So you've finished your Daredevil binge. You've sat through 13 episodes and come out the other side feeling hopefully a little victorious, and probably a little confused. Don't panic. We're here to break down exactly what was going on in that final scene for you, and to explain just what it means in the increasingly uncertain future of the Netflix Marvel Universe.

　　Needless to say: spoilers abound after this, so please read with care if you haven't finished this season!

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　　Now Playing: Comics History Of Kingpin (Wilson Fisk) | Marvel's Daredevil

　　As a result of his final confrontation with both Daredevil and Kingpin, Dex winds up paralyzed--specifically after Fisk breaks his spine over a wall corner, a move that Dex should probably be thankful didn't just full on kill him. Instead, he's left mumbling that he can't move as the NYPD storms onto the scene. That very well could have been the end of things for poor Benjamin Poindexter--but it wasn't.

　　After Fisk is put away and Matt, Foggy, and Karen begin regrouping, we're treated to a scene of Dex laying face down on an operating table with his entire back slit open right down the middle. A team of doctors are working on his spine, speaking to one another about the risks of such an experimental procedure, and its less-than-optimistic odds of success. If that wasn't weird enough, just before the final credits roll, we see Dex's eyes are open, his pupils haloed with an irridescent bullseye shape.

　　The target symbol is the easy part. Like Fisk before this season, no one ever called Dex by any codename or call sign--the name "Bullseye" was never uttered in Daredevil Season 3, despite the obvious trajectory of the character. Dex may have completed his arc and wound up a full-on criminal by the end of the season, but his time as a costumed supervillain is presumably still to come (that is, if Daredevil doesn't get canceled like Luke Cage and Iron Fist). Whether he's going to assign the name to himself or get it from somewhere else like Fisk's FBI agents naming him "Kingpin" in secret is still up for debate, but definitely something to keep an eye out for.

　　But what, exactly, is up with the surgery?

　　To really understand what's happening, you'll need to know a little bit about Bullseye's comic book history. After a particularly nasty encounter with Daredevil that ended with Matt literally throwing him off of a telephone wire from several stories up, Bullseye was paralyzed and hospitalized. But things didn't end there. Rather than let things go, Matt repeatedly broke into Bullseye's hospital room and tortured him with a rigged game of Russian Roulette using a gun that was secretly unloaded, just to terrify and humiliate Bullseye as much as possible.

　　Of course, that cruelty comes back to haunt Matt in the end, after Bullseye is sprung from his hospital cell by a mysterious man named Lord Dark Wind, the scientist who invented the adamantium-based procedures that created heroes and villains like Wolverine and Lady Deathstrike. Dark Wind promises Bullseye his mobility if he undergoes the same procedure, lacing his bones with adamantium in exchange for becoming Dark Wind's personal assassin.

　　The procedure actually goes according to plan, but Bullseye promptly betrays Dark Wind and returns to Hell's Kitchen to work with Kingpin instead, complete with his new adamantium bones. They don't help too much, however, and Daredevil is able to best him again and again. Bullseye retained his mobility for years, until he was killed and resurrected by The Hand in a botched ceremony that left him alive but completely paralyzed and confined to an iron lung. His second round with paralysis didn't completely stop Bullseye's quest to destroy Daredevil, however, and he spent his time confined in his own body engineering schemes where other people would end up doing his dirty work for him.

　　So, where does that leave Dex in the show? Well, Lord Dark Wind may not literally be in play for the Netflix MCU, but we do hear the name "Dr. Oyama" used during Dex's surgery, a reference to the name Kenji Oyama, Dark Wind's civilian alter ego. Additionally, the word "adamantium" is never used (probably something to do with the rights, considering it's X-Men connotations) but the doctors do say that they're repairing Dex's spine with "cognium steel," another, less known imaginary metal from the Marvel universe.

　　One thing that's simply unclear is how Dex got to this operating table in the first place. We never actually see him transported from the scene, so we don't know if he was arrested or convicted of the murders he committed while in the Daredevil suit, or if he was just sent directly to a hospital. We also don't know whether or not Dr. Oyama reached out to Dex or if Dex reached out to him. There are a lot of variables left up in the air that could potentially inform the way a hypothetical fourth season pans out.

　　It's important to note that even with the adamantium enhancements, the comics incarnation of Bullseye doesn't actually have any superpowers beyond his uncanny marksmanship, so even if Dex's experimental surgery is a success, he probably won't become all that different than he was. If anything, he'll just get much harder to hurt. But that definitely keeps with the Netflix MCU's efforts to remain as "grounded" as possible while dealing with the most supernatural elements of superheroics. And Dex certainly does have a deep enough personal grudge against both Daredevil and Fisk to really push him over the edge once he's back on his feet.

　　That, or it could be a complete failure and the next time we see Dex he could be encased in a tomb-like iron lung. Somehow, for a character like Bullseye, that seems just as terrifying.