Not A Not A Review Of “Daredevil”

So recently I’ve started watching the old Netflix Daredevil series, which is now a Disney+ series, because I want to get caught up before I watch the Disney+ Daredevil series Born Again, since the “Born Again” story arc is my favorite Daredevil one from the Marvel comic, but which, as I understand it, is not really a straight-up adaptation of the “Born Again” storyline but is, instead, a mash-up of some other storylines*, and they decided to use the title just to lure in suckers like me. Whew! Did you follow all that? If so, congratulations. You may be able to read a comic book without getting totally confused as to what’s going on.

Oh, and, before we continue …

Anyway, for those not in the know, the Daredevil series originally aired on Netflix at around the same time as the Jessica Jones series. Now, the longtime reader may remember that we were very big fans of Jessica Jones around here, especially season one, featuring David Tennant as one of Marvel’s most effective villains ever put to film: Kilgrave, AKA “The Purple Man”**, AKA “Jessica! I’ve never killed anyone.”

I was not, however, successful in getting my wife to watch Daredevil, despite the connections between the two shows, because while Jessica Jones was mostly centered on the trauma created by Kilgrave and his psychological manipulation of, well, everybody, Daredevil was mostly centered on Matt Murdock beating the crap out of people***, which is not of particular interest to her, especially when there was so much other stuff to watch, like Mad Men, Halt and Catch Fire, Mr. Robot, Six Feet Under, etc. I could have made Daredevil the official “Show That Jim Watches After His Wife Falls Asleep Partway Through The Current Episode Of Whatever They’re Watching Now”, but I didn’t do that either, because I was busy with Stranger Things, Vox Machina, Doom Patrol, etc. Plus, to be honest, Daredevil really did seem like mostly Matt Murdock beating the crap out of people, at least for the first few episodes. And if he’s going to be doing that, the least he could do is put on the Daredevil suit.

Then Wilson Fisk showed up.

I mean, I knew he was going to, because you can’t do a Daredevil show without Kingpin, right? And I knew that Vincent D’Onofrio’s portrayal of Kingpin was considered iconic. I can definitely report that things got a lot more interesting once he (and his little sidekick Wesley) were on the screen. For one thing, Kingpin is an incredible risk-taker. Just watch him making breakfast:

Now, the reason this is not a “Not A Review” is that, as expected, my wife still doesn’t watch Daredevil, because it’s still mostly about Matt Murdock beating the crap out of people.**** However, she did happen to wander by while Kingpin and one of his associates, Madame Gao, were having a conversation, and she got interested in what language they were speaking.

Wife: “What language is that? It’s very rhythmic and the same sound seems to be repeated a lot.”
Me: “I’m not sure. The character is Chinese, but I don’t know what dialect it is.”
Wife: “There are a lot of pauses when he speaks. Is it supposed to be like that?”
Me: “I think maybe it’s to show that he’s not super fluent?”

This led us down a bit of a rabbit hole, because now my wife wanted to know more about the linguistics. What I found was that the language is Mandarin and, according to experts on the Internet*****, it is largely accurate; some commenters said that Madame Gao sounded like someone speaking Mandarin whose native dialect was Cantonese, while Fisk, of course, was not a native speaker at all and therefore struggled a bit. I proceeded to read too much into this, plot-wise.

Me: “There must be some reason they chose to have Madame Gao sound like a Cantonese-speaker who’s speaking Mandarin. Maybe it’s because there are so many Mandarin speakers and they’re using it to illustrate how ambitious she is, or maybe—”
Wife: “Or maybe the actress is just a native Cantonese speaker.”

So I looked up the actress, Wai Ching Ho, and lo! She is from Hong Kong, and is, therefore, likely a native Cantonese speaker, although she is fluent in Mandarin.

Sometimes the simplest explanations are correct.

* For one thing, a major, major, MAJOR component of “Born Again” in the comics was that Kingpin learned Daredevil’s secret identity, but Daredevil didn’t know he knew, whereas in the series Kingpin already knows Daredevil’s identity and Daredevil knows he knows. I cannot begin to stress how important it was in the comic that Daredevil didn’t know Kingpin knew. (And again I say: Whew! Did you follow all that?)
** In the comics, Kilgrave is a straight up purple-skinned dude, like Grimace; in the show, he just wears a lot of purple, like he and the Joker go to the same tailor.
*** I oversimplify, but to my wife that was what it looked like.
**** Oversimplifying again.
***** I.E., Redditors.