Well, we finally made it. After a season that once again proved just how complicated it is to bring Marvel’s crime slaying vigilante to the screen, we get to not only to the end of the Punisher’s reign on Netflix, we get to the end of the streaming service’s Defenders-verse as each arm of the MCU adjacent franchise were canceled one by one. It turned out that Marvel were taking matters into their own hands when tackling the complicated juggling of movies and show and was using Disney+ as its launching pad, so it was time to mercilessly cull any dangling aspects like Frank in a drug lab in order to unify everything – so bye bye Daredevil, farewell Jessica Jones, so long Luke Cage and – well, I’m not that bothered about Iron Fist… sorry.
But after a final half to a season that rapidly squandered a lot of its earlier promise, can The Punisher manage to go out in a suitable blaze of glory that not only bids a fond farewell to the series, but to an entire sub-franchise of street based heroes?
With the pieces clumsily set on the board – or, in some cases, removed almost entirely after Dr. Dumont’s third storey plunge – its time for some long perculating grudges to finally get sorted. First up is Billy Russo vs. Dinah Madani after the Jigsaw-faced lothario witnessed his unbalanced lady love eat pavement courtesy of his earlier conquest and after he storms his way into Dumont’s apartment looking to avenge her, he attempts to put a beating on a woman who probably hates him more than Frank Castle does. However, while Madani has been consistently slow on the uptake for two whole seasons, she manages to fight Russo to a draw after she’s choked into unconsciousness after putting to mortal bullet holes into his belly.
As she awakes in the care of paramedics, Billy staggers off to try and get aid from a backstreet surgeon only to find that he’s pretty much dead already, he just doesn’t know it.
Elsewhere, after sorting out the confusion crested by the disappearance of Amy, Frank finally confronts John Pilgrim and in the ensuing gunfight they succeed in destroying multiple hotel rooms, but it ultimately ends in a stalemate when the holy man takes Amy hostage. However, when it comes time to exchange Amy for the captive David Schultz (whose tryranical parents are mostly responsible for the death and destruction that’s been occurring for thirteen episodes), we find that Curtis has already handed him back to Detective Mahoney in an attempt to end the madness.
However, listening to reason, Pilgrim lets Amy go just in time for him and Frank to batter the merry fuck out of one another before they finally reach some sort of accord. That means that the Punisher is free to make a number of brutal housecalls to close some books once and for all and for the Schultzs and a dying Billy, they’re about to find that they’ve reached their final chapters.
There’s a continuing argument to be made that there’s never truly been an instance of a live-action Punisher that’s done the source material real justice as some sort of compromise has always been met and I have to say, while the Netflix era has probably provided a Frank Castle that hits the most accurate beats, we’re still waiting for that perfect version. While Dolph Lundgren’s version was missing the iconography, Thomas Jane’s take wasn’t Punisher-y enough and Ray Stevenson’s more comic booky attempt nailed the aesthetic but dumbed everything down, Jon Bernthal’s series seemed destined to remain horribly inconsistent as it kept tripping up over its own plot threads and suffered from not being able to streamline its plots due to an ungainly episode count. However, while each iteration of Frank Castle obviously each has their own pros and cons, I still have to say that despite the inconsistency of his show, it’s Bernthal’s Punisher who gets it the most and it’s fairly apparent from the final episode.
While those pesky story issues remain messier than the aftermath of one of Castle’s assaults, The Whirlwind manages to find Bernthal’s temporary final hurrah virtually moving at every speed the character can muster. We obviously get Savage Frank after he and Pilgrim tear up a hotel room with bullets and then later batter each other with lead pipes and chain wrapped fists, but at the other end of the Punisher spectrum we find that the Surrogate Father Frank is still very much in play despite the relationship between him and Amy getting lost over during the last few episodes. While some Punisher purists might take issue with a “gentler” Frank, Betnthal’s touching, but still ludicrously masculine performance managed to find genuine heart in the breast of a man most famous for spraying criminal brains over as many surfaces as he can. We even get a glimpse of Reasonable Frank who manages to talk John Pilgrim around after they’d both bee chasing each other’s tails for so long, and of course, lurking somewhere in-between, lies Cold Frank as evidenced by the way he cooly dispatches the Schultzs and his final, wordless confrontation/execution of a fading Billy Russo.
But while we’re getting treated to a Frank for all seasons, I think it’s now blatently obvious that the downfall of season 2 was the insistence to constantly mute the fresh, Amy/Pilgrim storyline in favour of the Billy Russo one that, quite frankly, didn’t seem to know what the hell it was doing. One minute he was hospitalised, next he escaped, then he shacked up with his psychotherapist, then he built an army of veterans, cooked up a plan to discredit Frank and then planed to elope with his girlfriend – but for all of this, he rarely felt like a true threat and while a more comic accurate Jigsaw would probably have been just as erratic, I wonder if the messy nature of Billy Russo’s storyline could have be better served by putting Ben Barnes in more gruesome prosthetics – probably not. In fact, it seems that the hunt for Billy Russo was more of a Madani plot than a Punisher one and one wonders if that’s how the season was originally planned before they instead gave Frank double antagonists for his troubles. As a result, it truly feels that the other thread was by far the stronger of the two and yet this was the one that was constantly interrupted by whatever bullshit Billy was up to this episode – however, everything is ultimately wrapped up to some degree and even sees us out with Frank taking up his punishing work in full, comic accurate attire blazing away with duel machine guns.
In closing, while season 2 probably had more stronger episodes than season 1, the first series ended incredibly strong while the second got progressively messier as it went along. However, for all of its flaws, the Netflix era can still boast the fact that it brought us arguably the best Castle to ever wear the skull – in fact, you could say that Bernthal is the king of the Castles. If the MCU can figure out how to utilise him correctly while somehow integrating him into their more family favorite movie universe, they’ll open up a whole new avenue for the character to play in as he butt’s heads with yet more heroes. But for now, it’s safeties back on for Frank Castle.
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