Vanessa Fisk Is Not an Innocent Woman on ‘Daredevil’. She Also Terrorized New York!
This week’s episode of Daredevil: Born Again, “Gloves Off”, achieved something that I could not have expected. It was already, by a mile, my favorite episode of the season so far, as I relished in Dexter Poindexter / Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) using random diner objects to mow down AVTF agents, and every word that came out of the mouth of Mr. Charles (Matthew Lillard)
But it was the episode’s final moments that surprised me the most… in part because they elicited a sort of atypical feeling in me. The episode culminated at Mayor Wilson Fisk’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) “charity” boxing match: an already-odd thing for the mayor of a major metropolitan city to do, doubly so because he was holding it at the childhood ring of Matt Murdock / Daredevil (Charlie Cox). Justifiably worried that Bullseye would try to attack the match and “make a martyr” out of Fisk, Matt suited up and a confrontation ensued. By the end of it, Bullseye used a piece of glass from a “Mayor Fisk” paperweight from the fight’s memorabilia stand to throw a seemingly deadly blow at Fisk’s wife, Vanessa Fisk (Ayelet Zurer). The episode ended with Fisk standing over his wife, blood seeping from the gash in the side of her head and onto the boxing ring.
I wasn’t necessarily surprised at Vanessa’s death, much less at the hands of Bullseye, as she’d already spent an earlier episode of Born Again Season 2 have blue-tinged nightmares about him potentially attacking her. I was more surprised at my own response to it… and how it didn’t feel like “fridging” to me.
Was It Fridging?
The “Women in Refrigerators” trope has been around in pop culture for decades, after initially being coined by comic writer Gail Simone. The name was a reference to a Green Lantern story arc in the 1990s, where Alexandra DeWitt, the girlfriend of Kyle Rayner / Green Lantern, was brutally murdered and stuffed into the household fridge by a villain named Major Force. The trope became a sort of catch-all for women in fiction being killed or severely injured, largely to heighten the narrative of the men around them.
I am, usually, one to spread the gospel about fridging. I still remain frustrated with Deadpool 2 for taking an emotionally-manipulative approach to the death of Vanessa Carlyle (Morena Baccarin). Hell, this week is the 10-year anniversary of when a live-action version of my favorite character in all of fiction was very infamously fridged. And yet… I have not found myself having the same reaction to Vanessa’s death in Daredevil: Born Again.
If her death does stick from this point onward (which seems likely, given the amount of blood she lost), it does technically fit some of the trademarks of fridging. Fisk, whose love and fear of embarrassment towards Vanessa has been a staple of his character for over a decade, absolutely will not take her death well. Going forward, it is sure to have a negative impact on his tenure as mayor… either because he’s going to commit more atrocities in the name of it, or because he’s going to flounder under the grief and loss. She was also, quite literally, killed with a cheap totem that represents her husband’s meteoric rise to power.
But writing off Vanessa Fisk’s death as an egregious case of fridging feels way too simple, and minimizes the role she has had (good and bad) on the years-long saga of Daredevil. Unlike her comic counterpart, who is often just reduced down to being a wife and mother, Vanessa has consistently been an active part of New York’s criminal underworld. Once she fully took over her husband’s empire in Born Again, she’s been directly responsible, among other things, for the death of Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) and the Red Hook free port that’s now being used as an illegal prison. Back in Season 1, we also saw the fallout of her cheating on Fisk’s with an artist named Adam… who her husband proceeded to chain up in the basement and kill.
Vanessa Fisk has not been an innocent woman, and that’s part of what’s made her such a fascinating and fun character to watch. Her presence, both in Fisk’s life and just in the world of the show, has taken things into a more unpredictable territory than they easily could be. An earlier scene in “Gloves Off” illustrates this in spades, as New York Governor Marge McCaffrey (Lili Taylor) flat-out admits that she’s only tolerating Fisk’s problematic actions because of Vanessa.
To me, Vanessa’s death felt less like a textbook case of fridging, and more like a major player being taken off of the board. Just like a lot of her actions in life, her death has pulled Born Again into truly uncharted territory… and we’ll have to wait and see exactly what that entails.
(featured image: Marvel Studios)
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