The Defenders’ new clip looks like it sets up Daredevil’s entire character arc

The Defenders didn’t stop at just releasing a new trailer this weekend. There’s also a new clip featuring Daredevil having a chat with someone familiar.

The Defenders has rather a lot to juggle, since it has four main characters who now all of a sudden have to share eight episodes come Aug. 18 when they’ve all had at least 13 episodes of character development mostly to themselves. Matt Murdock, though, has had two full seasons of his own series to grow into the role of Daredevil.

That doesn’t mean that his superhero journey is complete, though.

The Defenders‘ official Twitter account released a new clip from the premiere episode earlier today:

(A side note: it appears that The Defenders is now captioning all of its Twitter videos, which is a nice touch.)

Let’s try and pull some things together from this, though. It looks like our favorite lawyer-slash-Stick-protégé (a narrow category, we know, but if we called Matt our favorite fictional lawyer there’d be all kinds of drama) has perhaps had a crisis of faith when it comes to superheroing. Why else would Father Lantom use the past tense in saying “This other life you led”?

Now take a look at the trailer. Pay close attention to the lines Daredevil delivers:

At one point, he sounds almost defeated when it comes to talking about the Hand, with lines like “There is no next move” when Iron Fist insists they should work together. But, by the end of the video, he’s come to the point where Luke Cage refuses to hug him after a nice expression of friendship … or at least camaraderie. (We feel like the first one of this quartet that says the word friend will endure merciless teasing.)

It seems like the idea of whether or not to “let go” will end up being central to Daredevil’s arc. On the one hand, he’s trying to recover from Elektra’s supposed death, only to find that she’s joined the other side again. On the other, he’s making “superfriends” to quote Luke Cage. It’s a natural continuation from his season 2 arc, really.

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The question is this: how much time will the show be able to spend on it? Remember, Daredevil’s just one of the titular four Defenders. Then again, it’s not like they can’t work together to have character development … even if that character development doesn’t feature them hugging it out.