‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Explainer: Is This The Same Guy She-Hulk Smashed Or Nah?

When I was writing my recap of the Daredevil: Born Again premiere, I spent a lot of time looking up older recaps and articles to remind myself exactly how Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk arrived at this point in continuity. This isn’t exactly a fresh start for the characters, and I was surprised at how much prior knowledge the show expected viewers to come to the table with. Knowledge of the Netflix Daredevil show, sure, but also of the characters’ other appearances in the MCU. It’s a messy timeline, complicated by the fact that some of those appearances came at a time when Marvel Studios had decided to make Daredevil: Born Again but hadn’t decided that it would be a continuation of the Netflix show at all. So if you’re like me and wondered if the Matt Murdock who hooked up with Jen Walters in She-Hulk was supposed to be the gritty Netflix Matt Murdock, then read on - I’ve whipped up a little cheat sheet to get you up to speed!

2018: Daredevil Season Three
Netflix’s Daredevil ended with its third season, and it was a pretty happy ending all the way around. Daredevil strikes a sort of truce with Kingpin — basically, he’ll leave Fisk’s new wife Vanessa alone if Fisk leaves Karen and Foggy alone. Fisk and Vanessa both end up in custody. Matt, Foggy, and Karen decide to resurrect their old law firm together, which lines up with where we see them in the Born Again premiere.

2019: The Punisher Season Two
The second season of Netflix’s The Punisher was its last, and all you really need to know is that Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle closes out the season as a no-qualms vigilante shooting up a warehouse full of teenage thugs. So basically, he’s just being The Punisher.

2021: Spider-Man: No Way Home and Hawkeye
There were a lot of cameos in Sony’s third Spider-Man movie, so it’s easy to forget that Charlie Cox showed up as Matt Murdock, too. He’s there briefly as Peter’s lawyer, and I think he catches a brick or something? So not exactly a big superhero team-up, but still notable as this was the character’s first introduction into the MCU proper.

The movie was released in December, which coincided with Kingpin’s big return in the Disney+ series Hawkeye. He’s revealed to be the boss of the Tracksuit Mafia and Echo/Maya Lopez, who shoots him in the eye when she discovers his involvement in her father’s death. That’s the source of the scar we see Fisk sporting in Daredevil: Born Again.

2022: Daredevil: Born Again Enters Development/ She-Hulk Appearance
Marvel Studios officially announced Daredevil: Born Again at San Diego Comic-Con. The original plan was an 18-episode first season, a legal procedural focusing more on Matt’s day job, with plans for a second season baked in. The show was expected to be its own new thing with few ties to the Netflix version, if any.

Later that year, Charlie Cox appeared on the Disney+ series She-Hulk: Attorney At Law. His Matt Murdock flies to Los Angeles to represent a client Jen is suing in court, and later the two clash as their superhero alter-egos (and smash in the bedroom). It also notably is the first time we see Daredevil in costume in the MCU - in a garish yellow and red costume, in fact. This was perhaps the first sign that Marvel’s shiny new take on The Man Without Fear wasn’t going to be received well. But definitely not the bit about him sleeping with She-Hulk, because fans were super cool with that. Just really super chill and normal.

2023: Creative Overhaul
While production was on hold during the Hollywood labor strikes, Marvel Studios decided that what had been shot so far of Born Again (six episodes or so) wasn’t working. Reportedly, Daredevil didn’t even appear in costume until episode four. They let go of head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman, as well as the directors, and eventually replaced them with new showrunner Dario Scardapane, who wrote on The Punisher, as well as directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who worked on Moon Knight and Loki season two. The plan was to retain as much of the existing footage as they could, but revamp the series to be more action-oriented and less of a legal procedural. Basically, make it more like the Netflix show.

2024: Echo
Daredevil and Kingpin both appear in the Echo miniseries, though it’s worth noting that the show was shot in 2022, before the Born Again series was revamped. Daredevil does appear in his red costume, however, and there’s reference to Kingpin’s backstory from the Netflix series as well (he offers Maya the same hammer he used to kill his father). Maybe there were reshoots? The events of Echo are, I think, what Fisk was referencing in Born Again when he tried to explain his disappearance to Vanessa, and the show’s end credit scene sets up Born Again with Fisk deciding to run for Mayor.

2025: Daredevil: Born Again Debuts
The first season will be nine episodes, with the remaining nine spun off as a second season. That accounts for the original 18-episode order, so I’m not sure what the deal is with the original second season - if that plot just no longer exists or if there are more seasons in the works. We now know that Marvel Studios didn’t just make Born Again more like the Netflix show - they made it an explicit continuation of the series, and may in fact be bringing more Netflix stars into the fold (Bernthal already has a stand-alone Punisher project in the works).

I wanted to lay it all out like this because it’s all one straight line, continuity-wise - but at various points in history, it wasn’t. The Kingpin in Hawkeye or the Daredevil in She-Hulk weren’t intended to be continuations of their Netflix counterparts, not really. They were supposed to be introductions to new versions of those characters for the MCU continuity. They’ve essentially been retconned into this new connected continuity, but they’re also vestigial traces of the shinier MCU Daredevil that’s now lost to the ether. Or to poor corporate strategy.

So to answer our original question: Jen Walters did hook up with the Born Again version of Matt Murdock, but at the time it was intended to be a different version of the show and thus of Matt, only that version got rewritten to be the same as the Netflix one. Duh.