A Major Character Death Helps to Reset the World of 'Daredevil' for 'Born Again'

Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers for the first episodes of Daredevil: Born Again.

The first episode of Daredevil kicks the story off with a pretty major death. Foggy Nelson, one of Matt Murdock's best friends and co-workers, is killed at the hands of Benjamin Poindexter, a.k.a. Bullseye.

Following the reveal of Foggy's murder, many wanted to better understand what motivated Bullseye to commit the act, and why the showrunners decided it was the right way to proceed. Here's what we know.

Foggy's death comes at the very beginning of Born Again. Foggy is stashing a witness in his apartment, and that witness tells Foggy that an intruder is attempting to break in. When Matt comes to his rescue as Daredevil, though, he learns that the intruder just wanted to know where Foggy was. By the time Matt gets back to Foggy and Karen, Bullseye has arrived and put a bullet in his chest.

The show then cuts to a year later without providing a clear resolution to why exactly Foggy was killed. It's possible that Bullseye was acting on orders from someone else, or that he undertook the mission for mysterious reasons of his own. Foggy's death is a tragedy that will motivate the rest of the season, but the exact reasons for the killing remain mysterious, and that seems to be intentional.

Although we don't know exactly why Foggy died in the world of the show, it seems that there were clear creative reasons for the character's death.

"Matt has to make a deal with the devil, in a way, himself," Brian Winderbaum, the head of Marvel TV, told Entertainment Weekly. "In order to be righteous, he has to assume a certain amount of toxicity of his own. The battles that he wages for ultimate justice often come with collateral damage."

"The death of Foggy was something that we really agonized over. It's not totally dissimilar to the death of Gambit in X-Men '97," he continued. "Both characters represent something essential to the core idea so that their loss actually has a huge impact on the universe that the story's living in. So it wasn't something we took lightly."

The team said that Foggy's death was the only thing they could think of that would push Matt to turn over a new leaf.

"Ultimately, that was the intention: Foggy being so integral to Matt, Matt realizing he needs to put away the mask, Matt starting a new life," he explained. "The only reason he would ever do that is if his best friend dies," she says. "Otherwise, this man will always come back to [violence], because [Foggy's] been his moral compass for so long. That is the only thing that made sense for us narratively to be able to tell that story."

While we don't yet know exactly why Foggy died in the world of the show, it seems clear that the show's creative team felt the move was important for reasons outside of that context.