Daredevil: Born Again is built on two inevitable regressions: Matt Murdock will always be Daredevil, and Wilson Fisk will always be Kingpin. People can change, and both of these men have — but they’ll still revert to the old way of doing things when the new way doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t feel as good. Vanessa’s affair presents a sort of test for Fisk in this regard: Can he bear to let Adam get away with this, setting his pride aside and truly learning forgiveness for the first time? “Episode 4” goes deeper on the relationship issues that led to this point: Vanessa was triggered by Fisk’s absence, which reminded her of her father leaving the family to drink and gamble for weeks at a time.
She never respected her mother for letting that happen, so finding herself in that position with her own husband was even more unbearable. She turned to Adam, a sensitive artist outside Fisk’s business and crime world. Fisk claims that he and Adam had a “clarifying dialogue” where he calmly explained how he felt about Vanessa, and both of them tell Heather they don’t know Adam’s current whereabouts.
But the end of the episode reveals the truth: Fisk has Adam locked up in a cell, undecided about what to do with him. He talks a big game about forgiveness, but there’s no way he can actually let this guy survive in the long term, can he? The real question is whether Fisk would ever hurt Vanessa. That was always a line he’d never cross in the original show; Van.
