Here’s The Weirdest Way Foggy Nelson Could Return In Daredevil: Born Again
Believe it or not, this isn’t the end for Foggy.
Major spoilers ahead for Daredevil: Born Again Episode 1.
After six years of uncertainty, Daredevil is finally headlining his own show again, but his return isn’t all good. Daredevil: Born Again reintroduces Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) as if no time has passed at all, but within 15 minutes, our trio’s lives are changed forever. Foggy is murdered by the villain Bullseye (Wilson Bethel), leaving Matt and Karen fractured. The loss of their friend will likely define their stories throughout the season, and it may feel like senseless shock value to the fans who waited years to see these characters again. But Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s head of TV and streaming, insists that Foggy’s demise was the result of “many impassioned debates” and even a few “sleepless nights.”
“It’s not something we took lightly,” Winderbaum recently told YouTuber Brandon Davis. “Honestly, nobody wanted to do it, including me — but we all realized it needed to happen ... Matt had to struggle with his own internal demons in a way that only an event like that could bring about. And it’s something that happens in the books: when you look at the source material, the cost of violence is something that drives him and also challenges him.”
That said, this won’t be the last time we’ll see Henson as Foggy. Winderbaum revealed that he, along with Woll’s Karen, will return in Born Again Season 2. “I see Karen and Foggy as being intrinsically tied to Matt,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a Matt Murdock story without those two characters, and I’m excited to see them both in Season 2.”
Foggy and Karen are “intrinsically tied” to Matt, so our trio could be reunited sooner or later.
How Foggy could appear in future episodes of Born Again remains a mystery, but there are plenty of paths the story could take. He may haunt the narrative as a ghost or a manifestation of Matt’s conscience, mirroring Matt’s weird visions of Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) in Netflix’s original Daredevil series. Born Again could easily feature flashbacks of the trio before the tragedy too, or maybe the series will somehow reveal that Foggy survived or faked his own death. And there’s one more, less conventional option: Born Again could also take things in a more mystical direction, adapting a recent comic storyline that would bring Foggy back from the dead.
The Daredevil saga is known for its grounded takes on crime and corruption, but plenty of comic book writers have taken big swings into the supernatural. Matt Murdock is a character defined by his spirituality, as he’s constantly working to reconcile his inner demons with his staunch Catholic beliefs. That inner struggle has paved the way for storylines that flit between grim-dark realism and religious fable, and Chip Zdarsky’s most recent Daredevil run tested the true limits of the latter. In 2022, the writer teamed up with artist Marco Checchetto to pen the Red Fist Saga, where Daredevil literally travels to Hell to save Foggy’s soul.
It would take a lot of finagling, but Born Again could adapt a supernatural Daredevil comic to bring Foggy back.
The Red Fist Saga is the culmination of Zdarsky and Checchetto’s Daredevil run, so there are a lot of moving parts. Between battles with the evil ninja clan known as the Hand, Matt learns that the Foggy he knows and loves is actually a replica. The real Foggy has been trapped in Hell, imprisoned by an ancient deity known as The Beast. With the help of his partner, Elektra, Matt travels to the underworld to confront the monster. His crusade reads like a modern-day, ultra-macabre remix of Dante’s Inferno, complete with eldritch beasts, spooky ghosts, and plenty of introspection.
Matt ultimately succeeds in his quest to save Foggy, but not before things get suitably dark... and more than a little convoluted. Still, this arc served as a great culmination for Zdarsky and Checchetto’s take on Daredevil: if you’ve got a Catholic superhero, it’s only fitting to set his final boss battle in the bowels of Hell.
This particular story is a far cry from anything we’ve seen in live-action so far, but there is a chance it could inform some aspect of Born Again. The original Daredevil only occasionally embraced the supernatural, but now that the character is in the often wilder MCU, there’s no limit to the stories Born Again could tell. It’d take a bit of finagling, but it could be fun to see the franchise embracing Daredevil’s trippier stories — especially if it could bring Foggy back for good.
