Born Again’ Kills Off a Major Marvel Character

The following post contains SPOILERS for the first episode of Daredevil: Born Again. (Sorry about that.)

Off topic but: How clever is that helmet design, where the horn gets broken off and leaves behind a big “D”-shaped hole on the forehead? That’s great.

Anyway, Foggy Nelson is dead. (RIP Foggy.)

That is the shocking twist in the first episode of Marvel’s new Disney+ series, Daredevil: Born Again. It is the foundational incident for the new show, which continues the old Netflix Daredevil series with a few notable differences. Like, just for example, offing Daredevil’s best friend in its opening minutes.

READ MORE: Our Full Review of Daredevil: Born Again Season 1

As Born Again’s series premiere begins, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), and Foggy (Elden Henson) are enjoying a night out at a local bar when they are attacked by Bullseye (Wilson Bethel). Matt fights off Bullseye as Daredevil, but not before Bullseye fatally shoots Foggy. Then the show jumps ahead one year. Matt works at a new law practice. Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) is now at the very center of New York City politics. Karen is largely M.I.A.

Foggy’s death is all the more shocking because by all accounts the character was originally not supposed to appear on Daredevil: Born Again at all. The initial version of the show, which was created and overseen by Matt Corman and Chris Ord, reportedly only brought Cox and D’Onofrio back from the first Daredevil, and almost functioned as a soft reboot of the franchise, with only vague and limited connections back to the three seasons of the prior Netflix series.

Then Marvel looked at the first several episodes that were produced and were apparently unhappy with the results. They removed Corman and Ord and replaced them with Dario Scardapane. They also added several additional characters from Netflix’s Daredevil to Born Again’s cast — including Henson’s Foggy. (On a practical level, reintroducing Foggy and then immediately killing him off is a good way to explain his absence in the material they had previously shot without him, much of which still appears in other episodes of Daredevil: Born Again.)

While that gunshot wound looks pretty fatal, this may not be the true, final end for Foggy. After all, this is comics (or a TV show based on comics), where characters die and come back to life all the time. Hell, Daredevil: Born Again’s villain, D’Onofrio’s Kingpin, got shot in the face on an episode of Hawkeye about three years ago, and he’s now the mayor of New York with nothing more than a little scar over his eye to show for his troubles. In comics, nobody stays dead for long.

There’s also a specific comic-book precedent for a potential Foggy resurrection. In an issue of Daredevil from the mid-2000s, after Daredevil’s secret identity had been revealed to the world and Matt was imprisoned, Foggy “died” while visiting him in jail. A later issue revealed that he had actually faked his death and entered the witness protection program. (You can read more about this on Foggy’s official Marvel.com biography.)

On Daredevil: Born Again, the show jumps ahead from Foggy looking mortally wounded to one year later; we never saw Foggy’s corpse lying in a morgue or a coffin. It’s conceivable that Foggy was revived by EMTs and survived his injuries, then went into hiding just like his comic-book counterpart. Being known as Daredevil’s best friend can make you a target for his enemies.

For now, that’s just speculation on my part. At this point, there are seven more episodes left in the first season of Daredevil Born Again. That’s plenty of time for Foggy Nelson to be born again.

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