Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Finale Outdoes Kingpin's Most Gruesome Season 1 Moment

Contains spoilers for "Daredevil: Born Again" Season 2, Episode 8 — "The Southern Cross"

The ending of "Daredevil: Born Again" Season 1 features a particularly brutal Kingpin (Vincent D'Onofrio) moment. The season finale, "Straight to Hell," sees the mayor-slash-crime lord brutally crush NYPD Commissioner Gallo's (Michael Gaston) head with his bare hands. But as impressively gross and gory as the scene was, it had nothing on what Wilson Fisk has in store for the "Born Again" Season 2 finale, "The Southern Cross."  

The episode delivers yet another classic Daredevil (Charlie Cox) hallway fight, in which the Man Without Fear and his allies take on the Anti-Vigilante Task Force. However, it juxtaposes their struggle with Kingpin's own version of the theme. Instead of being forced to fight, Kingpin outright demands to be let loose on the protesters roaming the corridors of the courthouse. He advances like a horror movie monster, mauling and seemingly murdering protesters with nothing but his bare hands.

Notably, Kingpin even seems to replicate the famous Gallo head-crushing moment on one protester, and we briefly see him start to execute the move on the poor guy. This time, however, it's just one of Fisk's many cruelties, to the point that it almost gets lost in the mix. The show doesn't even bother to show it properly, opting instead to just display the ensuing bloodstains on his suit. 

Kingpin, of course, is a veteran of the gross-out moment. Grisly though the Gallo head-crushing scene in "Daredevil: Born Again" Season 1 is, even that was merely a natural follow-up another Kingpin scene in "Daredevil" that went too far.

That original over-the-top moment of Wilson Fisk violence happened in Season 1 of the Netflix version of "Daredevil," when Kingpin grew weary of fellow criminal Anatoly Ranshakov (Gideon Emery) after the latter disrupted his date with Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer) and took too many liberties in trying to deal with Daredevil. Kingpin's perfectly measured reaction to being embarrassed in front of Vanessa is a highly graphic beatdown that ends with him repeatedly slamming a car door into Anatoly's head. 

As we noted, some of Daredevil's best action scenes take place in a hallway, with Matt Murdock making this particular kind of battle his own personal niche; it's safe to bet that every season of the show will feature at least one major hallway fight. But it seems that Marvel has decided to give Kingpin his own corresponding moments with these regularly occurring bloody murders. 

"Daredevil: Born Again" Season 2 is streaming on Disney+.