[85/100] There are two big revelations in “Revelations”. One was telegraphed and made me roll my eyes. The other genuinely surprised me and had an emotional impact. (And there’s technically a third, but it’s a little less significant than the other two.) Let’s take them one at a time. I don’t care that Sister Maggie is Matt’s biological mother. I still like the character. The actress still does good work. And her flashback is genuinely interesting. The idea that she suffered from postpartum depression and felt as though she’d betrayed God, spurring her to give up her child is the kind of sympathetic but hard choice that good storytelling and character work are founded on. If, for example, this had just been her backstory about a different child, and she decided to work at the orphanage as penance, it would have been interesting. You could even still have Matt be angry with her for doing the thing he resents his own mother for doing. There’s real meat there! But my god, the “So-and-so is your long lost relative” twist is so tired and hackneyed. It’s the cheapest way to manufacture drama. And everything about where she was and how she and Matt ended up connecting again feels so contrived. It requires the writers to bend over backwards to account for why nobody told Matt all this time, and comes off as a cheesy reveal just to add some extra oomph without having truly earned it. I’m mixed, at best, with what the show does with the revelation. Matt is already in a vulnerable place after the events of *The Defenders*. So there’s something to be said about this putting him over the edge. Now, he finds himself in a state of such emotional devastation that he’s ready to fully abandon his code and deal death to Kingpin. The actor who plays his dad isn’t as good as Vincent D’Onofrio, so the “voice of your fears and insecurities” routine isn’t as effective. But there’s still some juice to the idea that learning his mother was there the whole time accentuates his feeling of being cursed and unlovable, to where he’s more willing to embrace his dark side. The execution just doesn't blow me away. Charlie Cox continues to struggle to sell Matt’s sense of brooding and frustration in a way that compels me. And while the scenes in the flashback are good, Matt deciding to go muay thai to try to kill Fisk feels silly somehow, and his conversations with his father and Fisk as avatars for his self-hatred aren’t as effective. I do like that protecting Karen is his light in the tunnel, the thing that gives him some purpose and keeps him from going full kamikaze. That said, the reveal for Ray, that SAC Hattley is under Fisk’s thumb, and that Kingpin’s had this all plotted out for years, worked like gangbusters for me. My jaw dropped when Hattley shot the OPR agent. Maybe I’m a sucker, but she struck me as a solid agent, one whose actions toward Ray made sense to this point. So the reveal that she’s been blackmailed, that she’s been complicit in orchestrating all of these events, building this house of cards, comes as a genuine shock, for Ray and for me. And you feel for Ray here. He’s a good man, trying to do the right thing. This revelation happens after he effectively offers to fall on his sword, give up everything he’s worked for, for himself and his family, because justice demands putting Fisk back behind bars. It is selfless to admit you got played, to give up your promotion and your family’s financial security, because it comes at the cost of an evil man causing more harm, and it makes Ray one of the more noble characters in the whole Defenders-verse. So to offer yourself up like that, and to then be dragged deeper into the shit, made more of a pawn in this game, is shocking and devastating. And much as Fisk pulled away more and more of Dex’s support structures, Ray faces more and more reveals that unmoor him: the number of fellow agents who are under Fisk’s thumb, the threats from Dex once he’s reinstated, the lengths Fisk will go according to Hattley, and somehow worst of all, the fact that Fisk orchestrated the situation that would put Agent Nadeem’s family in dire financial straits so that he’d be an easier target. The way the scales fall in all of this, leading Ray to realize that he thought he was working hard and doing good only to be playing right into the hands of a cruel and conniving man, is absolutely unmooring. Considering the threats to his family, the things he becomes a party to, Ray suddenly ratchets up the list of most sympathetic characters despite everything. His is the right kind of twist: one that's surprising, that nonetheless makes sense within the world established by the show and the story it’s telling, and one which resonates in character, not just the shock factor. The third reveal is the fact that Fisk’s henchmen have leverage over Foggy’s family thanks to a book-cooked loan for the family store. It’s a solid reveal, especially with the hope of Foggy’s moment at the DA endorsement banquet going viral. And it adds to the sense that, as hard as our heroes are fighting, Fisk is always one step ahead. But it feels pretty mild compared to all the other big twists going on here. Otherwise, Deborah Ann Woll continues to do great work. You feel exactly how desperate and at the end of her rope she is when trying to escape from town before Fisk gets here. And Sister Maggie trying to help her is a little contrived, but plays well into the story. And Wilson Bethel does good work at making Dex seem like a smug bastard now that he’s fully embraced his own dark side, with his threats and intimations toward Ray seeming particularly menacing. Overall, this is an episode founded on two twists. One of them works nigh-perfectly and recontextualizes much of what we’ve seen in a piercing fashion. The other falls into tired tropes and can't make much out of them.

Fisk's whole plan seems to rely in buying or corrupting every FBI officer and agent of the law while offering that same protection to his adversaries. Unexpected given his circunstancies and very bold for a man incarcerated not long ago, yes, but hardly something that has never been done.