Season 3, Episode 5:

The Perfect Game

To quell the rising backlash over his release, Fisk serves up a scapegoat to the FBI. Dex misses the mark when he runs into a woman from his past.

Tropes:

• Armor-Piercing Question: While being questioned by Agent Nadeem, Karen asks a few of her own, specifically about the shell corporations she's been tracking that indicate Fisk now owns the hotel in which he is "imprisoned". Nadeem is shaken by this, but tries not to show it.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Fisk takes a page from Misty Knight's playbook and basically relives Dex's life by reading a few psychiatric reports.
• Bait-and-Switch: Right after Karen's failed confrontation with Manning, where he tells her he makes problems "disappear" for a living she notices a couple of men following her down the street, and is visibly terrified that they're Fisk's thugs coming after her. Then a black SUV pulls up nearby, and they're revealed to be FBI agents bringing her in for questioning about her connection to Matt, whom Fisk is framing as his crooked lawyer.
• Bullying a Dragon: Karen tries to coerce The Fixer working for Fisk to reveal his secrets by threatening to expose him in the Bulletin, only to be visibly frightened when he reveals several personal details about her and tells her his job is to make problems disappear.
• Call-Back: One customer at the Nelsons' butcher shop gladly votes for Foggy for DA—who's actively speaking out against Fisk—because her husband was killed in the explosions that Fisk had set off across Hell's Kitchen back in "World on Fire."
• Call-Forward: In the flashbacks, Dr. Mercer teaches Dex empathy, and the first thing she teaches him is to say is "I'm sorry. That sounds hard" to someone who is upset. We've seen Dex say this in an earlier episode, and he says it again here at the suicide prevention hotline.
• Chiaroscuro: The flashbacks to Dex's past are all in black and white, and frequently highly stylized with Dex, another person, and Fisk (observing through the extensive notes his fixer got him), all of whom are visible, spotlighted in darkness.
• Confess in Confidence:
  • Young Dex admits to deliberately killing his coach, as it's protected under psychiatric privilege. Presumably this is why the FBI never found out the coach's death wasn't an unfortunate accident, but Felix is not restrained by legal issues and gets the tapes of the admission to Fisk.
  • Foggy has Karen pay him five dollars so her confession to killing Wesley will be covered under attorney-client privilege.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • We learn about Benjamin Poindexter's past through Fisk's investigation: as a kid, his neglectful parents died, and then he murdered his baseball coach in a fit of anger for benching him to give another boy an opportunity to pitch, while pretending it was an accident. And after his court-assigned therapist genuinely connected with him and became his Morality Chain, she had a terminal illness and had to retire when he was a teen, leaving him adrift. He eventually started working at a suicide prevention hotline, where he first met Julie, but his Lack of Empathy caused him to struggle with the job, and he soon grew obsessed with Julie and became her Stalker Without a Crush.
  • We get another hint at Karen's past, with The Reveal that she used to be a drug addict and the suggestion that it had something to do with the death of her brother.
• Disproportionate Retribution: As a child, Dex killed his baseball coach by ricocheting a baseball into the back of his head, simply for benching him for the remainder of the game—not as any kind of punishment, mind you, but simply to allow other kids the chance to play.
• Evil Brit: Felix Manning, The Fixer for Wilson Fisk, is revealed to be one. He gets Karen to balk first in their confrontation by pulling The Villain Knows Where You Live on her and giving her an Implied Death Threat, proving that Fisk is still having her closely monitored.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • Ray Nadeem knows that Wilson Fisk is a criminal, along with all the things he got put in prison for. The law firm of Nelson & Murdock was instrumental in making this happen. Yet when Fisk names Matt as one of his previous criminal associates, Nadeem and the rest of the FBI (or at least the honest agents) take it at face value and immediately send agents to his home to arrest him, and don't even consider that Fisk has every reason to want revenge on Matt and may very well be lying. Foggy and Karen both directly call Nadeem out on believing Fisk so easily.
  • Also, when the FBI raid Matt's apartment, there is very visible door leading up to the roof, but they apparently don't bother to check to see if their suspect might have escaped through it, since the final scene shows that Matt was indeed listening to the raid from up there and wasn't caught.
• Fan Disservice:
  • We get a brief Shirtless Scene of Dex, showing that he has a very ripped physique. But it happens right after he hits his Rage Breaking Point, punches a hole in the wall, accidentally rubs blood from his knuckles onto his shirt, strips the shirt off in horror to try to wash the blood out, and keeps throwing and breaking more stuff, all while his knuckles are still bleeding, so it's played for horror and definitely not Fanservice.
  • Matt also gets one in the final scene (showing him returning home the night before), but this is when he's barely standing after whatever injuries he sustained from escaping the car in the river, and strips off his clothes—covered in blood and dirt at this point—and collapses on the floor.
• Food as Bribe: Foggy jokingly points out to his brother that offering Nelsons' famous meats if people vote for him is against the law.
• Frame-Up: Nadeem begins a manhunt for Matt after Fisk falsely gives him up as one of his former associates.
• Get Out!: Foggy to Nadeem, after the short interrogation is over.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: The episode ends with Matt hearing a BOLO being put out for him as an armed and dangerous fugitive.
• Implied Death Threat: Manning to Karen when she attempts to confront him about laundering money for Fisk and acting as The Fixer.
  Felix Manning: Off the record, you're incorrect about what I do for a living. I don't fix problems. I make them disappear. [gives her a Meaningful Look]
• I Never Said It Was Poison: Dex lets a few details slip that he knows about Julie's life from stalking her, and she realizes that their meeting probably wasn't a coincidence. She goes from creeped out to scared as he continues to mention things he shouldn't know, and immediately runs away.
• Internal Reveal: Karen finally tells Foggy about killing James Wesley, after being questioned about him by Nadeem.
• It's All About Me: Dex admits to being angry at Dr. Mercer for dying, to the point of wanting to kill her for it, because she won't be there for him anymore. Fortunately, Mercer is able to talk him out of acting on this anger, convincing Dex that it's better for her to die naturally.
• It's All My Fault: Foggy says this outright after both he and Karen have been interrogated by Nadeem, feeling that he never should've let Matt tell her about being Daredevil because it made her an unwitting accomplice, and is even willing to plead guilty in exchange for her immunity if needed.
• Lack of Empathy: Dex, to the point that his therapist had to train to him as a child to act empathetic since it doesn't come naturally to him.
• Manipulative Bastard:
  • Fisk continues to paint himself to the FBI as a repentant criminal this way, all while getting exactly what he wants. When Donovan demands more concessions for him in exchange for all the info he's provided and Nadeem says he'll get it in time, Fisk acts understanding, acknowledging the FBI's sacrifices for him while shooting Dex a Meaningful Look in a continued effort to sway him to his side. Furthermore, having just learned that Matt survived his assassination attempt, Fisk plays Xanatos Speed Chess by falsely naming him as one of his past associates, essentially recruiting the FBI to hunt down his hated enemy for him while making them think he's still a valuable asset who's cooperating with them.
  • Fisk also has Manning dig up all the background he can on Dex and learns his whole life story so he can determine exactly how to best manipulate him and get him under his thumb. It's heavily implied he set it up for the hotel restaurant to hire Julie Barnes as a waitress (by offering her double the amount of money she was making at her old job) to guarantee that Dex will end up directly interacting with her (instead of remaining a Stalker with a Crush), clearly knowing full well that Dex will end up letting his true nature slip and scare Julie off (which he does) to deprive him of his "North Star" and make it easier for Fisk to slide into that role himself.
• Morality Chain: Dr. Mercer was one for Dex, but when she gets a terminal illness and can't be his therapist anymore, she advises him to find a new one for himself, telling him that his "internal compass" works better when he has a "North Star" to guide him. Once Dex starts working at the suicide prevention hotline, his coworker Julie (the women he's currently stalking) becomes this for him; when he's about to talk a potential suicide caller into killing his abusive stepfather instead, he does a Verbal Backspace upon realizing Julie is nearby. Dr. Mercer also leaves him her tapes of their sessions to help ground him if he starts backsliding, and he listens to one in his final scene.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The scene with Matt's cab being fished out of the water only for Fisk to discover Matt's body is missing is taken straight from Born Again. There's even the repeated line of "There is no corpse", something that, owing to writer Frank Miller's love of repetition in dialogue, was repeated frequently in the scene in the comics.
  • Another reference is The Reveal that Karen Page used to be a drug addict, as the Born Again story started with a drug-addicted Karen selling Matt's Secret Identity for a fix.
  • The baseball flashback of Dex is taken from a possible made up story of Bullseye's past where he was a major league pitcher, pitched a perfect game, and then killed an opponent with a ball to the head out of boredom.
  • Dex's hat from his kiddy league baseball team has the classic Bullseye costume logo from the mainstream comics.
• Nice Girl: Julie Barnes, who gave Dex encouragement and positive reinforcement when she was his supervisor at the suicide prevention hotline and does so again in the present when they meet again. She's also shown giving money to a homeless woman while running. Dex realized this, and made her his Morality Chain as Dr. Mercer advised; unfortunately, he scares her off when she realizes he's been stalking her.
• Not Helping Your Case: James Wesley hiring Nelson & Murdock in "Rabbit in a Snowstorm" is cited as proof of Fisk's claim that Murdock was working for him, and stealing Foggy's ID so he can contact the Albanians in prison doesn't look good either.
• Obsessively Organized: Along with the Undercrank to make his movements look alien and robotic, the opening scene underscores how odd Dex is by showing how everything in his apartment has to be absolutely perfect. When he's done reading the newspaper, he puts it on a perfectly squared pile of other newspapers. He rinses his coffee cup, puts it on a rack to dry, then makes sure the handle is perfectly aligned with its neighbor. When he closes the door to his apartment, that causes a photo to fall off-kilter, so he opens the door back up to fix it.
• Once More, with Clarity: The last scene is a flashback to before the start of the episode, with Matt returning to his apartment after escaping the sinking taxicab, falling asleep on the couch, hearing the FBI coming the next morning, and showing how he listened to the raid from the roof.
• Out of Focus: Matt is almost entirely absent from the episode, only appearing in the final scene (which is set before the rest of the episode).
• Pensieve Flashback: Fisk reading Dex's files is presented like this, shown as black-and-white flashbacks (with Chiaroscuro) that take place entirely in the penthouse with different props and backdrops depending on the situation (resembling, at different times, a baseball court, a therapist's office, and a call center cubicle space) while Fisk himself is always shown sitting or standing and watching Dex's entire backstory play out.
• Punch a Wall: Dex bloodies his knuckles doing this, getting blood on his pristine white shirt that he then frantically tries to clean.
• Put Down Your Gun and Step Away: Karen puts her hand on the gun in her purse when she thinks she's being stalked by hitmen. Fortunately, the FBI agent sees she's nervous, and once she tells him about the gun, he has her face the wall and keep her hands in place, and removes it himself.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Nadeem suspects Matt is leading a double life, that said double life caused Matt and Foggy's split, and that his and Foggy's taking a case of a hitman working for Fisk back in Season 1 was in service to that. He is in fact absolutely right, except that he thinks Matt is a criminal gangster, not a vigilante.
• The Sociopath: In his childhood, Dex killed his baseball coach in a moment of anger, and admits that he fully did it on purpose and enjoyed the feeling. Dex's therapist actually notes that he has psychopathic tendencies, and literally has to teach him how to display empathy for others since he's incapable of naturally having it. At his later job at a suicide hotline, he is shown trying to convince somebody not to kill himself... but to murder his stepdad, who is the source of his pain.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted, as Dex did see one for years, Dr. Mercer. But after she retired, as she had a terminal disease, he felt lost again.
• Time-Shifted Actor: In the flashbacks, different actors portray Dex as a boy and then a teen, both of whom do resemble Wilson Bethel quite a bit.
• Undercrank: The opening shots show Dex in his apartment, and focus on showing how off he is. Some of this is accomplished by showing his obsessive level of organization, but the rest of the time his actions are filmed slightly undercranked, so he's moving just a little too fast. The effect makes him look alien, weird, unnatural. The scene is very subtle about this; he is undercranked, but the objects in his apartment aren't.
• Unwitting Pawn: Foggy accuses Nadeem of being one to Fisk, along with the entire FBI. He's right, but Nadeem refuses to see it out of pride.
• Villain Episode: Provides quite a bit of focus on Dex, with flashbacks to his backstory that reveal his Dark and Troubled Past; show that Julie, the woman he's stalking, isn't a stranger and is someone he used to work with; and demonstrate that he's a genuine psychopath.
• The Villain Knows Where You Live: A variation when Felix Manning tells Karen her parents' names, their address, which room Karen slept in as a child, and the fact that she used to be a drug addict who had something to do with the death of her brother. She's suitably freaked out.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Upon learning that Matt escaped from being Trapped in a Sinking Car in Fisk's attempt to kill him, Fisk instead pulls a Frame-Up by falsely naming Matt as one of his former underlings so the FBI will hunt him down instead.