Fans knew they were coming, but that didn't make what happened with the Hand in Daredevil Season 2 any easier to watch. Spoilers for all of Season 2 ahead. In Episode 9, after it's already been revealed that Nobu is alive and working on some kind of sinister plan, we see that the Hand is draining young people's blood into a large, stone urn. It's a deeply disturbing image, as Daredevil finds these five people, who appear to be teenagers, locked in cages with tubes continuously draining the blood from their gaunt bodies. When the attempt at saving them goes horribly awry, it's clear that there's more to this plan than torture.
When the group is brought to a hospital, one of them kills his own father and it seems as if they are all under some form of mind control, as they rise together and go back to the Hand to continue the process. Luckily, they were at the hospital long enough for Claire Temple to run some tests and discover that the group's blood was being replaced by strange substances, almost like they were serving as incubators, as she put it. We see Nobu continuously protecting the urn that the tubes lead to, and it clearly serves an important purpose — one that I believe is all about "activating" Black Sky.
As Episode 12 reveals, Elektra is Black Sky, the entity the Hand serves that can apparently exist in different people. But something Stick said earlier in the season suggests she's not exactly what the Hand needs yet. As he told Matt, the Hand had never "activated" a Black Sky before, and as we see, Elektra is able to fight against this part of her, sacrificing herself to save Matt and prevent the Hand from using her to carry out terrible things. Well, she tried to sacrifice herself, at least. As the season's closing moments showed, the Hand dug up her grave to put her into that urn — the same connected to all the blood draining.
While this act is clearly meant to resurrect Elektra, there might be more to it. What if this is also the process that finally "activates" a Black Sky, turning her into the kind of weapon everyone has described? The Hand was likely planning to put Elektra into the urn all along, since they had been preparing it long before she died, and her death simply didn't impede the process.
So before you get too excited about Elektra likely living to see another day, know that the process that saved may very well have turned her into something else.
Images: Netflix, Patrick Harbron/Netflix
