Kingpin's Return In Hawkeye Ruins Daredevil Season 3 Ending

Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin made his return to streaming on Hawkeye, but, while many people are glad to see Wilson Fisk back, it proves Matt Murdock actually lost in Daredevil season 3. While Hawkeye has been focused on Clint Barton and Kate Bishop, there's been a looming threat from New York's organized crime, and now it's finally revealed that threat comes from the primary villain of Netflix's Daredevil show.

D'Onofrio's Wilson Fisk was one of the more popular characters to come out of Daredevil, so there's been a persistent demand to see him return to the role (along with Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock) ever since the show's cancelation. D'Onofrio even participated in the campaigns for him to reprise the role in the MCU, and now his wish has come true as Hawkeye reveals his connection to the show's established villains.

Related: Kingpin in the MCU Explained: Backstory, What's Canon, Comic Connections

While it's exciting to see him return to the role, it also presents a big problem for the legacy of Charlie Cox's Daredevil. The core moral conflict of Daredevil season 3 was the fact that Kingpin was too rich, powerful. and manipulative to be kept in prison. After multiple failed attempts to legally implicate Fisk, Matt determined the only way to stop him from getting out again and hurting more people would be to kill him - a sentiment Fisk himself supports in their final battle: "no prison can keep me. You know that. Come on, kill me!" The moral victory for Matt Murdock, as presented in the show, is the fact that he denies his practical and personal motivations urging him to kill fisk and instead finds a way to trap him by threatening to implicate his wife, Venessa, if Fisk doesn't cooperate. But now Fisk's return suggests Matt's victory wasn't a victory at all, and exactly what he predicted would happen if he didn't kill Fisk has come true.

This sort of thing happens all the time in comic book stories. After all, how many times has Joker escaped Arkham? The difference here is the entire point of Daredevil season 3 was that Matt found a way to put Kingpin away permanently without killing him, screaming "I beat you!" in his face during the show's climax. Now, rewatching that moment, it doesn't feel so victorious knowing he was actually right when he said Kingpin was too powerful for prison. It doesn't simply undo the plot points from a previous story, but undermines the moral victory Daredevil season 3 revolved around. Father Lantom's death, Ray Nadeem's death, and numerous others are now pointless as the victory they provided was only temporary. This doesn't (necessarily) mean Matt Murdock should have killed Kingpin, but taking Daredevil season 3 and Hawkeye together, it would seem that's the lesson to be had, even if it is contrary to Daredevil's traditional aversion to killing.

Of course, given Marvel's venture into the multiverse and alternate villains in Spider-Man: No Way Home, this could simply be spun as a new version of Kingpin who doesn't have the same past with Daredevil, but in the traditional "it's all connected" theme of the MCU, that almost feels worse because it doesn't simply alter the moral lesson of a past story, but discards it entirely in favor of fan service. If Matt Murdock's seemingly (at the time) ultimate victory over Kingpin at the end of Daredevil was actually meaningless for story or canon reasons, then why invest in any characters in a universe where characters are supposed to gain significance from their connection to past canon? It's entirely possible the Marvel Cinematic Universe will give Wilson Fisk a dynamic character arc to justify this decision, but the cost is audiences knowing story and character arcs are always secondary to fan service.

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Next: Kingpin's Return Will Fix The MCU's Long-Running Villain Imbalance