Warning: This article contains spoilers from Daredevil: Born Again episodes 1 and 2.

It’s a bold move to bring back a main character from the original Daredevil series only to kill them off, but the Marvel team felt they had to do it for the revival, Daredevil: Born Again.

The opening of the Disney+ drama, which dropped two episodes of its freshman season on Tuesday, begins with a welcome sight for fans: Charlie Cox‘s Matt Murdock, Deborah Ann Woll‘s Karen Page, and Elden Henson‘s Foggy Nelson back together on screen for the first time since leading Netflix’s Daredevil. The trio walks out of their newly formed law firm — fulfilling a dream they had from the end of that original series — and head to their favorite after-hours haunt, Josie’s bar.

Then all hell breaks loose in Hell’s Kitchen.

Benjamin Poindexter (Wilson Bethel), a.k.a. Bullseye, a familiar antagonist from the Netflix era, makes an explosive entrance on Daredevil: Born Again. He opens fire on Matt’s friends outside the bar, kickstarting a new “oner” in which Matt, now suited up as the Man Without Fear, battles Bullseye through Josie’s, out the back door, up the adjoining apartment building’s staircase, and onto the roof. The pulse-pounding sequence plays out to the thrum of Foggy’s struggling heartbeat after Matt’s best friend was hit by gunfire.

When his heart eventually stops, Matt crosses the line he never thought he’d cross: he tries to take a life by throwing Bullseye off the roof. Though Mr. Poindexter walks away after hitting hard pavement, Matt “still had the intention,” Daredevil: Born Again executive producer Sana Amanat tells Entertainment Weekly. “So how do you deal with that?”

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Brad Winderbaum, the head of Marvel TV, goes deeper in unpacking this moment. “Matt has to make a deal with the devil, in a way, himself,” he says. “In order to be righteous, he has to assume a certain amount of toxicity of his own. The battles that he wages for ultimate justice often come with collateral damage. And that felt like a really crucial core to Matt’s character arc and to Daredevil: Born Again. The death of Foggy was something that we really agonized over. It’s not totally dissimilar to the death of Gambit in X-Men ’97. Both characters represent something essential to the core idea so that their loss actually has a huge impact on the universe that the story’s living in. So it wasn’t something we took lightly.”

Winderbaum notes how the team pored over Daredevil comics to find precedent, citing how Bullseye actually kills Karen in the source material. That’s why, Amanat points out, they brought Poindexter back. “Ultimately, that was the intention: Foggy being so integral to Matt, Matt realizing he needs to put away the mask, Matt starting a new life. The only reason he would ever do that is if his best friend dies,” she says. “Otherwise, this man will always come back to [violence], because [Foggy’s] been his moral compass for so long. That is the only thing that made sense for us narratively to be able to tell that story.”

It’s the story that now defines Matt’s arc on Daredevil: Born Again season 1, and perhaps beyond. “It sends Matt into a real state of freeze,” Winderbaum says. “You find a Matt Murdock who is trying to uphold the virtues of Foggy in Foggy’s absence, but the pressure’s going to come to bear and he’s going to explode, which you see at the end of the second episode.” She’s referring to the sequence wherein two corrupt cops beat up Matt, who then gives into his violent tendencies and maims them once first blood is drawn.

“And believe me, the absence of Foggy is something that looms large over the entire season and is a big part of the culmination of the season,” Winderbaum adds.

Everyone at Marvel seems to know the death of Foggy could be a risky move. Amanat recognizes how even their own internal conversations went to either end of the reactionary spectrum. “He’s a man in grief,” she says of Matt. “He is a man who lost his identity because he lost the person who has, in some ways, helped him define that identity. It’s heartbreaking to me that we had to do that. It was tough. It was really, really tough. But at this point, 10 years later, we have to move forward. We have to be able to start telling a new narrative.”

At the very least, this won’t be the last we see of Foggy, she confirms. “He and Deborah are coming back for season 2 in different ways,” Winderbaum adds. (Daredevil: Born Again season 2 has already set up shop in New York.) “But we’re excited to work with him again…. I don’t see a Daredevil season without him in some regard.”