Lots has happened to Daredevil’s characters since the Daredevil show

The Man Without Fear returns to TV this week with Daredevil: Born Again, more than six years after the final season of Netflix’s Daredevil. But don’t let its name fool you. Born Again is not a reboot of Matt Murdock’s TV continuity; it’s picking up right where the old show left off.

Well, sort of. Daredevil’s two leads — Charlie Cox’s Matt and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk — have actually been pretty busy. Both of them have appeared in multiple Marvel Cinematic Universe projects between the original Daredevil show and Born Again, some with pretty big ramifications for them.

That’s a lot to catch up on just to enjoy Born Again, so we’re going to break down a quick status quo for every returning character we know is showing up in the series, starting with our hero and ending with the bad guy himself: Kingpin.

At the end of season 3 of Daredevil (2018), Matt made a deal with Wilson Fisk: Fisk would agree to go back to jail and serve his time, if Matt promised not to expose evidence that his beloved Vanessa was complicit in his criminal empire, and therefore liable to see jail time.

The third season also saw Matt squaring off against an impostor Daredevil, Dex (Wilson Bethel). In the end, Dex was revealed to be framing Daredevil for crimes, and — after a misbegotten attack on Fisk and Vanessa — severely damaged his spine. After undergoing experimental spinal surgery, he awoke with a bullseye symbol reflected in his irises, a sign that he has finally fully gained his powers from the comics.

For his part, Matt formed a new law firm with his friends Foggy Nelson and Karen Page, and continued to work as both Daredevil and a lawyer. He was not rendered into dust by Thanos during the Blip of Avengers: Infinity War, and was around to confront Echo in a flashback seen in Disney Plus’ Echo series (2024), and to get Peter Parker cleared of charges when his secret identity was revealed in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021).

In She-Hulk (2022) he met and started dating fellow superpowered attorney Jennifer Walters in Los Angeles, and apparently they got close enough for him to be invited to a family barbecue, but as of the beginning of Daredevil: Born Again, he’s back in New York at his firm.

Matt’s law school roommate and longtime friend Foggy (played by Elden Henson) was around for all of Netflix’s Daredevil series, where he and Matt had various conflicts and reconnections, eventually settling into the three-person firm of Nelson, Murdock & Page, and hasn’t been seen in the rest of the MCU since.

Karen Page (played by Deborah Ann Woll) entered Daredevil as Matt and Foggy’s office manager, which can be difficult to remember, since she spent seasons 2 and 3 as a reporter working for the fictitious New York Bulletin, not their firm. But she joined the firm at the end of Daredevil season 3 and seemed to have passed the bar by the time she appeared in the second season of Netflix’s Punisher series (2019).

Frank Castle/The Punisher

Frank Castle (played by Jon Bernthal), at least, doesn’t require much explanation: He came into the Daredevil series as a man looking to enact fatal vengeance on all criminals, and he finished his own two-season Punisher series as a man looking to enact fatal vengeance on all criminals.

Wilson Fisk finished out Daredevil season 3 by accepting Matt’s deal and returning to jail to serve his time. But that apparently only kept him behind bars until the flashback sequences of Hawkeye (2021), which took place in the five-year period of the Blip (Avengers: Infinity War), during which Clint Barton took on the identity of Ronin and started murdering criminal syndicates.

After she threw her father under the metaphorical bus in order to escape Ronin, Fisk mentored Maya Lopez into becoming his skilled enforcer, until she discovered his betrayal and — in the final episode of Hawkeye — shot him in the eye. Fisk and his eye survived this, however, and he attempted to win back Maya’s affections in Echo, only for her to successfully rebuff his offers and gave him a supernaturally recalled memory of childhood trauma that convinced him to leave her and her loved ones in peace.

The last time we saw Fisk was in Echo, as he was on his private plane back to New York, watching a news segment on how open the New York mayoral race was — a clear tee-up to Daredevil: Born Again, in which he is running for that city seat.

As for what happens next for all of Daredevil’s returning characters in Born Again, we’ll just have to wait for the next episode.