 |
| Beards. |
After the disappointment of Iron
Fist and the frankly mixed results of The
Defenders, I'm heading back to the streets of the MCU rather later than
most, with Jon Bernthal reprising his dark horse role as Frank 'Punisher'
Castle. I'm watching this with my partner's husband, and as he hadn't seen Daredevil Season 2 I got him to watch
the graveyard monologue before we started, and it reminded me just how powerful
that performance was.
After finishing off the last members of the gangs whose crossfire
killed his family, Frank gets a job in demolitions, dulling the screams of his
ghosts with the relentless crack of hammer on concrete. He rebuffs the
friendship of new boy Donny and antagonism of the regulation-issue workplace
bullies, only really opening up - and that barely - to Curtis, a former comrade
who runs a group where veterans talk about their feelings of alienation and
fears of the liberal oppression of the Christian right.
 |
| He's such a round-faced woobie that you want to trust him, which makes me think even more that he's evil. |
Homeland Security Agent Dinah Madani is assigned to the New York office
after a stint in Afghanistan, where her local partner was killed. She believes
that the killers were corrupt US military personnel; possibly Castle's old
regiment under Colonel Schoonover. Her hard-ass boss tells her not to pursue
this case, so he's probably involved, while her new partner, serially disgraced
agent Sam Stein is supportive, so he's either involved or he's too honest for
this world and things are going to go badly for him. He's not a goodhearted African-American
of a certain age, so I'm leaning towards the former(1). She's pursuing Billy
Russo, another former comrade, but unlike Curtis one actively connected to
Castle's black ops days.
Frank comes out of retirement after Donny is sucked into a stick-up
gang formed of the other construction workers. Totally inexperienced, he drops
his driver's license in front of their mob targets, and Castle is forced to
step in rather than let the others kill him, taking out first the stick up
gang, and then the members of the mob poker game. Unfortunately, this brings
him to the attention of a hacker going by the name of Micro, who contacts him
with vague hints that the deaths of his family were related to his own actions
in Afghanistan.
 |
| A world of beards. |
To track down Micro, Frank enlists the aid of Karen Page, who points
him at the family of a supposedly dead NSA analyst called David Leiberman. Leiberman
gives Castle a disc containing footage of his unit torturing and killing
Madani's partner in Afghanistan, which leads Castle to capture and question
Madani's boss, learning that people do want him dead, and that the entire
carousel massacre was just one of those attempts. Castle also spooks Micro by
visiting his home, and is able to follow him to his base of operations and take
him prisoner.
The Punisher continues to
beat the odds for me, by making the Punisher not only a sympathetic character,
but a compelling one, largely thanks to Bernthal's relentlessly intense
performance. In this series, we have a chance to see the man before the
Punisher, and to see that that man was also flawed, already wired for too much
aggression for civilian life, and the series makes a strong attempt to portray
the inner as well as outer effects of Frank's PTSD and brain damage(2). Unlike
the other inhabitants of the MCU noir, I really can't see romance on the
horizon for Frank, and I'll be more than usually disappointed if it shows up.
 |
| THE FEELS! |
We've had relatively little action so far, but I expect that to change.
In terms of new characters, Micro is an interesting contrast to Frank(3), having 'lost'
his family not through their deaths but through his, and now separated from
them by a computer screen and a persistent threat. Madani is a cookie cutter
tough cop so far, a bit like Misty Knight with a few sliders moved around, but
she's got a lot of room to grow and we're not really going to get to know her
until she crosses paths with Frank.
(1) The pattern of previous shows, what I call the Urich-Clemons-Pops
axis, bodes ill for Curtis, a good-hearted African-American, if a little
younger than previous victims.
(2) It's easy to forget as he ably demolishes half a dozen opponents,
or outfoxes a senior intelligence agent, but some of Frank's confusion - he has
memory flashes which mix his wife's death with aspects of his black ops work -
is due to having a bullet lodged in his brain.
(3) They are the 'Two Dead Men' referenced in the episode title, and compared to the predeceased duelists in the nonsense poem of the same name.
No comments:
Post a Comment