Daredevil

The third season of Netflix’s ‘Daredevil‘ put The Man Without Fear up against The Kingpin of Crime and Bullseye and yet Matt Murdock didn’t want help. He didn’t go to his friends for help and in fact, warned them to stay away, but he also didn’t go to his vigilante support network either. It would be easy to imagine that Daredevil might seek help when working to take down his greatest enemy but showrunner Erik Oleson had multiple reasons for not going that route.

According to Oleson:

“Well, there’s a number of reasons. There’s the story reason of that Matt feels that it is his responsibility that Fisk’s release in large part is on him for not having taken care of it the first time around or the second time around. And so Matt Murdock is determined to right the wrongs that he himself set in motion.
“He also, in a kind of a spiritual way, feels like God is speaking to him and is putting in front of him a raison d’etre, a reason to keep going, and to keep existing after his heartbreaking life turn at the end of Defenders, where he walked out of the building and Elektra did not. And in episode one of this season, Matt essentially attempts suicide by thug. So he has spiritual and emotional reasons for why he doesn’t call in the Defenders.”

The true reason was in the storytelling and is a common question that comes up for films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe when viewers wonder why Cap doesn’t just call Iron Man for help when they aren’t in the middle of fighting one another.

“Then there’s the kind of meta writerly reason why I didn’t want to do that, and if one of the basic rules of great drama writing is that your protagonist must be outgunned by the agonist or else there’s no dramatic tension. “If Matt can simply call Luke Cage and Jessica Jones and Danny Rand to come in and beat these other villains, your dramatic structure is lopsided. It becomes boring. It’s like suddenly the heroes have all the power, and the villain is outgunned, and that becomes a major impediment to telling a great story. So that’s the other reason we did it, truthfully.”

This last reason is the most obvious, but it always needs to be crafted in a way to make sense. The other heroes have to be busy or not on speaking terms or across the globe for whatever reason (or in the cases of ‘Iron Fist’ and ‘Luke Cage’ having just had their shows canceled).

Do you agree that not having the rest of Daredevil’s crime-fighting friends be included was the best bet for the story? Can you justify that this continues happening on an ongoing basis? Share your thoughts in the comments below, True Believers!

Source: Comic Book