Could it be that my relentless punishing of The Punisher has finally come to an end? Could it be that the countless hours the show has spent trawling through some decidedly off-brand drama is finally starting to pay off? Is the fact that the show has begun to focus on killing bad guys instead of executing it’s own momentum taken hold? I genuinely think that the answer to these questions are now yes for one simple reason – even the slow, irritating plot threads are starting to actually have an effect.
After the last episode’s bump in quality, I was hoping that Netflix’s habit of relentlessly guilding the lilly and dragging shit out to an unimaginable degree was mercifully wearing off, so imagine my frustration when Cild Steel drove right into the very story lines that’s been guilty of stopping the show giving us the Punisher we got a taste of in Daredevil. However, for the first time since the show started, it’s actually injected some Punisher moments into those plots meaning that Frank is starting to sound like his comic counterpart again.
Before we check in with Frank and Micro’s ever growing relationship, we get some much needed villain shtick from Billy Russo who, despite his flashy suits, slicked back hair and winning smile, really does seem to be truly fucked-up from the core. Obviously processing a hefty amount of trauma from a childhood spent in the system, we find that he’s long since located his mother and continuously punishes her for being a absentee, junkie, non-parent by having her committed to a psychiatric hospital and keeping her hooked on her drug of choice. This obviously means that the fact that Agent Madani is in a relationship with him and they’re getting closer is actually an incredibly bad thing, but matters are about to get worse. After discovering the bug in her office, Madani now wants to through whoever watching her off the scent by supplying misinformation in order to fake out and catch the one listening in. However, having no idea that her lover is working for the spy-happy Rawlins, her sting operation puts Billy deep in the shit and it’s Stein who pays the price.
Meanwhile, after finally discovering Rawlins’ identity, Frank and Micro get drunk and debate their next move. Frank is still very much on the “kill everyone” side of the fence, but Micro realises that if they take everything they know and present it to Madani, he’ll be able to get back to his crumbling family all the more sooner.
The whole family thing is make an even touchier subject when Micro’s wife, Sarah, makes a drunken pass at him when he goes over to check on Micro’s camera feed after it blinks out. Tension rises even more when Frank also is required to provide some tough love to Micro’s son, who is rapidly becoming something of a problem child. Man, life sure was simpler when Frank just shot dudes and moved on…
So while Cold Steel does actually commit this season’s most prevalent sin and once again mostly retreats from any and all classic Punisher tropes, it manages to stop a massive backslide from occurring thanks to the script giving matters some much needed edge. Yes, Billy is still in his highly physical relationship with Madani despite her still not realising that she’s regularly bedding the enemy; and yes, we’ve once again got to spend yet more time with Frank dealing with Micro’s family, but after over half a season dealing with various plots that’s stopped the show from actually having the Punisher punish people, it seems that there’s finally some payoff on the horizon.
The notion that Frank’s accidently stumbled into a new family after losing his old one isn’t actually a bad idea – especially when you realise that Jon Bernthal is playing a much more human, relatable version of the character who hasn’t yet become the cold, calculating, murder machine of the comics. But the plot line has now been drawn out to such an extent that even we’ve spent more time with the Lieberman family than Micro has and it all looked like it was going nowhere – fast. There’s a plot line in Peter Benchley’s novel of Jaws that was wisely dropped from the film that saw Martin Brody and Matt Hooper constantly at each other’s throats thanks to the affair Hooper has with Brody’s wife which kind of took the emphasis off the giant bloody shark that was eating tourists willy nilly on the island of Amity. Obviously the the writers of The Punisher didn’t take this into account and while it was nice to occasionally see Frank indulge in a life that was cruelly taken from him, the non-fireworks it provided only served to frustratingly slow down Frank and Micro’s ability to work as a team while providing an annoying amount of filler. But after things with the Lieberman’s get a little too close, it finally manages to say some stuff off.
For a start, Sarah’s kiss doesn’t lead into some torrid romance and its dealt with quickly and in a mature manner. However, far more interesting is the heavy handed approach Frank takes with troubled young Zach Lieberman when it’s discovered that he’s taking a knife to school. There’s no understanding, no gradual talking down of the boy; Frank just tells him some genuinely traumatising facts about war and killing and then holds the knife to the kid’s fucking throat in a classic, Punisher-style, scared straight scenario. Unbelievably it works and after some outpouring, Frank and Zach are throwing the old ball around like nothing was even amiss, but it’s the last straw for Micro who now is desperate to end his self imposed exile and bring everyone to justice by taking the Madani route.
However, I’m not sure how much use Madani is going to be to them after her sting operation to lure Rawlins in sees her and a strike team ambushing Billy and his mercs as they walk right into a setup that has heinous repercussions. Simply put, in a effort to escape, Billy has to stab his way through a hapless Stein who bleeds out before he can warn his partner that she’s literally in bed with the enemy and the shock death, added to the twisted glimpse into Russo’s mindset we get with his mother, finally gives Ben Barnes’ character the villain shit he’s been so desperately missing up until now. It also helps that his ascension from henchman to twist-delivering murderer means that Madani is going to have some confidence shattering revelations coming to her at some point in the next few episodes – but anything that lights a fire under these people can only be a good thing, sorry Stein.
If the more uninteresting aspects of the plot can suddenly spark into life, then I guess we could soon see a rapid reversal of fortunes for a Punisher show that’s been stuck in the mud for most of its run. True, the fact that Frank took a shot a Rawlins last episode only to experience no blowback whatsoever maybe the most baffling, un-Punisher shit the show could pull; but if the series is finally getting all of its ducks in a row (even the boring ones have some bite now), then I guess something big could be around the corner.
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