Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 5 of Daredevil: Born Again, now available on Disney+.
The key to Wilson Fisk’s sanity is dead.
The fifth episode of Daredevil: Born Again is aptly titled “The Grand Design,” as the inevitable disaster that’s been hanging over Marvel fans’ heads for a decade culminates, setting Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) on a collision course for destruction.
So far, Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) has maintained a clean public image in the Disney+ revival. First as a mayoral candidate and now as mayor of New York City, he has meticulously hidden his nefarious activities and smashing heads in the dark. In the latest series of episodes, his wife Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer) takes on a larger role in his underground business operations.
Unlike her comic book counterpart, who frequently pressured Wilson to leave her criminal empire, Zurer’s portrayal of Vanessa is complicit in and truly integral to the Kingpin’s operations. In the original Daredevil series, Vanessa was fiercely loyal to Wilson, and even married him even after he was forced to spend two years in exile due to his detention at Rikers Island.
And in “Born Again,” Vanessa is further established as the voice of reason in Wilson’s life, helping him act with self-control. New York Governor Marge McCaffrey (Lili Taylor) catches wind of this movement and arranges a meeting with Vanessa to see if she can quell her husband’s dark impulses. “Supporting Mayor Fisk kept me up at night. But I can support Mayor and Mrs. Fisk,” she tells a hard-faced Vanessa in episode four.
The mid-season finale ends on a cliffhanger as Fisk’s public boxing match goes awry and Vanessa is hit in the head by flying shards of glass, leaving her bleeding in the arena. The fifth episode features a series of flashback sequences that explore the day Wilson and Vanessa first met at an art gallery, emphasizing her value in his life from the start. The episode culminates with Vanessa dying in a hospital bed and Wilson strangling a man to death in an uncontrollable rage.
“Personally, it was a really heartbreaking experience to have to say goodbye to everything I’ve worked on over the last 10 years,” Zurer told Variety at the New York premiere of Daredevil: Born Again in March. “It was emotional.”
Vanessa becomes the second major character death in the original Daredevil series in Born Again, following the shocking series opener in which Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) is assassinated by Bullseye (Wilson Bethell). Zurer said the decision came as a surprise and the creative team was forced to explain it privately.
“Everyone on the team had to call me directly and explain why and how,” Zurer said. “They were often very emotional about it, but we really felt it was important to the story as well, to have an explosion that would take Vincent’s character, Kingpin, to a whole new level of insanity.”
Zurer’s hints about Kingpin’s escalation are consistent with Marvel canon. In Brian Michael Bendis’s Daredevil in the early 2000s, Vanessa’s death sparked a calculated war of manipulation, with Fisk further embodying the Kingpin’s nickname, as if the last remnants of humanity had perished with Vanessa. A better known example is in 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. There, a grief-stricken Kingpin risks destroying the multiverse to bring his family back to life.
“Electricity has always been a risky business,” Zuler explains. “It was always an emotional quest[for Kingpin]to have more power and more control. To satisfy something inside him. It’s more of a psychological aspect.”
“She is never enough. Nothing is enough,” she concludes.
