That would have underminded Matt's arc. The season was about Matt picking up the pieces of his broken life and putting them back together. That was his journey. If he teams with Foggy and Karen that early on, there is no struggle. He's already basically pieced his life together. It's essentially a new show.
I feel like it was getting repetitive to have yet ANOTHER variation of Matt working independently of his friends. Like, by this point, he should've moved past that already and accepted that he’s not invulnerable and that the help of his friends is invaluable to his own successes as a vigilante; that now that Karen and Foggy both know the truth, pushing away his loved ones is not the answer, that keeping them in the dark does not keep them safe, and that he needs them in his life in order to find that balance. He's finally learned that now as of the end of season 3, I just wished that he'd learned that earlier.
I also feel that a little more teamwork would have also made the Nelson Murdock & Page ending feel a little more earned (
that it'd be a bit of an ethics violation for Karen to be a partner in the firm when she's not a lawyer, is another can of worms). Other areas where I think it would've helped would pertain to Karen's story. Her experiences are important for Matt's character development. In the comics, Matt is the one who "saves" Karen, whereas through the course of the show we see how she saves herself. While the latter is definitely more palatable to modern audiences, part of me feels that if her journey was a little more intertwined with Matt's, her warnings about how killing Fisk would change Matt for the worse would have a little more weight, at least to me. bad place, I think Karen would relate to Matt's hallucinations of Fisk because they'd remind her of the nightmares she had after killing Wesley.
There are also a few plot points that I think I'd have taken a different approach with if I were writing the season.
One plot point that I feel didn't gel was Fisk's scapegoating Matt in episode 5. I think someone was saying in the episode 5 discussion thread that they felt it was kinda pointless for Fisk to be ruining Matt's life when Matt has no life to ruin and he is already at rock bottom. Like, it makes sense why Fisk might send the FBI after Matt, but honestly, I think there'd be more storytelling potential if Fisk sent the FBI after Foggy, as Foggy had more to lose at that point in time. (Fisk wouldn't quite yet play his card with Foggy's family, for various reasons)
Another is the reveal of Sister Maggie as Matt's mother. Yes, it's from the comics, I know that. But I don't think it added much to the story, except for causing Matt to leave the Church, which didn’t really matter because he came back anyway to save Karen from Dex.
Jessica Jones season 2 had used the same twist, but the reveal of the IGH killer as Jessica's mom actually brought major implications to the plot and overall character motives. I don’t think much changed for Matt with this reveal that Sister Maggie was his mom, he was already in a dark place but didn’t get deeper after learning about it and recovered from this dark place for unrelated reasons. Not to mention, I think Matt spending an episode having talks with hallucinations of his father and Fisk just seemed like a time-waster, at least to me.
In fact, that thing about Matt having conversations with imaginary visions just ends up going back to my earlier point about how I feel that they exist to give Matt someone to talk to, the whole reason I would've preferred an earlier teamup between Matt, Karen and Foggy: they were almost never in the same room. Also, for being the main character, Matt didn't have much screentime. The dynamic between the main 3 is perhaps the thing I love most about the show, but we didn't have many scenes with the core group; there was Foggy and Karen, Matt and Karen, or Matt and Foggy, but the three of them together was only the case in maybe 5 or 6 scenes during the last three episodes. I feel if we had more of a teamup, we'd also see some of the other offscreen investigating that some of the characters did during their arcs (like Karen's investigating and fact-finding; I'd like to have seen the scenes breaking down how she determined Fisk was owning the hotel, or just what she went through to find that contact at the FDIC who gave her Felix Manning's name; or for that matter how she located Jasper Evans). Hopefully season 4 will give the trio more scenes together now that they're back to Nelson Murdock & Page.
And it would've been great to see more Matt. Because I saw a chart somewhere that noted that Matt's screentime in seasons 1 and 2 was about 307 minutes per season on average. He only has about 107 minutes of screentime in season 3. His time's been cut two thirds. Nadeem has about the same amount of screentime as Matt. And there's a very small gap in their screentime numbers to those of Fisk (100 minutes), Dex (95 minutes) and Karen (93 minutes). I realize that Erik Oleson's intention was to make everyone a main character, and you shouldn't put too much focus on the main character lest you risk making the show boring (
The Punisher season 1 definitely needed the Madani storyline for this very reason, and
Luke Cage season 2 did this through all its depth with Mariah and Bushmaster), but I feel it drowned out Matt to some extent. Like the episode where we had Dex's backstory and Matt was offscreen for 46 minutes.
I'd even go so far as to say that I wonder if we really needed to see Dex's fall from grace, given that we were already seeing Nadeem's. Like, maybe it would've been interesting if we only saw bits of Fisk corrupting Dex, like just a shot of him reading the medical files but we don't know why he's reading them. The reveal could've then been all about
Ray's reaction rather than the audience's or Dex's (with as much weight as the later reveal of Hattley's duplicity). And I dunno, I do think it would have benefited the show if we had a few more courtroom/confession booth/graveyard speeches. Or maybe even a few more midbosses to flesh out the life of the underworld. There's just Dex and Fisk during this season, really. I think we could've used a few more short-lived but characterful foes, similar to what earlier seasons gave us with Vladimir, Finn Cooley, Stick, and even Nobu (despite the various problems the show eventually had with Nobu during season 2, pacing-wise he was well-placed within season 1, a lengthy one-on-one fight where Matt absolutely had no choice other than to immediately step up his game).
).
As for Tombstone, I guess it depends on if Sony have any plans for him, they might be willing to trade for an Avenger appearing in their next two Spidey films.
