'Punisher' deserves so much better than where Season 2 leaves him
In a sea of heroic do-gooders, Punisher was a welcome arrival onto the Marvel scene.
While certainly nowhere near as evocative and poignant as Jessica Jones Season 1, his 2017 solo introduction into the Netflix-Marvel pantheon showed promise. The moral complexity of his character added some much-needed shades of grey to the usual black-and-white good guy superheroes versus bad guys.
With the talented Jon Bernthal playing the trigger-happy ex-marine, Punisher Season 1 asked audiences to consider uncomfortable questions about the cost of a greater good, war, trauma, government corruption, and gun violence.
But Season 2 brings back all of the bark and none of the bite to Punisher's rough-around-the-edges heroics. Like the character itself, the show seems stuck on reliving the past.
From the get-go, the plot reads like someone scrambling to stitch something together after not expecting a Season 2 to happen. Characters who were beaten nearly to death and shot in the head return to drag out a story that would've had bigger impact if it had been left behind in Season 1.
Unoriginal retreading isn't even Season 2's biggest flaw, though. The new characters and plots are so utterly lackluster that one can understand the need to fill out the season with characters who at least worked well in the past.
An overarching story that somehow manages to be both simultaneously too thin and too complicated.
But smashing a half-resurrected Season 1 plot with a copule of poorly explained new storylines results in an overarching narrative that somehow manages to be both simultaneously too thin and too complicated.
The motivation for Frank getting involved in the main plot of Season 2 while supposedly trying to lay low is inexplicable at best. He sees a random young girl in trouble at a bar and decides without asking questions to mercilessly kill dozens of goons going after her in a very brutal and public way. No introduction, rhyme, or reason needed!
I mean, I know merciless execution is pretty much Punisher's M.O., but at least he usually has a clear reason for doing it.
We're supposed to buy the premise that it was all because she reminded Frank of his daughter. Even a character in the show itself calls out this flimsy reasoning as "some outdated notion of chivalry” bullshit.
But that's how most things happen in Punisher Season 2.
In fact, there's an entire second villain subplot that's so disconnected from the rest of the story that I'd briefly wonder if I'd accidentally started watching a different show. The connection between this villain's conflict and Punisher or really any other character in the show is left completely unexplained until about the second to last episode.
There's a right way to withhold key connecting plot details throughout a season, in order to raise tension and mystery. It was expertly done on Breaking Bad. But Punisher's approach just makes you feel like you missed something, effectively sapping all tension, mystery, and immediacy from the experience.
If you want to understand why anyone is doing anything in Punisher Season 2, you'll have to wait until the very, very end.
If you want to understand why anyone is doing anything in Punisher Season 2, you'll have to wait until the very, very end. And by that point, you'll have lost all sense of investment anyway.
While Punisher was by no means a feminist icon in Season 1, Season 2 becomes egregious in how it uses women as ornamental victims who exist only as collateral damage for the male characters' journeys.
The young girl, Amy, isn't even the worst of it. Billy's therapist gets an even rawer deal in the story, and just as little characterization outside the men in her life. Frank's main moral dilemma in Season 2 is entrenched in more of that weird white knight crap, fueled by the execution-style deaths of nameless sex workers.
At least there's Agent Madani, possibly the only fully fleshed out female character to have a prominent role in any of the 13 episodes.
What's most sad about this sophomore slump is that is may very well be the last we ever see of Frank Castle. Netflix has been cancelling its Marvel shows, with rumors that Punisher and Jessica Jones will be next on the chopping block.
It's a real shame that this likely final season could not rise to the occasion of such a great character and actor. There was something timely and relevant in a story about a man who is both a monster made by an untrustworthy government, and also its reckoning.
Instead, we got a conclusion that leaves Frank in practically the same emotional place he started at the beginning of Season 1. The lack of character evolution might be par for the course for Punisher's persona. But it also turns out that just sinking viewers further into a character's self-pity and loathing doesn't make for very good TV.
Really, the only people who were punished in Season 2 of Punisher was anyone who bothered caring about the battle for Frank Castle's moral soul in the first place.
Jess is an LA-based culture critic who covers intimacy in the digital age, from sex and relationship to weed and all media (tv, games, film, the web). Previously associate editor at Kill Screen, you can also find her words on Vice, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vox, and others. She is a Brazilian-Swiss American immigrant with a love for all things weird and magical.
