Netflix had been hitting the nail on the head for the first two seasons of Daredevil, can the third season continue to ride this wave of success, or did it fall on it's proverbial face?

I absolutely loved the first two seasons of the show, and was really looking forward to watching the third installment in the twisted tales of Matt Murdock, but before I talk about that let's quickly cover something important.

Firstly, This series will not make much sense to you if you haven't seen the Netflix TV series The Defenders, the Marvel TV Superhero team up, so I'd suggest you go and watch that before you make any progress with this series.
For most of Netflix's TV series you can watch them independently and still get a good picture of what's going on, with only a few characters and easter eggs appearing between the series. This series breaks that trend, and requires you to have watched their other content as well, otherwise you won't understand how the characters have moved between series two and three.

Now, as with my other reviews, I won't spoil the plot specifically and talk about it in detail, but will talk a little about that in the next section. If you want to skip over that, then keep scrolling until you pass the next picture, you can't miss it, where we'll be talking about characters and performances.

As I said before this season follows straight after the events of The Defenders, with Matt Murdock and his friends still suffering the aftermath of the superhero's battle with The Hand. The series looks at Wilson Fisk's machinations while in custody, the importance of the public's perception of the city's heroes, and on the actions and impacts of the ordinary members of society as they are exposed to the events of the world of superheros and villains.

In a similar way to series two, there are a few key scenes which stick out in my mind, but the majority of the episodes blur together and make specific points harder to grasp. What I did like in the series is the greater focus on character development. There is less action in this series, so more time is spent with the characters' morals, views, and actions. It introduced new characters, and gave them enough backstory that we can understand their motivations without it feeling too forced by the writers.

The plot itself is well written, however for people who know a fair amount about the comics then the build up for the series is a little too overplayed and obvious. The plot lines for the supporting characters is better than the plot for Matt Murdock, but the series is still enjoyable to watch.

As I've said in my reviews of series one and series two, the three central characters of the series are portrayed expertly by the actors, Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock), Deborah Ann Woll (Karen Page), and Elden Henson (Foggy Nelson). This season gave them all a chance to shine in their own way, but especially Deborah's performance through Karen's physically and emotionally troubling journey.

This series also has great returning performances by Vincent D'Onofrio (Wilson Fisk), Ayelet Zurer (Vanessa Marianna), and Geoffrey Cantor (Mitchell Ellison). We've seen all of these characters before, but this series gives the actors a chance to develop the characters in a different way, and they all stood out in their own time. I would love to talk about them all in the detail they deserve, but this post would be so long almost no-one would read it!

This series also introduced two new characters which became focal points of the series, Jay Ali (Rahul "Ray" Nadeem) and Wilson Bethel (Benjamin Poindexter). Each of these characters has their own moments to shine, and the actors gave a performance which at times left me remembering them more than the central three characters. The story of their characters is very well written, and their performances brought the emotions to life in spectacular fashion (although finding a good picture of the two of them together is not an easy feat...)

This series has fewer high-intensity fight scenes than the previous two series, due to the nature of the plot, but the fights which were present were well choreographed and keep you interested and gripped. It is compounded by the expert use of lighting and sound throughout the series to add more tension and suspense to the series.
There was not too much to say about the costume department in this series, 

All in all, I think the season was pretty good, full of amazing performances by all of the cast, and left the series in a really interesting position for the future season, before they cancelled it...
But what do you think? Leave a comment, and let me know.

Until next time,

Tim

Plot: ✇ ✇ ✇ ✇          Performance: ✇ ✇ ✇ ✇ ✇          Overall: ✇ ✇ ✇ ✇

image credits: image 1, image 2, Image 3