Karen Page, the former secretary of the Nelson & Murdock law offices and girlfriend of Matt Murdock, left the series years earlier to pursue an acting career in Hollywood. However, her plans did not work out, and she became a star of pornographic movies and a heroin addict. Unable to take control of her life, she spirals deeper and deeper into an existence of hunger, need and desperation, until she finally sells Matt Murdock's secret identity for a shot of heroin.
This information eventually reaches
the Kingpin, who proceeds to test it. Over the next six months, he uses his vast influence to hound Murdock, causing his accounts to be frozen by the
IRS, the bank to foreclose on his house and in general make Murdock's life increasingly unbearable. He even manipulates police lieutenant
Nicholas Manolis into testifying that he saw Murdock pay a witness to perjure himself in a case. In the resulting trial, Murdock manages to avoid a jail term, but he is barred from practicing law. The Kingpin skillfully ruins Murdock's life piece by piece, but Murdock cannot see his handiwork – instead, he is convinced that he is simply unlucky and that there is no enemy for him to fight except for his increasingly desperate and violent attempts to investigate this situation.
But the Kingpin overreaches himself. He can't keep himself from delivering one more strike, and he has Murdock's house bombed. This act of violence tells Murdock that his problems were not random, isolated incidents but the work of a mastermind – the Kingpin.
Unfortunately, by now Murdock has become unhinged. He has trouble differentiating between his fantasies and the real world. He is homeless and absolutely destitute, and now believes he has no friends. He even thinks that his former girlfriend
Glorianna O'Breen and his best friend and business partner
Foggy Nelson are a part of a complex, all-encompassing conspiracy against him.
Meanwhile, Murdock's confidant,
Ben Urich, the
Daily Bugle reporter, is investigating his friend's plight and finds evidence of the Kingpin's involvement. Unfortunately, the Kingpin learns of this and has Urich's source killed and Urich's hand broken to intimidate him into silence. This cows Urich into keeping quiet and Murdock is left on his own.
Seeing no other course of action in his confused and paranoid state, he decides to attack the Kingpin and force him to return his life. On the way, he brutally assaults three would-be robbers in a subway train and then beats up a
police officer who attempts to arrest him and takes the officer's
nightstick. In his weakened and confused state, he is allowed to enter the Kingpin's office and quickly beaten by the crime lord. The badly hurt and unconscious Murdock is drenched in whisky, strapped into a taxi cab, whose owner is beaten to death with the billy club Murdock stole from the cop, and finally, the taxi is pushed off a pier into the East River. When the car is eventually found, Murdock's reputation will suffer the final blow. The Kingpin revels in the knowledge that he has completely disgraced, destroyed and murdered the only good man he ever knew.
But when the taxi is finally found, there is no corpse. Instead of drowning, Murdock managed to smash the windshield and, in a supreme show of will, cut the safety belt with one of the fragments and swam to safety.
Badly injured, Murdock stumbles through New York's Hell's Kitchen by sheer
will power alone, and, though injured, forces himself to keep walking just to keep from passing out. As he shambles aimlessly across the city, he is stabbed by a thug in an alley and even hit by a car. He eventually ends up being rescued by his mother, who, having not been in Matt's life for decades, has become a nun at a local church. She nurses him back to health. At the same time, Karen Page – now hunted by Kingpin's men as part of Kingpin's orders to kill anyone who possessed knowledge of Murdock's
secret identity – arrives in New York with an abusive drug dealer named Paulo Scorcese, intent on finding Murdock. She's unable to locate him, but meets up with Foggy Nelson, who takes her to his home in an effort to protect her from Paulo. Meanwhile, Urich manages to regain his courage and comes forward with his investigation, alerting his paper and the authorities of the situation.
In the meantime, the Kingpin becomes increasingly obsessed with finding Murdock and silencing Urich. He first arranges for the nurse who murdered Urich's source to kill the reporter himself and he also arranges for a violent mental patient to be released from an asylum, dress up as Daredevil and kill both Nelson and Page in an effort to provoke Murdock into resurfacing. However, Murdock intervenes in both plots, defeats the nurse and the patient, takes the latter's costume and proceeds to save Page from both Scorcese and another hitman sent by the Kingpin. The two are reunited and Matt comforts Karen with the fact that he has moved beyond regretting losing his material possessions.
In a major misstep, the Kingpin uses his connections in the military to procure America's super soldier,
Nuke, whom he sends to assault Hell's Kitchen. In a climactic battle, dozens of civilians die while Matt responds as Daredevil for the first time since the destruction of his home. Nuke uses heavy weaponry against Daredevil, who is plagued with not only the challenge of fighting an inhumanly formidable opponent, but the awareness through his enhanced senses of the casualties caused every time Nuke's weapons are fired. In the end, Daredevil defeats Nuke and, in an uncharacteristic move to stop the slaughter, uses Nuke's weapon to destroy an assault helicopter that supported Nuke and further threatened civilians, thereby killing the pilot. The
Avengers arrive at the scene and take Nuke into custody.
Captain America, however, is not pleased with the situation. Although the authorities claim that Nuke is a terrorist, the Captain is not convinced, especially after a discussion with Murdock, who tells him that the assailant's body was heavily enhanced. As America's original super soldier, the Captain is appalled to suspect that the violent, musclebound, insane man with little regard for the lives of civilians, appears to be the country's latest super soldier. Unsatisfied with the evasive answers given to him by Nuke's superiors, he breaks into the base's computer files to discover more about Nuke. He turns out to be the only surviving test subject of a severely flawed attempt to recreate Project Rebirth, the same project that originally enhanced the Captain's own body.
Enraged by the treatment he is receiving in the media, Nuke breaks free from custody in the same base and runs amok in an attempt to attack the offices of the
Daily Bugle. He's stopped by the Captain, but nonetheless, the military attempts to kill him, as do the Kingpin's men; however, though mortally wounded, Nuke does not die immediately. Daredevil first attempts to get him to a hospital, but realizing that Nuke will not survive, he then decides to get him to the Bugle instead in an effort to prove that Nuke is a government operative and that his presence in New York is the product of the Kingpin's widespread influence in the military.
In the end, the Kingpin's public image as an honest and respectable businessman and pillar of community is shattered, although he manages to avoid imprisonment while he plans for his revenge on Murdock. For his part, Matt Murdock accepts and enjoys a new, different but apparently fulfilling life in Hell's Kitchen with Karen Page and expresses no regret over the loss of his previous lifestyle as a successful lawyer.
Daredevil - Love And War
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Originally Posted by NAKHI the SOLORIAN
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