10 best moments of Daredevil season 3

Marvel’s Daredevil season 3 production still. Photo: David Giesbrecht/Netflix

The Karen Page Story

Karen Page has had a rough time of it on Daredevil. She’s been kidnapped, beaten, nearly killed on multiple occasions, and been caught up in conspiracies, cover-ups, and problematic love triangles. We’ve often wondered, what draws a person like Karen Pige to these kinds of dangerous situations and unreachable men? Well, we get our answer, at least in part, thanks to a pretty terrific episode titled “Karen” later in the season.

“Karen” presses pause on the action for a second to dig deeper into the show’s main female protagonist. We see her life growing up in a nowhere town in Vermont. With her mother dead from cancer, her family’s diner going bankrupt, and her father incapable of managing anything, it’s up to a young Karen to run the business, take care of her younger brother, and keep her dad from drowning them all in debt. To fight the depression and anxiety that comes with this kind of thing, Karen parties … a lot. She drinks, she dances half-naked, and she does cocaine. A lot of cocaine.

So much cocaine that her boyfriend, a real sleazy dude, is actually a drug dealer.

After her brother tries to make thing right, accepting her admission to Georgetown on her behalf and burning down her boyfriend’s camper, a drunken brawl and a fatal car accident take his life — and Karen’s.

Not literally of course, but we now know why Karen pushes to save people like Matt Murdock and Frank Castle and why she’s always trying to do good, even when it may cost her life. This enlightening backstory has been a long time coming, but we can’t be mad considering how Deborah Ann Woll knocks this on out of the park. No other actor on this show has the range and the courage to take a character like Karen where she needs to go but Woll, and we’re lucky to be watching her work.