With Heather Glenn's Turn, Daredevil: Born Again Could’ve Reintroduced A Forgotten Villain
While Lady Muse could redeem season one’s worst storyline, there’s another character who Heather Glenn fit even better.
In the six-plus decades since Matt Murdock first debuted as the swashbuckling scourge of Hell’s Kitchen’s criminal underworld, he’s met his fair share of villains. But the threat posed by them pales in comparison to the one posed by Matt himself. He’s turned himself over to a brutal prison system (twice), been possessed by the demonic entity in charge of The Hand, and even chose to stay in the Marvel Universe’s version of actual Hell in order to save his friends. And yet none of that has quite blown up his life the way his incredibly fraught romantic entanglements have, which include everything from an extra-marital affair with a crime boss’ wife to a complicated relationship with the most dangerous former assassin in the Avengers.
Although they haven’t been as frequent or as explosive so far as in the comics, both the original Daredevil Netflix show and its revival have tipped the hat to Murdock’s toxic love life and the collateral damage left behind in its wake. In the first season Matt’s inconsistency and lies created an insurmountable rift between him and his then-girlfriend Heather Glenn, the unwitting psychiatrist of the serial murderer Muse and one of his only surviving victims; the compounded stress and trauma of both events sent her into the open arms of Mayor Fisk’s administration while also making her increasingly psychologically unstable throughout Season 2. Courtesy of some set leaks for Season 3, we now know exactly what Heather’s arc is building towards…and while it’s certainly an interesting twist, her development was a golden opportunity to re-introduce another villain that didn’t live up to her fullest potential in her first introduction.
Heather’s arc has been building to something obvious, and now we know that season 3 is going to make good on that build-up.
As if Born Again wasn’t hemorrhaging spoilers, leaked set photos from over the weekend have confirmed a popular fan suspicion: Heather’s mental duress will indeed escalate to the point of her becoming Lady Muse and adopting the mask of the man who attacked her in season one. Her increasingly cruel and unethical behavior towards the victims of Mayor Fisk’s Safer Streets Initiative was a big hint that the character was trapped in a downward spiral as a result of the powerlessness she felt during Muse’s attack, and the show has all but explicitly stated that Heather would do pretty much anything to never feel that way again, a fairly tragic but believable negative arc for her character.
Ironically enough, there’s another Daredevil villain that fits that mold as well: Typhoid Mary, aka Mary Walker, the pyrokinetic assassin introduced in Ann Nocenti’s late ‘80s run on Daredevil.
Who Is Heather Glenn In The Comics?
Although her villainous transformation isn’t based on the source material, the character of Heather Glenn very much is. First appearing as far back as 1975’s Daredevil #126, Heather was not a psychiatrist but the socialite daughter of Maxwell Glenn, owner of the corrupt Glenn Industries, a megacorporation with secret ties to the criminal underworld. Matt and Heather became romantically involved while Daredevil was investigating the company, and like the show, their relationship was constantly strained by Matt’s frequent deceit about his secret identity as well as a string of conflicts stemming from the unethical nature of Glenn Industries, which she took control over after the demise of her father in an attempt to root out the corruption. After Elektra perished, a grieving and impulsive Matt proposed marriage to a reluctant Heather, a desperate attempt to give his life some kind of structure.
Despite a pretty adorable meet-cute, Heather and Matt’s relationship in the comics was anything but.
However, their marriage never happened for the same reasons that their relationship didn’t, and a heartbroken Heather fell into alcoholism and a string of disappointing casual dating. Eventually her all-consuming loneliness and co-dependence on an emotionally unavailable Matt became too much to bear and Heather would hang herself in Daredevil #220, one of the most tragic and affecting consequences of Matt’s way of life.
Who Is Lady Muse?
While the original Muse was introduced and offed during Charles Soule’s 2018 Daredevil run, his design and overall gimmick made an impact despite the villain’s lack of depth or staying power. As a result, Lady Muse was introduced in last year’s Daredevil: Unleash Hell - Red Band from Erica Schultz, which follows Elektra after she adopted the Daredevil mantle in Chip Zdarsky’s run on the character (much of which has formed the basis for Born Again’s main narrative). Lady Muse was a troubled young artist named Morgan Whittier, who was slowly corrupted by the supernatural influence of the original Muse, himself trapped in Hell. After an extended crucible (which saw both Lady Muse and Elektra transported to the Lake of Fire), Elektra was able to save the young woman’s soul and free her from the serial murderer’s influence, despite her landing in custody and being forever haunted by what she did under his influence.
Replacing the demonic influence angle with a grounded depiction of PTSD is a smart decision on Born Again’s part.
Why Typhoid Mary Would Have Been A Better Choice
Although the Born Again writers have the chance to rewrite Lady Muse from the ground up to fit Heather’s character, she already shares quite a lot in common with Mary Walker’s story in the comics. As a young child she was abused by her father, which caused her to develop an alternate personality designed to protect her through extreme brutality if necessary — this alter (Typhoid) developed low-level mutant abilities, the most noteworthy of which being pyrokinesis. After a childhood spent in psychiatric hospitals, she became a prostitute as a young adult and had a fateful run-in with a pre-Daredevil Matt Murdock, who broke into a brothel to find one of the men responsible for his father’s demise. When he was attacked by the women who worked there, Matt lashed out blindly and accidentally threw Mary out of a window; miraculously, she survived, and vowed never to let another man harm her again.
Many years later, after Daredevil’s emergence, Typhoid had become a sought-after assassin within the criminal underworld, while the dominant persona Mary had no idea. After being hired by Wilson Fisk to murder Daredevil, Mary would seduce him into cheating on Karen Page with her civilian persona while battling him as Typhoid — eventually her dual lives would collide with Mary realizing that she has DID. And, despite trying to merge her alters, her complicated enemies-to-lovers-to-enemies conflict with Daredevil would continue, alongside an eventual romance with the Kingpin himself.
Combining Typhoid Mary and Heather Glenn would have been a brilliant and subtle critique of the way Matt’s behavior frequently hurts the women around him.
Typhoid Mary was already loosely adapted once, in the second season of Netflix’s Iron Fist, but it remains to be seen whether or not that depiction is still canon. In terms of Born Again, having Heather become Typhoid Mary would’ve been a brilliant and fitting decision: she’s already suffered extreme trauma, both at the hands of a violent man but also due to the manipulations of Matt Murdock. There’s also the fact that both Heather and Typhoid share different kinds of intimacy with Wilson Fisk; in the source material, Typhoid and Fisk’s mutual understanding of each other eventually blossoms into a romance and then marriage, and in the show, Fisk provides his own sort of comfort to Heather after she’s attacked by Muse, and in response she becomes one of his staunchest supporters, even though she’s unaware of his criminal activities.
DID traditionally manifests as a result of childhood trauma, but there are rare cases in which it can arise later in adulthood — for a show that has explored so much of Matt’s competing identities, it would have been fascinating to see a depiction of a psychiatrist wrestling with her own mental health in such a direct way. Considering last night’s episode, there’s also the immense dramatic potential of Matt being caught in an immoral love-triangle between his ex-turned-assassin and Karen Page, a relationship that can’t help but feel a little boring at times. In just two seasons, Heather Glenn has already become one of the most complex and tragic villains Matt has encountered — while it’s fun to imagine an alternate turn for her, hopefully her transformation into Lady Muse is just as much of a thoughtful development for her character.
