Kingpin’s Rise in Daredevil: Born Again Could Finally Bring Back the MCU’s Most-Missed Character

Six months after the first season left New York in pieces, Daredevil: Born Again comes back and basically says: yeah, Fisk won. And the city moved on.

Where Season 2 drops us

Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) is now mayor and has bent NYC into his version of order. Martial law is still in effect. The Anti-Vigilante Task Force he built is now just part of daily life. Crime numbers are down, his approval ratings are up, and a lot of people have decided that masked heroes cause more chaos than they fix. Not great for Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), who are stuck running a resistance most New Yorkers don’t want to admit exists.

Fisk, unsurprisingly, is not content with quiet control. He wants a spectacle to lock in the narrative, so he builds it around a high-profile courtroom drama designed to make every mask in the city look like a ticking time bomb.

The Swordsman on trial

The centerpiece of Fisk’s message is Jack Duquesne (Tony Dalton) — yes, the sword-obsessed philanthropist from Hawkeye who refused to play ball with Kingpin back in Season 1. Jack is hauled into a very public trial that’s less about evidence and more about painting vigilantes as a civic threat. Fisk even rigs the optics: Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva) — Matt’s ex and a trained therapist — has accepted the gig as the city’s Mental Health Commissioner, and part of her job, as presented here, is massaging Jack’s psychiatric evaluation so he reads like a violent psychopath. The goal isn’t justice; it’s to rubber-stamp the mayor’s preferred reality.

All of that does something else too: it practically begs for a certain archer to show up.

So where is Kate Bishop?

Given what the show is doing, it would be weird if Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) didn’t crash this party. Everything happening in Born Again overlaps her history with Fisk and her current zip code.

• She lives in New York and actually operates on these streets. Under Fisk’s martial law, putting on a costume is a legal problem now. That alone is reason enough for Kate to push back.
• By temperament, she doesn’t wait for permission. She ignored cops, lawyers, and even Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) when she thought she was right in Hawkeye. Sitting this out while Fisk weaponizes the courts doesn’t track with who she is.
• Her beef with Fisk is personal. In Hawkeye’s finale, she fought him to protect her mother Eleanor (Vera Farmiga). He survived, regrouped, and then took the mayor’s office in her hometown. From her point of view, the guy who threatened her family is now running the city — and staging show trials against heroes she would normally back up.
• The Jack Duquesne angle is another hook. Jack was engaged to Eleanor. Kate thought he was dirty, only to learn he was basically a patsy while Eleanor did the real dealing with Fisk. Watching Jack get used as a prop for anti-vigilante propaganda is exactly the kind of thing that would pull Kate off the bench.
• And yes, the franchise could use her. Since Hawkeye, Kate’s live-action footprint is a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in The Marvels, where Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) tries to recruit her for a Young Avengers setup — which, officially, has gone nowhere since. The rest has been voice work in side timelines: a Kate variant in What If...? Season 3 set in a stylized 1872 frontier, and a role in Marvel Zombies’ parallel apocalypse. Fun, sure, but none of it moves her main story forward. Daredevil: Born Again actually does.

The bottom line

Fisk is laundering his rule through a made-for-TV trial, Matt and Karen are fighting ghosts underground, and Jack Duquesne is being spun into a cautionary tale. On every level — story logic, character history, even basic MCU momentum — Kate Bishop should be in this season. Leaving her out would feel like skipping a chapter.

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 is streaming now on Disney+, with new episodes every Tuesday. Should Marvel drop Kate into Hell’s Kitchen to take a shot at Fisk’s regime? I’m voting yes — what about you?