doesn't seem to affect Spider-Man's ability to do vigilantism in Queens in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and if it didn't affect him there, it wouldn't affect Matt, Jessica, Luke, or Danny. It was a writing mistake on Agents of SHIELD that led to the assumption that all enhanced people had to be registered. Civil War stated the Accords were specifically for regulating the Avengers because they were a non-sanctioned, American-based team acting internationally. Agents of SHIELD turned it into the comic’s version of the superhero registration act which then muddies the waters. It's the fact that the Avengers were an international team with no oversight or regulation that was the problem, as evidenced by the fact that Black Widow had to sign despite not having superpowers. They're for those sorts of people, not for guys who only want to help a single neighborhood of Manhattan.
    • This has actually been further muddled by She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. In his court case, Matt states there that the Sokovia Accords have been officially struck down by at least 2023 (and sometime after the events of WandaVision, given they seemed to still be in place when that show's events occurred), and that therefore enhanced individuals have the right to a certain amount of privacy. This implies that, after the Accords were instated, enhanced individuals could be captured by the US government with certain rights waived. However, during the period of the show in 2016, S.H.I.E.L.D is working with incredibly limited resources and busy with larger threats, Damage Control is in its infancy, and the ATCU has been shut down. Most likely there was someone keeping track of Jessica and Luke to some extent (the only two that the public knows have powers), but seeing as they use their powers help their communities, they're viewed as mostly harmless and are thus left alone, and any problems they might cause are left for the NYPD to handle. Come 2023 when Damage Control is routinely rounding up enhanced people (especially persons of color) in the Tri-State area, this would probably be a very different matter.