⚠️ Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again Seasons 1 and 2, along with set photo spoilers for Season 3. Reader discretion is advised.
There’s something tragic about becoming the thing you hate most. It can happen in small steps, a gradual decline that’s too easy to miss. That’s the story of Dr. Heather Glenn from Daredevil: Born Again.
Over the course of two seasons of Daredevil: Born Again, this therapist unravels without even realizing it. Now, set photos from Season 3 have confirmed what many fans knew would happen sooner or later: she is now Lady Muse, the very thing that nearly killed her.
A Woman Wants to Help Others
When Heather (played by Margarita Levieva) is introduced in Season 1 of Daredevil: Born Again, she’s at the top of her field. She is a respected therapist and author of the book Live Without Fear: A Guide to Confronting Trauma. She starts dating Matt Murdock after the two are set up on a blind date. Heather also becomes a couples counselor for Wilson and Vanessa Fisk after Wilson learns about Vanessa’s affair.
She is, by every measure, someone who genuinely wants to help others.
Then one of her patients ruins everything.
His name is Bastian Cooper. During their session, Cooper thanks Glenn for making him the artist he is today. He brings up the paintings he’s displayed across New York City, then he does a demonstration to show they were made with blood. Sensing his instability, Heather is horrified to realize that Cooper is Muse, a serial killer who’s been murdering people in New York City and using their blood to paint his murals.
Muse knocks Heather unconscious and kidnaps her. He admits he became obsessed with her because he feels she understands who he really is. Muse ties a tourniquet around her arm and cuts into it, wanting her blood for his final painting.
Working through her terror, Heather headbuts Muse and reaches for his gun. He slams her to the ground and chokes her to death until Daredevil crashes through the window. As Daredevil fights Muse, Heather grabs Muse’s gun and shoots the serial killer multiple times.
She survives the ordeal, but the woman she was before the Muse incident was gone.
The Lie She Needed to Believe
After the attack, Heather refuses to acknowledge that Daredevil saved her life. She insists she saved herself and this is where we get an interesting look into her current mental state.
She is a therapist. She knows better than most how helpless a person can feel when someone sweeps in to save them. Admitting that a masked stranger had to rescue her would force her to stew in that feeling of powerlessness. So her mind tells her a story: she grabbed the gun, she fired the shot. She is the reason she is alive today. That story is a defense mechanism, and she will defend it at all costs.
This reframe has also served a second function too. Muse wore a mask and so does Daredevil. Both of them hide behind secret identities and operate outside the law. Her brain can’t process “Daredevil good, Muse bad.” So instead, she overgeneralizes the two as “dangerous masked figures and one of them almost killed me.”
There’s also another layer that fans rarely address. Muse was her patient and she missed all the warning signs. A serial killer sat across from her week after week. Not only did she fail to identify him, she indirectly helped him. Her identity as someone who helps others, the core of who she is, took a catastrophic blow. Blaming a whole category of people (masked vigilantes) is a way of externalizing that failure. If they’re all the same dangerous type, then she’s not at fault for missing the red flags. She was a civilian deceived by the kind of person who’s fundamentally rotten to the core.
It’s a survival strategy. And it leaves her wide open for Wilson Fisk.
Fisk Sees An Opening
Fisk sees Heather and her trauma as the perfect vehicle for pushing his anti-vigilante agenda. He invites her to his Black and White Ball, where he reminds her of Matt’s association with vigilantes. By the end of Season 1, he appoints Heather as the city’s Commissioner of Mental Health, making her the credible, traumatized face of his anti-vigilante crusade.
Fisk doesn’t need to do much. All he has to do is validate and amplify what Heather’s broken mind is already telling her. Then he gives her a role in his administration to trick her into thinking she’s making a difference. Her hatred of vigilantes was already forming; he just gave it a job title and a platform.
Meanwhile, Matt tries to warn Heather that Fisk is using her, but his secrets and sympathetic view of vigilantes pushes her away.
A Breakdown in Slow Motion
Throughout Season 2, it becomes clear that Heather is not okay and is burying herself in her work to avoid having to confront what she went through with Muse. While it’s never really addressed in the series proper, it’s heavily implied Heather and Matt broke up sometime before Season 2 starts. With Matt in hiding and having no real friends outside of Fisk’s inner circle, Heather starts to lose her grip on what’s left of her sanity.
She starts to space out and hallucinate Muse at random intervals. She sees him while she interviews clients, feels his presence lurking in the corner of the room. The camera tilts when she loses focus, a technique known as the Dutch angle that’s used to spotlight a fractured mind. Heather might be putting up front for the world, but something inside her is crumbling to pieces.
In a shocking twist, the episode “The Scales & The Sword” reveals that Heather kept Muse’s mask. Again, she’s a therapist who understands the psychology of holding onto trophies, an object from the worst moment of a person’s life. Yet she not only keeps Muse’s mask, but it seems like she uses it to de-stress by grabbing it while she counts to three. It’s something you’ve got to see to believe.
Meanwhile, she is doing real damage in her position as Commissioner of Mental Health. She falsifies the psychiatric evaluations of Karen Page and Jack Duquesne after they’re accused of vigilantism, which Fisk has declared to be a crime. That’s right, she intentionally paints the two as dangerous sociopaths to increase the odds of them being found guilty and imprisoned.
She takes it a step further when she visits Karen while she’s in jail. It’s painfully clear that Heather is bitter Matt prefers Karen over her and takes great pleasure in making hurtful accusations claiming Karen’s brother molested her (which never happened). When Karen makes it clear she’s not putting up with Heather’s mind games, the latter becomes so enraged she starts slapping Karen until she bleeds.
At Karen’s trial, Heather takes the stand where she’s confronted by Matt Murdock. Matt throws her off her game by dismantling the argument about Karen having antisocial personality disorder. He eventually gets the case dismissed with prejudice and reveals to the world that he’s Daredevil, which had to have gotten under Heather’s skin.
Later that same day, Heather punches the slimy prosecutor Hochberg in the throat when he suggests they both abandon Fisk after his crimes are exposed. That brief moment of uncontrolled violence shows that she can’t even keep it together in a professional setting.
The season ends with Heather looking at her reflection in the mirror. She finally puts on Muse’s mask but surprisingly, she sees an unmasked version of herself smiling back at her. She once questioned if vigilantes wear masks because it made them become their true selves. Now, she dons the mask of her would-be killer, losing herself to the Muse persona.
Showrunner Dario Scardapane explains that Heather’s biggest problem is that she “started to confuse serial killers with vigilantes and became a press mouthpiece for Fisk.” According to Scardapane, becoming Muse might be Heather’s way of trying to understand what pushes people into becoming vigilantes in the first place: “What happens if she literally puts on that trauma, and that trauma solves a lot of her conflict?”
What’s In Store for Heather in Season 3?
Set photos from Season 3 show Levieva decked out in a Muse-inspired outfit, pairing the bloody mask with a black coat, dark hair, black pants, plain white top and a gray hoodie.
Heather’s outfit is a direct nod to the female Muse from the comics. Lady Muse first appeared in Daredevil: Unleash Hell – Red Band #1 (January 2025), created by writer Erica Schultz and artist Valentina Pinti. This character is named Morgan Whittier, a young artist whose soul is corrupted by the original Muse from Hell, and is ultimately saved by Elektra.
The show will probably skip the supernatural possession to maintain a grounded, realistic street-level vibe. Which doesn’t make much sense since Daredevil: Born Again is confirmed to take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) where magic, spirits and gods exist…but I digress.
One theory that’s gaining traction among fans is that Heather may be the reason Matt gets out of prison. The authorities could offer to reduce his sentence if Daredevil helps them track down Lady Muse. Some are speculating that Heather’s crimes could be attempts at discrediting the work Matt has done as a lawyer and as Daredevil. It would also be the perfect revenge to help her cope with the fact that Matt lied to her AND she completely missed that he was Daredevil this whole time.
Season 3 of Daredevil: Born Again is set to premiere on Disney+ in March 2027. We don’t know yet if Heather will be the season’s main villain or one of several threats in a story that also brings back Fisk and reunites the Defenders.
What we do know is that Scardapane has said he didn’t think the show did the original Muse arc in Season 1 justice due to production issues. Heather’s arc is his way to flesh out that storyline and give it the attention it deserves. “I don’t think anybody’s prepared exactly for where this is going,” Scardapane teased fans.
Heather Glenn wanted to be powerful enough that nothing could hurt her ever again. She just didn’t notice that she was morphing into the very thing she hated in the first place.
Seasons 1 and 2 of Daredevil: Born Again are available to stream on Disney+. Season 3 is currently in development and is expected to premiere sometime in March 2027.
