The only thing that kind of worries me about this show is that I am not sure it is all that plausible that a mere mayor could pull off this level of evil corruption.
Wilson Fisk isn't a "mere mayor"; he's the
Mayor of New York City. It is an elected office that wields tremendous political and cultural authority in the United States, more than most American State governors,
including the governor of New York State. Think about it–the election of the NYC mayor is international news. I'm an American, a Wyomingite, and I can tell you about the election campaigns and the policies of the last two mayors of NYC and... historical trivia about a couple others... and I can't tell you the
name of a single NY governor.
I think
maybe one of the Roosevelts was governor of NY before becoming President? One of them is one of my personal heroes, and other is a fascinating historical figure who changed the course of the American Republic–in ways I've argued with others for hundreds of hours. And I can't tell you which one was the governor of New York State, or for how long.
And frankly we have seen this before in real life. There is always a breaking point where people are gladly willing to throw away freedom for security and “to get the trains running on time”. If a failed artist could do it in Germany, a criminal mastermind could do it here
I don't think this is correct. I think this is... fundamentally, a self-serving myth lie that liberal democracies and their citizens tell themselves, because they more or less have to. There isn't a point at which people gladly throw away freedom for security–there's only a point at which they
stop because the "security" they purchased with other people's lives/liberties/property starts hurting them more than they enjoy watching it hurt other people.
Loki wasn't
right in
The Avengers, but he was
correct. He only lost because he forgot to tell the people of New York that it was
for their own good; unlike the President of the United States, the Mayor of New York City is not legally required to be an American citizen. If the God of Lies had
bothered lying the WSC and SHIELD would have handed him the keys to Earth and, frankly, Earth-19999 would have been better off.
He made the right choice by letting BB go. Yes, he should have run too, but I had a sense early on that he wasn’t going to make it out alive.
Daniel made it clear he believed Buck would go after his family to get to him. Confronting Buck was a sacrifice for his mother. And, yes, it absolutely (pun intended) was the correct moral decision – penance for his sins after his confession (to BB).
He made the right call, full stop. He bought BB time to go to ground, he kept Buck from having to
ask his friends where we went, and the beating he took was foreplay compared to what he'd have gotten if Buck had needed help to find him–and people that
weren't sweet on him had been involved in the interrogation.
Daniel
chose to die when he told BB to run. Walking into that house was choosing to
die like a man.
Daredevil doesn't kill anyone, goes to prison. Fisk murders twenty to thirty people in front of the entire city, goes to the beach.
But that does NOT forgive the crimes he then does in the courthouse. Complete murder of many people, security cameras, witnesses, the works. No freaking way your giving immunity for that.
Daredevil commited hundreds of criminal assaults over the course of both series, including attempted murders, assault on police officers and
attempted murder of police officers. He waived Miranda at his arrest, and I'll bet you dollars to donuts he chose to waive his right to a jury trial–he pled out to a
grateful District Attorney, and allocuted to as many of criminal offenses as he could remember the details of.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm guessing what Murdock pled to was some ridiculous number of charges of
assault in the second degree (dropping the enhanced penalty for assaulting police), for 2-7 years each but served concurrently. How long he actually serves would be a crapshoot, but this is where the
comic book logic would override–he'd serve as long as the story didn't need him to be released.
My memory isn't great, but over the course of both series, I remember Fisk only committing two actual murders with his own hands–the guy whose head he crushed in the car door, and Vanessa's doctor. He's on the hook for
felony murder in the death of Vanessa's boyfriend, and for any number of murders carried out by his subordinates, but those murders would require a lot of legwork to trace back to him.
Everyone he kills with his bare hands in City Hall is as open-and-shut a case of justifiable homicide in self-defense as the law allows. He's outnumbered and surrounded by an angry mob who are attacking him with lethal intent; "outnumbered" is lethal force on the crowd's part, surrounded negates his duty to retreat, they're
trying to kill him, and there is no legal argument whatsoever that his speech–"I love this city and did everything for you"–qualifies as inciting violence.
Sic semper tyrannis, but the law is entirely on Mayor Fisk's side here. Everything he can be tried and convicted of in a court of law is a RICO case that would take decades and millions of dollars to prosecute.
My only disappointment was knowing how easy Powell got off. Yeah, he’s in prison now too but that stuck-up SOB had it coming to him.
It shows all the former members of the AVTF in orange scrubs walking past Matt as he's being led to his cell.
They're not convicts in prison. They're
ex-cops in
general population with the friends and family of the people they were put in prison for terrorizing. They're just not serving the same time in the same prison as Matt Murdock, at all; there are people in that prison that Murdock
brutalized as Daredevil who feel that what he did for them–against Fisk and the AVTF–more than makes them square.
Matt's a top-shelf and bottom-dollar defense attorney who beats the crap out of child molesters and crooked cops. He's got more friends than enemies in prison, and even his enemies know he's not locked in there with them.
... and Daredevil's sense of justice is incoherent.
But why would Matt be ok with that? Doesn't that just completely upend his entire character premise, that justice does NOT exist, that once your high enough up you don't answer to the law, etc.
Matt's entire arc in this season is trying to accept that his sense of justice has a price, and sometimes that price is too high. That there is a balance between justice being
necessary to peace, and justice coming at the expense of peace. Matt realizes that sometimes he has to tolerate injustice because he doesn't have the right to make other people pay that price for him.
I think my biggest issue is that the whole season is pretty obviously about American politics, and I am sick of everything being about American politics.
Marvel Comics and Marvel Studios have been about American politics since before the American news media has been about American politics. "Magneto Was Right" was over 20 years ago;
Civil War and
Dark Reign are approaching 20 years. Captain America first denounced the American government–in support of its founding principles–over 50 years ago, well before I was born.
It was their main selling point, against DC, in the 1960s.
But its technically easy for a US citizen to revoke their citizenship (its generally done for tax purposes) and Dual Citizenship is not required under the law (and its not as if UN conventions are binding)
Every time I buy a gun–rarely, since I'm not a hobbyist–I have to sign an electronic document swearing I've never done so; it was even a near thing, once. Governments are discouraged by international custom from withdrawing citizenship from the people who've been granted it, but there's very little stopping private individuals from renouncing their citizenship or governments from recognizing the act.
They gave us a legal charter earlier that explains it. Now is that legally realistic? Probably not....but I can understand how the MCU is different, you just have to show me. That to me was them doing that.
The existence of the legal charter is perfectly realistic... there've been a lot of "free cities" and "free ports" historically, especially in the 17th-18th centuries. The unrealistic thing is the courts not taking one look at it and saying
lolnope, and saying the charter isn't binding anymore because they don't want it to be, and there's nobody with legal standing to demand that it be upheld.
