With an AVTF officer hostage, Daredevil and Karen finally have a weapon they can use. But Fisk has the law on his side.

This one builds, and builds, and BUILDS. Karen and Matt’s urban guerilla warfare and interrogation is just the start of a story that builds up and out and takes in the entire city as it goes. Karen gets the governor of New York in play to frustratingly little effect. Fisk uses Jack Duquesne as a show trial to lock his Safer Streets Initiative. Moves come faster on stages not everyone can see. Everyone’s in motion, everyone is fighting for the same things, and New York is starting to boil over. The secret prison Duquesne has been kept in is key to this, as is McDuffie, Matt’s old partner. Chosen for the hopeless task of defending Duquesne, she gives Matt the information he needs to find the prison and then everything goes to hell in the best of ways.

The ending here is the sort of cathartic violence that these shows excel at. Matt breaks in, discovers just how many people are imprisoned and makes the smartest choice possible – he opens every cage. Alone he can’t do anything. But with a tidal wave of frightened, furious New Yorkers (and a joyous Duquesne) he can get something done. It’s such a convincing riot, escalating rapidly and chaotically as Karen and Angela del Toro tag in to help out and get people clear. There’s a sense of constant, imminent catastrophe and real danger, something emphasized by the offhand reference to no one knowing if the Punisher is alive or dead. It’s just people on the run, terrified, doing their best and slowly starting to unite. Matt, Karen, the latest White Tiger, the Swordsman and BB Urich’s newfound secret identity as the satirical Kingpin broadcast. None of them able to do something alone but all of them, just maybe, able to do something together.

But even as we realise that, Fisk makes another move. He sinks the White Star with a salvage crew aboard, killing them all and framing Daredevil.

Verdict: The war rages on, and right now, it’s anybody’s fight. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart