I don’t know about you, but I just feel that we’re all just making time now. As The Punisher stumbles towards it’s finale, we find the show stuck in a state of flux between an episode putting across some potentially game changing stuff and then the following installment doing virtually nothing to back it up or build upon it. Take the last episode for example: when it ended, it seemed that Billy Russo (with a major assist to his therapist girlfriend, Dumont) had finally found a chink in Frank Castle’s armour that smartly bypassed (mostly) attacking the body of the unstoppable vigilante and instead went to dismantling his spirit by leading him to believe that his latest rampage had lead to the inadvertent deaths of three women who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Smartly figuring out that if you take away the Punisher’s superiority complex over the criminals he kills and make him believe he’s jutst as bad as the scum he culls, we witnessed one of the worst defeats we’ve ever seen the character take on screen – so what does episode 11 do with it? Not much.
After discovering the bodies of three women apparently slain during his latest attempt to take out Billy Russo, a badly beaten Frank Castle has surrendered to the NYPD and is being carted to the nearest hospital by ambulance. However, as busted up as his body is, it’s his spirit that’s taken the major damage as the realisation that he’s now a murderer of the innocent has broken him far more successfully than club’s, fists, or concussive blasts could ever hope to do.
Meanwhile, we find that another of Castle’s antagonists, the formally pious John Pilgrim, is also experiencing a crisis of faith as he just wants to leave the den of sin that New York is and get back to his sick wife. However, unbeknownst to him, his beloved Rebecca has actually succumbed to her illness, but the insidious Schultz’s have been keeping this from him in order to keep John out doing the “lord’s” work. Eventually, Eliza Schultz arrives in person to tell Pilgrim the truth, but angrily demands that he stay in the rot of the Big Ape until his mission is completed in order to honor Rebecca’s memory. Heart broken and desperate to return home to his boys, Pilgrim agrees and proceeds to double his efforts now he knows exactly where Castle is.
Meanwhile, Frank has given up so much, he is prepared to let a corrupt police officer murder him for the bounty on his head rather that live with what he’s done, but soon he’s visited by Amy, Madani and old friend Karen Page who each have shown up to aid him while he’s at his lowest ebb. But while Madani and Page team up to do a bit of sleuth work concerning the bodies of the shot women, Billy can’t help but call Madani’s phone to gloat which gets the women thinking that Frank’s been set up. However, while proving Castle’s innocence is one thing, getting him the fuck out of that hospital with John Pilgrim and detective Mahoney both looking for him is another matter entirely.
Again, I find myself caught between admiring what The Punisher does right and outright hating on what it does wrong and while the entire plotline that suggests that Frank is only as indestructible as his belief subtle allows him to be is some of the finest exemplary character work the show has pulled out thus far, the fact that they decided to make this story play out two fucking episodes from the end just boggles my mind. I mean, why would you take a plot point this strong and not only drop it near the end of the season, but actually have it resolved within one episode? Surely you could base an entire season on a concept this strong and in all my years of watching live action Punisher content, I’ve never seen the “hero” so conclusively beaten as we have for the majority of this episode, and yet for some reason the writers deem to not only have it all utterly resolved in a little over 50 minutes, but it’s figured out with relative ease too. Why this show insists on dragging out other plot points that aren’t worth a damn and then skimming over gold is beyond me and if this exact episode had occured maybe two or three episodes sooner and really built up the fact that Frank’s truly turned in the skull for good, it probably could have been an utter banger.
However, if anyone was going to untangle a cool plot twist in an annoyingly short span of time, I’m glad it’s Karen Page as Debra Ann Woll’s random appreances have become a welcome sight of the show and watching her team with the other women in Frank’s life is actually a team-up I didn’t know I was waiting for. OK, so it gets a little weird here and there – I’m not entirely sure that we needed the side-plot of Page doing deals with the creepy morgue guy so he can wear her high heels – but it’s a pretty cool to have a trio of women band together to exonerate Castle from the murder of another three women. It’s just unfortunate that the show can’t keep up that narrative flow when dotting those i’s and lining them t’s as the writers do some distractingly stupid things.
For a start, why have Billy Russo give the game away by having him ring Madani (an agent for Homeland Security, no less) to crow about Frank’s predicament when it makes it painfully obvious that he’s set his former friend up? It’s just yet another bit of sloppy writing that’s continually stopping Ben Barnes’ villain from becoming the credible threat he’s supposed to be, which is a shame as his ploy last episode was pulled off perfectly. Elsewhere, it’s now painfully apparently that the show has lost all faith in the John Pilgrim storyline because it’s occured to me that just as Pilgrim has been sidelined, the Schultzes – who have set a lot of these events in motion with their machinations – have been barely in the show at all when they could have been arch bad guys that jams a sardonic stick into the ribs of the types of hypocritical, ultra religious, ultra rich people who are dead set on manipulating the country for their own ends. To hype Pilgrim’s puppet masters up now after only a handful of scenes just feels a little lazy, especially considering that Pilgrim himself hasn’t really been enjoying the limelight as much as he should have been, but also any hopes that both he a Cadtle would enjoy some sort of stunningly violent showdown seems unlikely considering that both men are now virtually purple due to all the beatings their bodies have taken.
While the show is still clinging on tenaciously, even the good instalments feel more like four-star moments in a two-star episode and while Bernthal and Woll are always good for the occasional “if only” moment and the violence quota is still nice and high, the showrunners need to pull out something fairly earth shattering to pull the Punisher back to its former glories.
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