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The Marvel Cinematic Universe is only as strong as its villains... but, ever since 2019's Avengers: Endgame, the franchise has struggled to set up a recurrent big bad who can clear the high bar that Josh Brolin set with his swaggering, paternalistic, and imperialist vision of Thanos. There have been some bright spots, of course - the legendary Tony Leung's Xu Wenwu in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, The Void in Thunderbolts*, Chukwudi Iwuji's High Evolutionary in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and Kathryn Hahn's Agatha Harkness in WandaVision, for example - but unfortunately, none of these characters will ever get the same studio-platformed hype as Robert Downey Jr.'s incoming Doctor Doom, set to debut in December's Avengers: Doomsday. 

With teasers for the upcoming tentpole film dropping every few months after a flashy reveal of Downey as the man behind the Doctor Doom mask at San Diego Comic-Con 2024, we're all expected to board the multiverse-bound Doom Train. I say, to hell with that. I mean no disrespect to Robert Downey Jr. - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a national treasure that deserves to be added to the Library of Congress - but the multiverse-tinged dramatics of Doctor Doom bear little interest to me after Daredevil: Born Again season 2 dialed up its street-level baddie, Bullseye.

Played by Wilson Bethel since 2018's third season of the Netflix Daredevil show, Bullseye is now the only MCU villain I have eyes for. Born Again season 2 has hammered home something that may be at odds with the MCU as a whole, which is that a villain may not need to pose that much of a threat on a macro, planetwide scale to earn 110% of my attention and emotional investment. Is the MCU’s Bullseye an Avengers-level threat? Probably not; Luke Cage could handle him. But that doesn’t matter to me. 

What differentiates Bullseye from his MCU villain peers is that, on the surface, he’s unremarkable. He lives a quiet life while working at a suicide hotline before joining the FBI, looking like every other jogger you might pass while running along the East River in Manhattan. Dex didn’t need a fancy spaceship, an outlandish costume, or an MIT degree to be interesting to us when we could observe the tension of him masking his obsessive compulsions and lack of empathy around other people. In other words, he’s a character who, at first, desperately wants to go unnoticed, and we’re given all the evidence for why that’s an impossible task. Thanks to a devastating performance by Wilson Bethel, Bullseye was humanized onscreen in ways that he’s never been in Marvel Comics, while still embodying his comic book counterpart’s chaos and precision. 

While we were meant to empathize with Dex’s downward spiral from normalcy in Daredevil season 3, leading to him becoming the terrifying force of nature that is Bullseye, this season of Daredevil: Born Again makes us love him even more for his strategic rejection of normalcy. Season 2 of Born Again let Dex run loose, and he completely stole the show. We got to see Bullseye in his element, no longer grounded by a desire to be 'normal.' Wilson Bethel imbued Bullseye with so much charisma this season that instead of being afraid of him, we were invited to feel joy from seeing him chuck household items at his enemies with lethal precision, like a bizarre inversion of Marie Kondo’s tidying philosophy. Girls (Dex) just wanna have fun! 

Born Again season 2 wisely made room in its fourth episode, “Gloves Off,” for Bethel’s Bullseye to graduate from merely an enemy that Daredevil faces off against to a persona we can rally around in a strictly fictional context. Seeing a guy who wouldn’t hesitate to kill someone with a pencil cook breakfast for himself in his dingy apartment like he’s living in Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York” feels like a luxury in an interconnected universe like the MCU. We get the sense that Dex actually likes who he is and what he does, deepening the relationship that we forge with him as the audience.

Later on, as Dex takes out a horde of Anti-Vigilante Task Force grunts in a diner, he notices that an innocent civilian has been sitting with their chihuahua at their table the entire time. Surprised by the dog’s whimpers, Dex takes off his Bullseye mask and saunters over to the guy to tell him that “Dogs in restaurants are unsanitary.” Of course, Bullseye doesn’t kill the dog owner or his pooch because he, Dex, is “one of the good guys.” Who said the guy who killed Foggy Nelson can’t have a sense of humor? It isn’t surprising that this scene was a hit with fans.

I think the particular satisfaction of seeing a character like the MCU’s Bullseye drop the facade and embrace his true self partly comes out of the highly curated culture that we live in. Walk with me here. Social media algorithms reward conformity instead of raw, blemished reality. We’ve grown to package ourselves and apply unstated “rules” on how to move through social media “like a normal person” online, as if performing socially accepted “perfection” in real life wasn’t exhausting enough already. 

Dex, with his railroad tracks of scar tissue on his face and cheeky performance of normalcy, thus feels refreshingly human in today’s world. To be clear, I’m a vegetarian who abhors violence and lives by a strict code of catch and release with spiders inside my house, so I’m not valorizing Bullseye for being a violent criminal. Frankly, I have no idea what it’s like to be someone like Dex, and that’s why I love watching him onscreen. Maybe it’s my affinity for Sally Rooney, but I suspect part of my love for this character stems from his self-acceptance for who he is and what he does, much like how Matt Murdock doesn’t bemoan the fact that he moves through the world differently because he’s blind. Any bit of human chaos in a franchise as meticulous as the MCU feels exhilarating at this point. 

The glimpses we got of Bullseye feigning normalcy in Daredevil: Born Again season 2 are miles more compelling than any of the shenanigans with Kang et al. in the MCU’s Multiverse Saga, because, frankly, a lot of it has felt like pure spectacle curated for YouTube reaction thumbnails. And if the Daredevil shows have taught us anything, it’s that people across all genders and walks of life love a complicated, violent guy with a simple schtick. Now, the ball is in Marvel Studios’ court: they should take notice of how fans have responded to Bethel’s Bullseye, just as they did with Jon Bernthal’s Punisher and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin. As an insane and tireless Bullseye comics fan, all I can ask for is Dex’s path to keep continuing - preferably to the Dark Avengers, but I'm not picky.

Daredevil and Daredevil: Born Again are both available to stream on Disney+.

Fear not, we have the essentials when it comes to Marvel's Daredevil - especially with Marvel Studios' Daredevil: Born Again. Check out:

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