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- NOTE: This article is about the incarnation of the Bullseye from the Marvel Cinematic film series. For the mainstream version, see Bullseye (Marvel). For the incarnation from the 2003 film "Daredevil", see Bullseye (Daredevil 2003).
| “ | 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 in Season 3 of the Netflix Marvel Cinematic Universe TV series Daredevil and will return in the upcoming Disney+ series Daredevil: Born Again.
He is a deeply disturbed and sadistic FBI agent who is manipulated by Wilson Fisk/Kingpin into becoming his right-hand man and also a dummy Daredevil in order to incriminate the real one.
He is portrayed by Wilson Bethel, who also portrayed Randy Jacobs in Criminal Minds.
Personality[]
On the surface, Benjamin seemed to be a dedicated, hardworking, and diligent man who was eager to please his superiors in his FBI career. However, while he was a determined person, he also had difficulties in trying to maintain direct interaction with others and, as a result, came off as socially awkward towards others. Even so, Benjamin retained a measure of respect with his peers by being incredibly competent and successful in whatever tasks he was given to take part in. This compulsive desire of wanting to prove his worth was also extended to Wilson Fisk once Poindexter was appointed to look after and serve him as a personal enforcer.
However, his outwardly demeanor, while somewhat genuine in trying to blend in with society and to impress his FBI workforce and be seen as a commendable contributor, was actually a psychological mask, for Benjamin held a far darker impulse that had been inside of him since childhood. In reality, he was a dangerous, mentally and emotionally unstable, irate, deranged and psychopathic individual who implicitly had an urge to harm and kill others as doing so meant that Benjamin would be able to grant him a sense of fulfillment and assert a degree of superiority as well as entertain himself with his actions. Like a usual sociopath, Benjamin feels absolutely no shred of remorse for what he has done, such as during a therapy session when he admitted that he killed a baseball coach because he denied him another turn at the pitching table and chose to throw a ball at him, despite the two having befriended one another. He also has a sadistic streak since he admitted to killing little animals like kittens. Although he tried not to he admitted that he liked it, clearly stating that on top of being ruthless, he is also a blood thirsty sadist and revels in the suffering of others (in many cases to vent over his pain).
However he wasn’t without feelings or humanity as he was genuinely saddened by the deaths of his parents, his therapist and Julie Barnes who he went insane over and vowed to avenge for dying at the hands of Fisk. Because of his traumatic past, Dexter tries his best to maintain a structured and orderly life which caused to develop a keen obsession with keeping his surroundings in his home completely neat, organized and tidy which reflects his trauma of lacking the ability to be in control over the tragedies he’s lived through his youth and prevent them. Because of these traumas he has struggled with severe abandonment issues since childhood because of the early loss of his parents which instilled him with a sense of emptiness and the life-long extreme fear of abandonment which led him to almost kill his therapist for “abandoning” him by dying because of old age. At the culmination of his insanity, Dex begins to hear voices inside of his head and the sound of swarming insects which reflect his internal chaotic thoughts and his descent into madness and darkness. However he still had a code of honor and ethics as he refused to kill his teammates (although he hurt them badly) in his encounter with them while dressed as daredevil in the Bulletin, demonstrating that he somewhat cared about them.
In the end, once Dex was pushed to the edge by the loss of Julie, he vowed to embrace his vicious nature and accept it as his true self since there was nothing else for him to lose.
Biography[]
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 heavily implied to have been abusive/poor caregivers who often resorted to berating and neglecting him. When they died when Benjamin was young and sent to an orphanage. The early loss of his parents determined Ben with a deep sense of emptiness, loneliness and unhappiness and depression with him pining for his deceased 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 ill mentally and emotionally. He was also gifted with the deadliest aim that can turn any object into a lethal projectile and barely miss. symbolically, this represents that for all the pain, anguish and loneliness he has been through which propels his desire and will to never miss out on a golden opportunity for a better life with a family and people that love him which in it manifests in his aim, an aim that he perfected throughout his time in the orphanage by throwing a baseball at the wall creating an hole in it showing his desperation and desire to escape the situation he is in. However the major flaw that gets in the way of this idea is that Ben is also aimed to become a violent and unpredictable madman with an insatiable bloodlust who will mentally snap at any second whenever something goes wrong or doesn’t get his way. This immediately erases any chance for him to achieve the life he wants. When his baseball coach ,who had befriended him, informed him that he needed to step down from the pitching plate to give other kids a chance to play, Benjamin spitefully threw a baseball lying on a duffel bag 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 all out of pettiness for not getting his way.
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 control, hoping that she could curb his mental instabilities and violent 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 and remain sane for the rest of his life.
Working at the hotline[]
After leaving the army, Dexter joined a suicide prevention center to improve his social and empathetic skills. He eventually met a coworker by the name of Julie Barnes and started to like her. She was very supportive and commending of him but was unaware of mental state and his sadistic and murderous tendencies. When he received a call by a suicide victim, he was about to encourage the person to kill his stepfather instead of committing suicide but saw Julie and pretended to encourage the caller to refrain from enacting self-aware and reassured to support him.
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 terroristic 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 galvanizing him into fully embracing his murderous impulses.
During this time, Benjamin was secretly stalking a young woman named Julie who he had a 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 to be 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.
Afterward, Dex volunteered for an experimental surgery to try and save his spine overseen by 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.
Victims[]
- Coach Bradley
- Amber
- Jasper Evans
- Everett Starr
- Father Paul Lantom
- Esther Falb
- Special Agent Ray Nadeem
- Agent Arinori
- Agent Mockta
- Agent Markham
- 12 Albanian Crime Syndicate members
- 5+ New York Bulletin Staff members
- 2 Unnamed civilians
- Several FBI agents
- Unnamed Presidential Hotel Employees
Kill count: 34+
Trivia[]
- This is the second live-action take on Bullseye, after the first in the 2003 movie.
- "Benjamin Poindexter" is the true 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. Finally, during his operation in the Season 3 finale, his eyes reflect a bullseye insignia.
- His impersonating Daredevil on Kingpin's behalf is adapted from two different comic stories :
- 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).
- An unnamed story arc of the early nineties written by Ann Nocenti where Bullseye impersonated Daredevil of his own accord to ruin his reputation.
- 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.
