Characters That Are Ruining Daredevil

The second of season of Daredevil has been binged by Marvel fans across the globe, and critics generally agree that it's maintained the same quality as the first season, which is great for the parts that were awesome, but bad news for the parts that sucked. With more ten-minute fight sequences and generic ninjas than you can shake a bloody katana at, Daredevil sometimes forgets to depict well-rounded characters. Here are a few characters that really need to put up or shut up if we want season three to be even more binge-worthy. And by "a few" we mean "a bunch of them." We're not saying that these characters are straight-up bad, just that they really should be better. Major season two spoilers ahead...

Let's just get it out of the way: Matt Murdock is a personality vacuum. As Daredevil, he's a pretty rad vigilante who shows more realistic strengths and weaknesses than any other live-action superhero in recent memory. But Matt Murdock is one boring dude. Maybe it's a revealing character trait that only Daredevil has any kind of emotion or motivation and Matt is just a human-like skin-suit that only vaguely mimics natural human behavior, but dang, is it hard to watch.

We love Foggy Nelson, but his carefully-written quips and responses so rarely ring realistic. On one hand, we have Matt Murdock's frustratingly constant stoicism, and on the other, we have Foggy's awkward overacting—and neither hand feels right. Maybe it's just Eldon Henson trying to get through weird lines in the most believable way possible and acting to complement the desolate void that is Charlie Cox, but we're glad that Foggy got a slightly better story this season. There's still hope for Foggy to balance out as a character, but it definitely hasn't happened yet.

Deborah Ann Woll is a beautiful and talented actress, and it totally makes sense that she'd be a confused, dewy-eyed, babe-in-the-woods in True Blood, but those days are over. Karen Page has chosen a series of pretty difficult professions, from journalist to law office assistant, but she rarely seems emotionally equipped to handle her choices. Page cries when good guys get hurt, when bad guys die, when she has really good coffee, and whenever she thinks of puppies. When will Page realize that it's time to either toughen up, or get back into her comfort zone working at Whole Foods or something? Or does fresh produce make her weep too?

For an immortal, meathook-swinging ninja master, Nobu sure is boring. His battle with Daredevil during season one was pretty impressive and involved one of the most ridiculous injuries Daredevil sustained: being caught in the gut with a giant hook and reeled in like an angry fish. Nobu burnt to death, but returned mostly unscathed in season two, died a couple more times, and may or may not still be a threat. Without any truly clear motives or lines that didn't sound like trite supervillain speeches, Nobu is just another nobody.

It's hard to reconcile Elektra's faux spoiled rich girl act with the fact that she's a deadly ninja warrior, because neither act was that convincing. Shifting from obnoxious to petulant to difficult, it's impossible to tell why the Hand would pledge their undying loyalty to her in one moment, and then try to kill her the next. Elektra's character is so convoluted in her shifting loyalties that she's nearly impossible to follow, and she completely derailed a pretty interesting story about the Punisher...and you know that she's coming back to mess up another season.

Gao is obviously behind some pretty crazy Big Trouble in Little China stuff, but after two seasons, all of the hints about bottomless holes in the middle of Manhattan, weaponized children, and using human bodies as weird serum generators have gone nowhere. If we're going to get into some mystical superhero stuff, Gao is probably the gateway, but she's more concerned with being a code-talking ninja movie cliché than actually advancing the plot.

So, after a dozen season two episodes, we learn that this mysterious figure called the Blacksmith organized the three-way drug deal that killed Frank Castle's family, which was also a totally botched sting operation, so Castle is pretty justified in being mad at everyone, everywhere, forever. Everyone's looking for the Blacksmith, who seems to be a perfect target for a good, old fashioned Punisher revenge killing. While the big reveal is that the Blacksmith is Frank's old army buddy, many viewers feel that the reveal was way too inconclusive to have been the truth, and we already have enough ambiguity as it is. Was he really that easy to take down?

You might not recognize her by name, but that's only because she's such a strange non-character that it's weird she's even still around. The nurse is somehow able to accept a bunch of critical patients into her hospital without anyone really knowing about it until ninjas try to re-abduct them. Daredevil seems to take some liberties with how medicine, hospitals, and the human body actually work, but Claire's role as the dourest nurse of all time is the strangest mystery of all.

Not only do we have the mystery of the Blacksmith, but we also have the mysterious Black Sky, which is a lot of black-nouns to keep up with (hopefully Black Widow won't make a cameo in season three). Black Sky was the codename for the kid in the shipping crate from the first season, and by far the most interesting thing about the entire series so far, so the return of Black Sky sounds pretty promising. Unfortunately, Black Sky is treated like a joke in this season, first assigning the title to Elektra, and then quickly taking it away, and never revealing the actual Black Sky. Whether or not this was a Hand ploy or not is never made clear, and maybe it's only in death that Elektra can truly become Black Sky—but that's just one cliffhanger too many.