They say that endings are hard when it comes to writing stories, and episode 3 of Daredevil: Born Again gives you an idea of just how hard it can be.

(Watch out, True Believers – spoilers ahead!)

The action in this episode mostly takes place in the courtroom. Matt Murdock, formerly the vigilante superhero “Daredevil,” is defending a new client: a man named Hector Ayala. Hector is on trial for the death of a plainclothes police officer (Born Again, Episode 2). But Matt and Hector have a problem: their main witness, Nicky Torres. Nicky is a confidential informant who Hector saved from a beating by the plainclothes officer and his partner. But when Nicky arrives in the courtroom, filled with NYPD officers, he decides to lie and say he was never at the scene at all.

This throws an interesting wrench into the works and forces Matt to come up with a hasty Plan B. Matt reveals to the court that Hector is the White Tiger, another vigilante superhero. In a dramatic scene, he reads police reports detailing multiple instances where the White Tiger came to the police’s aid to show that Hector is an ally to the police and not an enemy.

Hector is freed. But he doesn’t have long to enjoy his freedom, because the last thing we see in the episode is Hector, dressed as the White Tiger, getting shot in the head while investigating the sound of a woman’s scream.

As far as I’m concerned, Hector’s death was a sad misstep from an otherwise decent episode. The death wasn’t so much shocking as it was disappointing. The unknown man who shot Hector bore a Punisher-style skull on his chest. Born Again episodes 2 and 3 have heavily been hinting at a gang of crooked cops with Punisher skull tattoos, and it would seem that the mysterious man in the last scene of episode 3 was an attempt at misdirection.

The question is though, a misdirection for who? Even if you’ve never watched any of the Netflix Marvel shows and didn’t know who the Punisher is, the skull tattoos that we see on some of the police officers makes it pretty clear that there’s more than a few of these guys—and they have much more reason to pop Hector in the head than the Punisher, who only goes after bad guys.

Perhaps Hector’s death would have made more sense at the start of Episode 4. If we got to see him looking forward to moving on after winning the trial, only to be murdered by someone wearing the Punisher’s symbol, that could set Matt up to go looking for answers, and it would be a smoother transition into the next part of the story. I’m sure these things will happen in the next episode anyway, but having Hector die when he does feels too abrupt.

During the credits we hear the sound of the Puerto Rican beach frogs that Hector tells Matt about earlier in the episode, a sound Matt reassures Hector he will hear again someday. This would have been a poignant moment if only Hector’s death didn’t seem so… pointless.

★★★☆☆