Marvel's The Defenders: 10 Ways It Sets Up Daredevil Season 3

10. Relationships Repaired

The Defenders Karen Foggy Trish Malcolm
Netflix

Matt's friendships at the end of season two were... strained, to say the very least. Foggy had all but abandoned the Nelson-Murdock partnership, and Karen - frustrated by Murdock's emotionally distant attitude - was well on her way to abandoning him altogether. Revealing his actual identity didn't seem to help things either, so it's clear that the character was in a bad place.

Cut to The Defenders, where Matt - now a solo attorney with a continuing reputation for helping out the little guy - is laywering the sh*t out of everything pro bono. He rekindles a romance with Karen, mends a friendship with Foggy, and actually grows as much as they do. Both Karen and Nelson accept that Daredevil is needed (at least for a moment), and they await Matt's return with open arms.

Except he doesn't return, and things are pretty sad. It's clear that Karen isn't ready to accept Matt's 'death', and Franklin can't shake the feeling that he was complicit in his demise. They'll be in for a surprise when Matt does, eventually, seek them out again, but it remains to be seen if this instability begets a warm reaction from the pair.

It's a long-running tradition in the comics that when Matt's life is at its best, things tend to go awry. And while it remains to be seen how his return will be handled, one would imagine that Murdock will be reluctant to reenter their lives having put them in danger previously.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.