🥷 She's the devil in disguise...
[SPOILERS FOR DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN]
The first season of Daredevil: Born Again ends on an interesting cliffhanger. Kingpin has become the mayor of New York City and has turned a bunch of corrupt cops into his own private army at the Red Hook dock in Hell's Kitchen. He's declared martial law and his "task force" are executing masked vigilantes--or anyone they can put a mask on while no one is looking--with impunity while donning Punisher regalia. They've holed up in the port in a fortified position and taken Frank Castle, the actual Punisher, hostage along with a host of New York's wealthy elite. Daredevil is set to go in and start busting heads, but realizes that he cannot win, since he's hopelessly outnumbered and sporting a fresh gunshot wound. So instead he goes to ground. And starts talking about drumming up an army.
The tease here is that Daredevil, a.k.a. Matt Murdock the lawyer without fear, intends to reform the Defenders or some other superhero team in order to take the fight to Kingpin. So I immediately started speculating on the roster. Swordsman is featured in the show, so it stands to reason that Kate Bishop (the new Hawkeye) will get pulled in. Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) lives nearby, and she got a shout-out in an early episode about a heist at the bank where her dad works. And from the teaser at the end of The Marvels, we know that Kamala is already courting Kate to join a team. Meanwhile Daredevil has had appearances in She-Hulk, Echo, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Now, Jennifer Walters (She-Hulk) lives in LA, but the rest of them either live in or near NYC and would be affected by Kingpin's rampage. Kingpin is even a Spider-Man villain. Plus, there's the other extant Defenders: presumably Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist could all be on the table.
And oh yeah, isn't Wong--the acting Sorcerer Supreme--headquartered there as well?
You see the problem, don't you? What do you do with characters who exist in your continuity, and who would presumably have a dog in this fight, but can't be involved for non-diegetic reasons?
Spider-Man, for instance, definitely won't be involved. He's a film-based MCU hero, so Tom Holland won't be slummin' it in a TV series that he's not the star of. But even if that weren't true, the live-action rights to his character are--at time of writing--still the property of Sony Pictures. And then there's just plausibility. Spider-Man is too powerful for this fight. The bad guys are a bunch of un-powered police officers with a penchant for murder. Armed to the teeth, sure, but are they a match for spider-sense? He could probably handle it by himself. Those are all very compelling non-diegetic reasons to leave him out.
But what would be the narrative reason to exclude Spider-Man? You can't just pretend like he doesn't exist. This is, after all, a shared continuity.
And it doesn't stop there. You see, this is a big world with a host of heroes and a varying degree of threat levels. NYC is the home base for a whole lot of them. The Avengers--currently defunct in the MCU--and the Fantastic 4--currently in... another continuity maybe?--are both headquartered there, and the X-Mansion--also in another continuity--is just upstate. And a big enough threat would certainly draw the attention of the new Captain America or Bucky Barnes or Ant-Man. So how do you create a threat that feels appropriate for Daredevil with the kind of grand stakes that you expect in long-form narrative, but small enough that it goes unnoticed by the scale of hero who would find it trivial to deal with?
The MCU has nodded to this in the past. In Spider-Man: Far From Home, Mysterio made a big deal about trying to conjure an "Avengers-level event" in order to prove his bona fides. This was played for comedy at the time, but it's a real narrative concern. In general, the MCU approach is to either sideline people or just ignore them, to mixed effect. Fans were justifiably wondering where the rest of the Avengers were during the events of Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Both of these movies took place over a very short span of time, and other hero's actual availability was not something discussed at all in the films. But you'd think that if a helicarrier was planning to execute Tony Stark, that Cap or Widow would have been able to take five minutes and send him a heads up.
Sidelining has been more effective, especially when handling characters with ridiculously high power levels. It's the reason that Captain Marvel--arguably the most powerful character in the entire MCU--has spent almost all of the continuity jet-setting across the galaxy. Part of the business of Avengers: Age of Ultron was to make sure that the Hulk and Thor were off-world for the events of Captain America: Civil War, because their involvement would have completely broken the scale and tone of the conflict. Their absence was noted by Secretary Ross as part of the justification for the Sokovia Accords. But the real reason they weren't there is because it would break the story to include them. And since this is a shared continuity, characters who are extraneous to the story but would otherwise be involved have to be explained away.
So let's take stock of what's going on with our East-coasters during the martial law lockdown at the end of Daredevil: Born Again.
Hulk and Thor are, once again, off-world. Monica Rambeau is stranded in another timeline. Dr. Strange is in another universe, probably. Riri Williams is at MIT, assuming this takes place during the school year, which is far enough that she wouldn't necessarily need to get involved. Captain America is based in DC but is doing a fair amount of globe trotting in his own stories. The WandaVision characters are an interesting conundrum. West View is in New Jersey, but none of the characters are married to that location. The reconstructed Vision could be anywhere, really. Wiccan and Agatha Harkness are nearby but on the move. Wiccan's brother Speed hasn't been brought back yet, but the end of Agatha All Along implied that he would be found soon. Will any of them be involved? No, because they're too overpowered.
Echo, Kate Bishop's Hawkeye, and Ms. Marvel are almost certainly going to be involved. Two of them have already been hinted at and the third has history with Kingpin. I wouldn't expect to see any of the other original Defenders except possibly fan-favorite Jessica Jones, although she's borderline too powerful for this. And I didn't keep up with the Netflix shows so I don't know where she ended up. If you were going to include her, or any of them, then you'd need to bolster the villain side to accommodate--and Daredevil's rogues gallery just isn't that compelling, with a handful of exceptions. Kingpin and Bullseye, for instance, are already involved.
But what about Elektra? The end of Defenders left Elektra possibly evil, definitely leading the Hand, and maybe dead for the second time. She doesn't have a lot of love in the fandom--her previous two live-action portrayals did not go over especially well. She's also a little out of sync with the tone of this iteration of Daredevil. This is grim-and-gritty street-level-thuggery storytelling that mostly doesn't acknowledge people having superpowers. Ninjas and sorcery will not jibe well, to say nothing of the fact that Hand ninjas immediately evoke the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fights with the Foot. It didn't work in the Netflix Daredevil, so why should it start working now?
But still, it would be a coup if they brought Elektra back. The MCU has a solid track record of rebooting older versions of characters that didn't work whose name begins with "Electr." Speaking of rebooted characters that didn't work the first time, I'm very curious about the Fantastic 4, who are presumably not part of the main MCU timeline even though the Baxter Building is clearly visible in Spider-Man: Far From Home. They obviously won't be involved, but I wonder if they'd get a nod.
And then we have the curious case of Spider-Man. The end of No Way Home basically reset the character in the MCU so he could be excluded or included depending on how the live-action rights land. He was erased from people's memories, so it's not like anyone can just hang a lantern on him. That would raise more questions than it answers. But even though no one in continuity knows he exists, the audience sure does. And they're gonna wonder why he's sitting this one out.
That's what I think anyway,
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