Bullseye (Marvel Cinematic Universe)

"FBI and the army before that, they helped keep me on the straight and narrow path. But now... without that it's all... I'm drowning in deep water and I don't know whether I'm swimming through the surface or the bottom."

- Dex wrestles with his inner demons

Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter is the secondary antagonist of Marvel's Daredevil 's third season.

He is a disturbed and mentally unstable FBI agent who is manipulated by Kingpin (Wilson Fisk), into becoming his right-hand man and also a dummy Daredevil in order to incriminate the real one.

He is portrayed by Wilson Bethel and is based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name.

Early life
"No...it wasn't an accident"

- A young Benjamin Poindexter admits to murdering his baseball coach.

Benjamin Poindexter was the child of parents who were implied to have been abusive/poor caregivers. When they died when Benjamin was young, he was put in an orphanage. The early loss of his parents instilled Ben with a deep sense of emptiness and unhappiness, with him pining for his lost parents to come back to him. However, it also ensured that he was unable to be properly taught right and wrong, as well as becoming dangerously unstable mentally. When he was informed by a baseball coach who had befriended him that he needed to step down from the pitching plate to give other kids a try, Benjamin spitefully threw the baseball he was given at a metal pole. The ball ricocheted off of it and hit the coach in the side of the head with enough force to kill him...exactly what Benjamin had intended.

Following his first murder, he was put in psychiatric care. Despite admitting to his therapist that his throwing the ball at his coach's head was indeed intentional, she chose not to have him incarcerated, instead resolving to teach him empathy and hoping that she could curb his murderous and sociopathic impulses.

The two saw each-other for many years, but eventually, as Benjamin's therapist got older, she became sick and weak, and he was no longer able to keep seeing her. Before her death, she urged Benjamin to always have a "North Star" in his life, to guide his internal compass; a good person who would always be there to give him the moral guidance that he needed and ensure that he would not be alone again.

FBI Agent
As an adult, Ben had become an FBI agent in the hope that it would bring order and structure to his life, though he still had murderous impulses that would occasionally manifest, such as when he murdered members of New York's Albanian criminal empire who had already surrendered and then lied about it, or when he lied again that he was coping with his use of lethal force on targets when in fact he was doing no such thing. During this time, Wilson Fisk (then a prisoner of the FBI), became interested in Benjamin, who had earlier saved his life, and began making efforts to sway the young man to his side. After digging into Ben's past and learning of his unsavory childhood acts, Fisk inserted himself as a mentor figure in Benjamin's life and began steadily corrupting him and galvinizing him into fully embracing his murderous impulses.

During this time, Benjamin was secretly stalking a young woman named Julie who he had history with as part of a suicide prevention group. Dex was obsessed with her but unable to express it in a healthy manner, and Kingpin, determined to ensure that Dex remained loyal to him and not to a woman who could potentially steer him away from murder, secretly arranged for her murder before tricking Dex into believing that she had abandoned him due to not wanting to see him again. Kingpin later had a copy of Daredevil's suit made by Melvin Potter after blackmailing the latter and giving it to Dex, so that he could become a new Daredevil...one in Kingpin's pocket.

Kingpin's Man
"I'm Daredevil."

- Bullseye impersonating Daredevil.

As the fake Daredevil, Dex murdered anyone Kingpin wanted eliminated, from a man who stabbed him in prison so that Fisk could be moved into a penthouse to be under house arrest, to journalists, to criminals who were unwilling to let Fisk blackmail or bribe them. He did, however fail to kill Karen Page (who Fisk wanted dead for her killing Wesley). He fought the real Daredevil twice, both at The Bulletin and in Hell's Kitchen's local church, and both times Dex was able to defeat him. He also later killed the owner of a painting special to Wilson Fisk who had acquired it after his imprisonment, returning it to Vanessa, who was by then aware of Dex's violent nature.

However, Daredevil learned of Julie's death and her connection to Dex in life, and called Dex to tell him that Kingpin had had her killed. He told Dex to go to where her body was being kept on ice, verifying his claims and throwing the betrayed Dex into a murderous rage. Again suiting up as Daredevil, Dex crashed Fisk's wedding to Vanessa and tried to kill them both, engaging him and the real Daredevil in a three-way fight that ended with Kingpin arrested again and Dex defeated and with a damaged spine. Unmasked and exposed, Dex's reign of terror as a false Daredevil was over, and the real Daredevil was exonerated for the many murders Dex had committed in his costume.

Afterwards, Dex volunteered for an experimental surgery to try and save his spine overseen by a Doctor Oyama, who intended to graft experimental metals and seeming cybernetics into Dex to save his life and, possibly, finally his open his eyes appears its symbolic iconic in them, make him a more dangerous villain than before.

Trivia

 * This is the second live action take on Bullseye, after the first in the 2003 movie.
 * "Benjamin Poindexter" is the real name of Bullseye in the Ultimate Marvel Universe (Earth-1610) as well.
 * Benjamin's baseball cap as a child is black with a white target in the center, a visual nod to his 616 costume's trademark mask. His black outfit worn while jogging is also possibly a reference to his Bullseye costume.
 * His impersonating Daredevil on Kingpin's behalf is adapted from the comic story Born Again in which Kingpin has a mentally ill man dress up as Daredevil in an attempt to discredit and incriminate the real Daredevil (and also kill Foggy Nelson).
 * Likewise, his fight with Daredevil in a church while trying to kill Karen Page is a nod to the death of Karen Page in the comics, in which Bullseye killed Karen on Mysterio's behalf despite Daredevil's best efforts to protect her. It also bears some similarities to the fight between Bullseye and Daredevil in the 2003 movie.
 * His damaged spine that is then reconstructed with special metals is directly adapted from a story in the comics in which Bullseye's backbone was damaged and then rebuilt with adamantium. In both cases, the one responsible for it was Lady Deathstrike (Yuriko Oyama)'s father.

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