4 out of 5

Created by: Steve Lightfoot

covers season 1

The rock-music-blaring, bloody-vengeance-implying trailers had me worried, as did Marvel’s decision to hold the airing of their Punisher series to not drop the same week as another public mass shooting tragedy.  Frank Castle’s small screen MCU debut in Daredevil season 2 was powerful, but that slew of episodes also, to me, way over-compensated with gore, and Punisher was an element of that.  So signs seemed to be pointing to a solo show that would just up the ante, and if that was approached from a grindhouse perspective, fine, but they’d already grounded Frank as serious, thus adding nails and barbed wire to the signs that would be screaming bloody murder while also proclaiming some undoubtedly dubious ‘commentary.’

That fate did not come to pass.

We’ll thank the showrunning of Steve Lightfoot – setting a competent and mature tone from the show’s first notes  – and our main cast of Jon Bernthal as Frank, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Micro, and Amber Rose Revah as DHA agent Dinah, each presenting their morally conflicted characters with believable taints of rage, and guilt, and good and bad.  The Punisher does fall short in several regards, lacking the thrill or wow-factor of that first Daredevil season, or the deep-dive conceptual plumbing of Jessica Jones, but it is also the best standalone show and experience of the Marvel stable, taking what many cheer on as a one-note character and doing a very respectable job of trying to flesh that out and make it real, while not divesting itself of its shared universe and comicy roots.  The Punisher actually earns its 13 episodes, and interestingly does so by avoiding a Kingpin / Purple Man / Hand / Diamondback distraction: Frank’s end is a black hole of revenge; the show is about him; about the effects his decisions have had on his life and those around him.  And the enemies he’s naturally accrued along the way.

 You could call this Punisher Year One, but Frank already went though that in the background of Daredevil, a path completed on this show via a killing montage at the start.  We kick things off properly with the aftermath for Frank: his recovery.  But for a man like Castle, this is anything but: restless days of wandering; nights of nightmares… When he gets a mysterious video delivered that suggests there’s more to his family’s murder than he knew, it’s not a surprise that he takes to the new focus rather immediately, first targeting down the source of the video – Micro, aka David Lieberman, also burned by similar elements from his past – and then, ultimately, the big baddies.

While a late-in-the-game twist is one of the show’s failings, allowing a multi-faceted relationship to devolve into violent mustache twirling and chortling, this revenge quest is otherwise scintillating, with Frank navigating the bloody waters of right and wrong, attemptedly moderated by Micro – while assisting with reconnaissance, and reporter Karen Page – whom he turns to for information assistance – and zigged and zagged on his path due to a diversion with a disturbed war vet Lewis Wilson and Dina, who’s wrapped up, unknowingly, with the same dirty deeds.  Said quest maintains its tension by, as mentioned, not making it squarely bad guy versus good guy; we know who the enemy is and where he is, and it’s the degrees of reluctant self awareness that click into place for Castle and Micro along the way that make the journey so compelling.  This is the psychologically complex version of Frank from Ennis’ Marvel Max run.

…Mostly.

Because the show can’t quire get there without potentially alienating its rah-rah blood fanbase, or fully severing Frank from the potential to be a ‘hero.’  So the internal conflict bubbles but cannot boil; we are shown aspects to consider, but they’re presented on the same plane as the plot, allowing The Punisher to slip in elements of a thinkpiece M.O. while more fully leaning into its forward momentum.  This is distilled in the very last shots, which set up both a comic book cliffhanger and then a juxtaposingly sober and more human ending.

But is this an amazing standard to have set over what could have been?  My god, yes.  The Punisher might not have the water cooler discussion design of Daredevil or Jessica Jones – it’s oddly restrained for all it’s grit – but it also doesn’t suffer from plot exhaustion or drag, built fully on the back of a fascinating character and finding an impressively mature medium between a revenge tale and a survivor’s tale.