It’s always fairly frustrating when a show you’re invested in settles on good when it could be great. As a Marvel fan and someone who’s read a decent stack of Punisher comics, I should be well versed in live action versions of the controversial vigilante not quite nailing the source material thanks to the three, previous movie attempts never quite feeling like the quintessential Frank Castle experience. However, with the Netflix show potentially poised to finally deliver a take on the character that touches all the bases, it’s proving to be a constant source of annoyance that for every episode that impossibly does justice to a very complex character, we get two or three that send the whole season into mess of repetitive plotting.
Once again, after a fairly gripping build up, the show has found its momentum well and truly disrupted by the fact that the writers just can’t get its various plot threads lined up in a satisfactory manner. Can Flustercluck manage to reverse the probable clusterfuck that looms on the horizon?
After discovering that it was his former friend, Frank Castle, that sliced his face to ribbons and beat his memory into fragments, Billy Russo’s made good on his threats to form an army of lost vets and wage a war on the city. Shooting up other gangs and taking their ill-gotten gains, the gang chill out after their murder sprees at their hideout that’s been humbly named Valhalla and Billy’s also taken his relationship with Dr. Dumont to the next level as she gives him psychological advice along with the passionate sex. However, that doesn’t stop Billy visiting Madani and demanding an explanation for Frank’s attack at gunpoint, buy even after he learns of his part in the deaths of Castle’s family, he refuses to take responsibility for his part in the massacre.
Meanwhile, that other thorn in Castle’s side, John Pilgrim, is finding that his bosses aren’t overly pleased with his lack of progress sniffing out the Punisher and Amy and urges him to speak to contacts from his old life to put a hefty bounty on them to finally bring this mess to an end. However, the faces from his white supremist past aren’t too keen to clap eyes on this man that they now regard as a tractor to the cause.
Elsewhere, after Frank’s earlier tantrum, Amy has decided to go out on her own while being blissfully unaware that there’s a hefty amount of money that’s been placed on her head and soon discovers that even her old friends can now no longer be trusted. Thankfully, Frank manages to come to the rescue in his typical, guns-a-blazing fashion, but while the bullets fly, Amy gets into a situation where she has to use a gun on one on her would-be kidnappers. Ever the dubious protective figure, Frank makes sure that the burden of murder doesn’t fall on her. But with enemies closing in all around from multiple fronts, does Frank even have enough bullets to shoot his way out of a worsening situation?
It’s by this point that I get a bit sick of repeating myself, because there’s nothing that’s occurring right now that hasn’t occured at some point in every single season of a Marvel show made by Netflix. I’m not even annoyed that at this juncture of the “Defenders Saga” offers up precious little in the way of MCU synergy because from a realist point of view, that was never really sustainable from the get-go – no, I’m still pissed that every single season of every single character stalls at some point for the exact same reasons. As I’ve no doubt ranted about before at some point, Netflix’s thirteen episode count often seems to be far too long to sustain whatever plot has been whipped up, but as the show was created for binge watching in a couple of days, chances are you won’t even notice it as you absorb five or more episodes a day. However, when you stretch the seasons out to even something a regular as an installment per day, those cracks in the storytelling soon become much more visible and way more apparent.
Of course, that’s where we currently find the second season of The Punisher that, after a truly solid first half, has seemingly lost all momentum and now just has all of the characters chasing their tails in some sort of narrative limbo that seems them all still running into one another but that somehow doesn’t manage to change the status quo. While it was pretty evident from the beginning that the season was going to have Frank try to fight a war on two fronts, the show has done precisely squat to make this potentially electric set up actually exciting. We literally could have had Frank, John Pilgrim and Billy Russo all try to out-manoeuvre each other in a lethal game of three-dimensional chess while they stop at nothing to achieve their goal – however, obviously someone on the writing team decided that would be too hard and instead we’re finding that each of these players keep getting annoyingly distracted.
After last episode’s pissy-fit, Frank’s seemingly fine again after a trip to his wife’s grave, but his attitude has seemingly caused everyone else in his little group to fuck off. Curtis gathers together the members of his therapy group not sucked in by Russo’s army to keep tabs on those who have and Amy checks into a friends place to vamoose her way out of the city – but while this sort of makes sense, it’s more of an excuse to keep everyone in a state of flux while nothing that happens actually changes the direction of anything. Russo visits Madani for answers and then leaves without any sort of altercation whatsoever; Frank’s discovery of a bounty on his head merely gives him a few more goons to shoot; and worse of all, Pilgrim’s plot thread seems to have come off the rails completely after being absent for two whole episodes, only to resurface and be given an entirely new storyline that seems to have nothing to do with the Punisher at all. Maybe a twist that sees Pilgrim facing his sins in the form of the angry white supremist movement he was once part of could have been a nice rug pull if the show had bothered to keep a bit more front and centre of the action; but now it just seems that they have no idea what to do with him as we wait out the remaining five episodes of the season.
Alternatively, Billy Russo biggest villain trait now seems to be that he’s going to be a whining, complaining little bitch whose main motivation now seems to be that Frank hurt his feelings. While I realise that Russo’s always been one to think solely of himself above all others, surely it would be far cooler for the character to realise how badly he fucked up by being in on the hit on Frank’s family and take similarly violent precautions, but instead he throws a full on baby tantrum that none of what he’s done can possibly be his fault simply because he can’t remember it. It may give Ben Barnes something to play with, but that doesn’t mean that it makes Russo anything close to being a credible threat, so with one villain having their attention drawn elsewhere and the other being simply annoying, once again it’s left to Bernthal to out shoot some people in an admittedly cool quickdraw to pull focus.
While I’ve been tough on this episode, it is genuinely an improvement over the last and the moment where Frank executes a man mortally wounded by a horrified Amy to spare her the burden of being a murderer still proves that the Frank/Amy stuff has definitely got the goods. It’s just a shame it’s getting lost in the mess the writers are creating to stretch the plot out to the end of the season…
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