You mean, they didn’t want you to kill off any of the major characters?

I might have ended the season in a more Greek-tragic or sharper way, but ultimately, there are many more stories to tell with this cast of characters. Hopefully if I’m a lucky duck, I’ll be among the people who get to tell those stories.

What does the news about Iron Fist and Luke Cage being canceled do to those hopes?

As I understand it, each one of these shows has their own viewership, and Netflix takes it on a case-by-case basis. Look, I’m not blind to the emergence of the Disney streamer and a potential Netflix competitor. What I can control is coming up with a good story, and telling it with great writers and great actors and a great crew, and just really doing the best that we can with the show. And my corporate overlords will decide the future that all of us will have. Let’s just hope that we get to do it again.

How heavy of a hand did head of Marvel TV Jeph Loeb have in shaping the season as a whole? I know the idea of basing this season on Daredevil’s famous “Born Again” comic plot pre-dates you coming on board. So how much of that was mapped out for you?

Well, it was an option certainly. They hinted at it at the end of The Defenders, when you see Matt in the bed and they say: “Get Sister Maggie.” That certainly was set in stone and part of what I inherited. When Jeph Loeb and I sat down at the beginning of the season, the “Born Again” arc—or the pieces of it—were options, but there were others. For instance, before I walked in the door, they knew that Vincent [D’Onofrio] wanted to come back.

I took those pieces away to my writing cave and came up with a story which was original. And then I brought it back to Loeb. When I came back, I got this look from Marvel, like, “Holy shit, we had no idea you were going to go off and come up with the entire season.” I ended up getting the job, and that’s what you ended up watching. It was a partnership very much at the beginning and throughout the process, but they let me go tell the story that I wanted to tell.

I’m curious what it’s like, though, to operate as one piece of story inside the larger Defenders universe. This season feels almost intentionally more divorced from the continuity of the rest of the franchise than these shows have been for a long time.

I told Jeph at the beginning of the season that I wanted to treat Season 3 of Daredevil like it was my run of the comic book, in the way that Frank Miller had his run of the comics. Loeb had his. Kevin Smith had his. I very much wanted to put my stamp on the show and the kind of storytelling that I admire. I knew coming into Season 3 that the tone of the show was going to be a little different, because I am not somebody who writes to cool action sequences. For me, the writers that I most admire are the David Chases of the world. Matt Weiners and Vince Gilligans. You’re writing it from inside the head of the character.

How do you accomplish that?

I employed a technique known as deep point of view. I imposed certain rules this season about who the camera could follow, and editorially how to cut scenes. I worked very closely with the directors and the D.P. with lens selection, with everything about how to create an emotional bond between those deep-point-of-view characters and the audience. At the beginning of the season, it’s Matt, Karen, Foggy, Fisk, Dex, and Ray Nadeem. Those are the six characters that enjoyed point of view until the secret that Sister Maggie is Matt’s mom comes out. Then I gave a seventh character P.O.V. But by limiting where the camera could go, where the scenes could go, I was intentionally trying to build a bond between those characters and the audience. It helped me impose what I would consider a more character-driven, premium kind of model for storytelling.