Seldom does the Daredevil story start where it ought to. Most readers meet Matt Murdock in a courtroom or on a rooftop, never in the place that actually shaped him: a cramped dorm room at Columbia Law, somewhere up in Morningside Heights, a few subway stops from the Hell’s Kitchen he would later try to save. It’s unfortunate that this detail is often overlooked in favor of the costume and the radar sense, since the character was probably developed during the college years.
The background of Columbia Law is not coincidental. It’s an Ivy League institution sitting on the edge of Upper Manhattan, all stone buildings and clipped lawns, the kind of campus where the ambition is quieter than at Harvard but no less serious. Putting a blind kid from Hell’s Kitchen inside that world was a clever bit of writing. Matt arrives with a public-defender’s instinct and a saint’s guilt. The majority of his classmates come with trust money. The whole point is the friction.
Franklin Percy Nelson, better known as Foggy, walks into that friction and decides to stay. According to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, their encounter is the kind of minor mishap that shapes decades. In a way that probably did more for Matt than any amount of sympathy could, Foggy is loud where Matt is quiet, slightly rumpled where Matt is exact, and completely unaffected by his roommate’s blindness. Watching the flashback episodes, it’s hard not to feel that the writers understood something true about male friendship — that it’s often built on bad jokes and shared all-nighters, not grand declarations.
There’s a moment fans on Reddit still circle back to, where Matt almost lets a curse slip during one of those Columbia flashbacks. It’s a tiny thing, easy to miss. However, it indicates that the production team and costume designer of the show gave careful consideration to texture, just as Emily Gunshor and Michael Shaw did with the new series. minor details. collars that are worn. A Catholic child who is making a great effort to be good but is falling short.
Complicating matters, Elektra Natchios also appears during this time. According to most accounts, their brief relationship at Columbia ended poorly. The plot works, but it’s possible that the show handles this as underlying trauma in a way that the comics never quite did. Matt’s three pivotal relationships—Foggy, Elektra, and the law itself—occur during his college years. Every subsequent action is a response to one of those three.
The graduation itself seems to be set up for a joke. Matt achieves summa cum laude. Cum laude, foggy lands. They enter Landman and Zack, one of those white-shoe companies where the partners absorb conscience and the carpet absorbs sound, and they quickly leave. When Nelson and Murdock decide to start from scratch in a neighborhood that can hardly support them, their college friendship transforms into something more substantial.
The university begins to feel less like a school and more like a quiet engine room for half of the Defenders saga as other Columbia students drift through this same universe, including Dinah Madani pursuing a master’s degree in Islamic Studies, Joy Meachum in law, and Stephen Strange in medicine. The authors seem to take pleasure in this. A shared address gives the impression that a vast fictional New York is smaller and more realistic.
But the friendship endures. The Kingpin, the Billy Club, and the mask all rest on top of two children who used to share a room and who, for some reason, never stopped supporting one another. The part that ages well is that one.
