Daredevil: Born Again's villain Muse lost the one power the comics gave him

Muse arrived in Daredevil: Born Again in its first season in 2025 as a masked serial killer who paints murals with his victims' blood. Comic readers spotted the gap right away. The character Charles Soule and Ron Garney created in 2016 comes with a power built specifically to break Daredevil, and the show didn't use it. With the Muse mask set to return in season 3, that missing power is suddenly a live question again.

The power the comics gave him

Muse debuted in Daredevil #11 in September 2016, in the "Dark Art" arc. In Soule's run, he's an Inhuman with enhanced strength and speed, but that's not what makes him dangerous to Matt Murdock. His body absorbs the sensory information around him, which makes him nearly impossible to track. For a hero who navigates the world entirely by sound, smell and his radar sense, Muse is a blank spot in a city Matt otherwise hears all of.

The art is just as extreme on the page:

• His debut mural: Painted with the blood of more than a hundred people in Washington Heights.
• His second piece: Six dead Inhumans posed as if doing everyday tasks.
• His later work: Giant graffiti of vigilantes on Manhattan landmarks, plus a Punisher mural decorated with the bodies of police officers.

The comics Muse ends the way he lived, theatrically. Blindspot beats him, and Muse sets himself on fire. His spirit later shows up in Hell, where it influences a rejected artist named Morgan Whittier, who becomes a second Muse in 2025.

What Born Again kept, and what it cut

The show's Muse is Bastian Cooper (Hunter Doohan), and he's entirely human. He's a skilled fighter who can briefly hold his own against Daredevil, he still mixes his victims' blood into his murals, and by episode 6 he has more than 60 murders to his name. What he doesn't have is any way to hide from Matt's senses.

That one change reshapes the whole fight. In the comics, Muse is a mystery Matt physically can't solve with his gifts. In Born Again, he's a serial killer Matt hasn't caught yet.

The case breaks the old-fashioned way. Bastian turns out to be a patient of Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva), the therapist Matt is dating, and both Matt and the task force find paintings of her in Muse's lair. In episode 7, Bastian thanks her in a session for helping him embrace his true self, she realizes who he is, and he knocks her out.

Matt rescues her and fights Muse in her office. Before the Anti-Vigilante Task Force can storm in, Heather shoots Bastian dead. Fisk then credits the task force with stopping him.

In the comics, Muse is the one thing Daredevil can't hear. In the show, he's a guy Matt's girlfriend had in her appointment book.

The showrunner thinks Muse got shortchanged

Showrunner Dario Scardapane has been unusually frank about season 1's Muse. He told Entertainment Weekly, as quoted by CinemaBlend, that the team didn't do justice to the original Muse storyline and that production limits meant it "didn't have the heft that I thought Muse deserved."

Don't miss: VisionQuest finale: release time, and the three questions episode 8 has to answer about Ultron

His fix is to give the mask to someone with history. Season 2, which premiered March 24, 2026, follows Heather into Fisk's administration as Commissioner of Mental Health while she struggles with trauma from her encounter with Bastian, including hallucinations of Muse. In the closing moments of the finale, "The Southern Cross," she puts on Muse's mask.

"What happens if she literally puts on that trauma?"

— Dario Scardapane, showrunner, to Entertainment Weekly

Set photos from the season 3 shoot show Levieva in a white Muse mask with blood dripping down it, per Screen Rant. Season 3 is expected in 2027.

Will the new Muse get the power?

Nobody has said, and the show's approach so far suggests not. Born Again has kept its street-level villains grounded, and Heather's Muse is being built out of trauma, not Inhuman biology. But the comics already have a precedent for a second Muse who isn't the first one: Morgan Whittier took over the name after the original died. Heather is following the same path, just without the trip through Hell.

If season 3 really wants to fix what Scardapane says season 1 missed, a Muse that Matt can't hear would be the simplest way. Given who's under the mask now, it would also be the most personal.

Previously we wrote: Is Nocturne a true story? Jurek Walter's creators borrowed one idea from The Silence of the Lambs