[95/100] I don’t say this lightly, but the creative team for *Daredevil* might be wasting their talents. I like this series. I like superhero projects in general. I like doing elevated takes on the genre. But holy hell, if you lop off the last fifteen minutes or so of this episode, you have a vignette of a family in crisis, of rich characters who are made to be broken, that would fit seamlessly with *Daredevil*’s prestige drama contemporaries like *Breaking Bad* and *Fargo*. Suffice it to say, this blew me away. I would watch a whole show about Karen’s life in Fagan Corners, Vermont without any heroics involved. There’s a lived in grittiness to her situation, rendered in miniature given the confines of a larger-than-life drama that needs to get back to the punching and kicking, but which is thoroughly piercing in the tale of domestic tragedy it weaves. Suffice it to say, you feel for everyone in this story. You feel for Karen, who is stuck trying to keep things afloat after the death of her mother, and duty-bound to look after her family, but who feels trapped in this dead-end town in the same trap her mother fell into and hated. You feel for her brother, who does everything in his power to get her out, to cover for and protect the sister he loves, and who ends up dead for his noble but foolish youthful efforts. You even feel for her father, who is trying desperately to hold onto the last vestiges of his dead wife, who suffers another mortal blow at the death of his only son, and who cannot bear to endure the notion that his only daughter had a hand in his other child’s death. There are no bad guys here. (Alright, maybe the shitty drug-dealing boyfriend and the condescending, misogynistic cop are bad guys, but there are no bad guys in the Page family!) Instead, there is a collection of individuals who have understandable motivations, driven by an unfair tragedy that all too many families have grappled with, trying to hold onto whatever they have, however they can. There are so many open wounds on display here, a confluence of hurt people trying to do their best for one another and only; hurting each other more. It is tragic, not in the standard but dramatic way of Matt losing his father to a mob hit, but in the more prosaic sense of a family suffering a blow that none can ever fully recover from. There’s so much lived in detail to the progression of events in Fagan Corners. The way Karen deals drugs with her scuzzy-but-dreamy boyfriend to both deal with her own pain and help prop up the family, the way Kevin tries everything in his power to get her out of this pit and succumbs himself in the process, the way her father has latched onto a doomed dream and unwittingly impressed his family into service to prolong it. There’s so much realness here, right down to the diegetic soundtrack and bric-a-brac filled camper that Karen and her boyfriend hole up in. You feel every minute of this extended vignette, from the extended shots of a burnt out town to the kitchen sink drama of a family in crisis hashing it out over pancakes and framed lottery tickets. It would be so easy for this animating flashback to feel cheesy, or like too much and too perfect to set up what’s happening in Karen’s life now. Instead, it goes to a deeper and realer place than *Daredevil*’s ever gone before. That extends to the death of Karen’s brother. Again, no one’s the bad guy here. (Other than a shitty, drug-dealing boyfriend.) Karen finds solace where she can. She defends Kevin much as he defended her. In the accident that takes his life, she may be driving, but she’s full of palliatives trying to wash away the pain of her family’s blow-up over unresolved issues stemming from her mother’s death; she’s emotionally disturbed from the domestic violence that she just witnessed and took part in, and her mind is further addled by her little brother’s own pain at the loss of his mom and the fear that he may lose his sister too. It is a horror, one that Karen’s father blames her for, but one that is the result of innumerable small choices, each too tiny and individualized to deserve great blame, rather than one damnable action. Frankly, it stands on its own. You don’t need to know Karen’s past or her future for this to mean anything. The story is that good, and the performances are that strong, the sense of place so vivid, that the first thirty minutes or so work as their own short story, regardless of anything else happening in *Daredevil*. I almost wish the episode had stopped there, letting us sit with this glimpse of another world, one far removed from Karen’s current crusade and predicament. Because, to be frank, what follows is good, but feels so removed from the lived-in, crushing blows of small town life and death that it can't really compare. The confrontation, fight, and murder in a church is operatic, larger than life, in the way that *Daredevil*’s elevated, four-color presentation provides for on a regular basis. But I have to admit, as impressive and stylized as the battle between Daredevil and Bullseye is, it’s hard to take Dex throwing rosary beads through parochial crystal seriously in the shadow of a father exiling his daughter because he’s too wounded by a pair of unfathomable losses. Which is all to say that, in any other episode. I think I would dig the Daredevil/Bullseye fight tremendously. There’s a real stylized quality to it, with the red accent lighting and yellow structures that gives the skirmish a true gothic quality. Matt being faced with his one and possibly only chance to slay Kingpin, only to choose t o protect Karen instead, is meaningful as all hell. And the reciprocal choice from Karen, to give herself up to Poindexter so that he won’t hurt any more innocent people shows her steel and morality as well. Of course, the prime bit of selflessness here comes from Father Lantom, taking a dagger to the heart in place of Karen. The show’s done a stellar job with him this season, showing him both as a moral center in a chaotic world, and providing the right mix of support and feet of clay for both Matt and Karen when it counted most. He’s been a highlight in season 3, and he gets an appropriately reverent swan song, and plea for forgiveness, in the throes of a deadly situation. I just can't disengage from seeing such a grounded, at times hard-to-stomach vision of small town tragedy curdling into greater loss enough to shift to watching badass metahumans trading punches and kicks with each other. The fight between Daredevil and Bullseye is more symbolic than anything, with Poindexter’s over-the-top sacrilege matched by Matt and Karen’s moral defense of the church and what it stands for. The latter is heightened and over-the-top, certainly in line with the series’ usual tone, but a far cry from the down-to-earth drama the episode spins for two-thirds of its runtime. And yet, if there’s a connection between the two, it’s in the closing image, of Karen holding Matt much like The Pietà, as Mary cradles Jesus. Karen has been imprinted with the sense that,she is responsible for so much death and devastation from those trying to protect her. To see it happen once again, not just with her brother, but with her coworkers, her friends, and with Matt, is too much to bear. The two parts of “Karen” feel like they come from different shows, but if anything unites them, it’s the sense of one unbearable loss begetting another, and the mental and emotional hardship that a hurt but enduring person labors under in the wake of both.

Shout out to the writers that decided not to fridge Karen, they could have gone with the sexist trope from the comics but they decided to do the right thing. And to the people who will be angry because they wanted to see it exactly as it happened in the comics, I say: just because something happened in the comics, it doesn't mean that it is sacred and that it should happen on the screen too. Some things are just a product of their time, let them die there, it's 2018 and the female characters deserve better.