The Punisher reax
You will be shocked at how concise I am not.
In no order whatsoever:
* I loved this, almost unreservedly.
* I spent the first half annoyed af whenever Madani showed up. I deeply resented her being forced on us as a co-lead and thought the show started to drag whenever attention focused on her. Which was too often. She had zero interesting traits, she was deeply unlikable, she objectively made bad choices... and totally not coincidentally, she was a prototypical Male Action Lead. She was a Lone Wolf who was Determined to Find the Truth Regardless of Consequences and No Matter How Many Toes [S]he Had to Step On and Used Sex With a Pretty Partner As Investigative Strategy/Distraction and her Recklessness and Determination Annoyed her Superiors and Got People Killed while she also required a Sympathetic Ally to Explain Their True Emotions because she didn't show any. Also, like a male action lead, she showed no real nudity while her partner bared quite a bit.
By the end, however, I was very mildly disappointed to see her shot in the head and seemingly killed at the carousel. So brava for that character arc going from "why isn't she dead yet?" to "well, that's a shame." Which is not to say that I ever want to see her again in any other Netflix show, because all she really did was stop being so goddamned annoying, but I cared about her life by the end.
* Micro... Micro stopped being annoying much earlier on. He had earned some quarter by the time he sighed "are we still doing this?" at Frank's shenanigans. By the time he stabbed Frank with his drug pen, he was a good guy. The David-Frank partnership was the most important in the show and I thought it was played so well. David had his own poorly thought out choices to examine on top of having a lot of heavy lifting to do with Frank, trying to corral and re-socialize him. David did both partially through his own actions and partially through getting himself into situations that required Frank to access his humanity and carry David emotionally as well as act physically himself. Also, David showed himself a good father through his care of Frank more than through his angsting over what his absence had done to Leo and Zach. He didn't treat Frank like a child at all and the two of them had a purely adult-adult relationship, but he was patient when Frank was toddler-like in his stubbornness and he chose his battles, he gave Frank his independence but set boundaries when necessary, and he let Frank figure out who and what he was going to be. And Frank, in this weird childhood of his rebirth, needed exactly that.
* Good grief, Bernthal nailed this. Frank blossomed like a flower in this series, from murderous death machine to a man coming to accept what he has lost and, well, a man. A human being capable of great violence, but also great compassion and great humor and great love. His self-loathing remains his dominant trait, but if you go back and look where he was at the end of DD2... the progress he has made, sometimes despite his own intentions, is so remarkable. He's still indifferent to his own survival and the rage that burns in him will never be banked, but he has gone from being willing to die for anger to being willing to die for love -- for that, in the end, is what he chooses. Repeatedly. He stays with the claymore-bedecked Curtis well beyond the point that would have been useful for his mission or safe for himself. Everything he does for Karen. He trades himself for David Lieberman and his family more than that he puts himself in a position to face his archenemies. That he gets to to both is good, yes, but his primary objective was to free the Liebermans of the crazy hell they'd been in for a year because he genuinely liked and even loved all of them. His arc has been remarkable and the final scene, where he speaks so candidly and shows himself so raw, is breathtaking. And it makes the looming fear that a second season is going to have to undo at least part of this growth heartbreaking.
* I'm kind of annoyed that Sam Stein had to be handed the Stupid Stick to die for the plot. Give the man an honorable death, don't have him screw up disarming and subduing a dangerous prisoner like a probationary officer.
* You know how in the MCU they keep making the villains so very underwhelming? I know the movie and tv people don't talk over at Marvel, but the former really need to take a lesson from the latter in how to establish comics-canon bad guys. Kingpin, the Purple Man, Cottonmouth, Jigsaw... all of them are cartoonish in the comics to some degree, either through how they're consistently drawn or their half-assed character development. But in the Netflix MCU, these are all pretty strong bad guys. Wilson Fisk remains the gold standard for how to run a four-color villain through the realism machine and spit a monster out onto the screen, but Billy Russo had pretty much nowhere to go but up and they cleared the very low bar of "not lame" easily. They nailed the vanity that's so essential to Russo's pre-Jigsaw life, but they didn't turn it into a caricature -- he's aware of his beauty, but he doesn't preen and in fact is very casual about it. There's one scene of his skin regimen and plenty of offhand comments about how well he dresses and how handsome he is, but he's not that fastidious or vain, he doesn't pose or make self-referential comments about his good looks, and his parting words to the dying Sam Stein make it seem like he's actually annoyed by the His Prettiness nickname.
And everything else? Everything else is stratospherically better than Jigsaw's comics-canon backstory. Billy Russo might be a psychopath, but he's not a cartoon imitation of psychopath. He might very well have zero true attachments, but he can fake them really, really well. The family scene with the Castles is perfect. His relationship with Curtis is note-perfect, down to his implied reluctance to face his own demons by instead giving money for others to face theirs and his later real insult at being lied to. His flashback scenes with Frank ring true as two men of deep connection who find themselves in well over their heads. His care of Madani while he's still playing that part is thorough and considerate -- his emotional and physical comfort is offered without demand (and gawd, is that bathing scene creepy) and he refuses sex when it really won't do Dinah any good. There are no close-ups of his dead-eyed stare into the distance as he goes through these motions despite the fact that the audience is already in on the ruse; it's played totally straight because he's playing it totally straight. His shockingly warped relationship with his birth mother is as close as it gets to mustache-twirling behavior and that's brief and almost an aberration because his cruelty is otherwise much-better clothed in kindness.
And his real feelings about Frank... it's the most fucked-up love story ever. He sees Frank as his soulmate, his match, maybe even his equal. And like Hannibal Lecter with Will Graham, he will wait for Frank to realize it and accept it, sometimes interfering and sometimes choosing not to interfere depending on whether the result will bring Frank closer to him. He wants Frank for himself, to himself, and Frank is the only one he ever chooses ahead of himself. He is courting Frank honorably -- he would have nothing to do with the planned family annihilation, even as he seemed maybe to have been sure that Frank would survive it, and you have to wonder if he would have actually killed Frank if Frank had turned up at the ship -- and is deeply wounded when Frank will not accept the gestures. "We're the same," he pleads on the carousel.
* On the other hand, Rawlins was a cartoon. He would have probably have been more or less okay as the amoral Clandestine Service head, efficiency and ambition having burned away any semblance of reasonable humanity, but then they got into the gratuitous sadism. Leave the BDSM with Morty, yeah?
* Can we pause for a moment and have a good giggle over just how much alcohol is consumed in this series? We are, what, ten episodes in before nobody's pouring a drink? If that? The Liebermans use wine glasses more than juice glasses (bless you, Sarah) and everyone else is hitting the whiskey when they're not using it for disinfectant. The Madani family even has rituals built around wine. It's great. I love it and I'm not kidding at all.
* For a show about a dude with a dude sidekick and a couple of dude villains, this series had a very respectable array of powerful women. I didn't like Madani, but there she was, along with Mrs. Madani. Sarah Lieberman was never quite the damsel in distress and while she was grateful for Pete's presence as an adult male, she was doing very well on her own as woman and mother and head of household. Even in flashbacks and David's story of their meeting, she had two hands on her own agency and never let go. Leo Lieberman is the archetype of every spunky young girl Wolverine ever adopted and she's gonna grow up to be a star. Marion James didn't need no man to get where she'd gotten and did the right thing in the end. And Karen... all of everything about Karen.
* I know Marvel/Disney's cheap, but they could have sprung for a military advisor to at least once-over the stuff that could have been easily gotten correct without changing the plot. Some things are okay, some are grin-and-bear-it, and some of it is 'seriously, did you guys ever hear of Google?"
We're going to have to assume that Frank and Billy Russo are prior enlisted Marines who got commissions because there is no way on God's green Pentagon lawn that you can be in any US military service for at least eight years and still be an O-2 if you started off as an officer. Unless you're some kind of special screw-up who keeps getting busted down and has enough political connection not to get thrown out, in which case there's no way you're leading a handpicked Goldwater Act Special SOCOM team seconded to the CIA. Actually, there's no way any pair of lieutenants is doing that. This was a raging case of Make Him An Officer Because Officers Are Noble and Important and Intelligent and Capable, which is something that afflicts Hollywood and makes everyone who has ever significantly dealt with a military laugh uproariously. Seriously -- you don't put lieutenants in charge of anything important. They'll lose the bathroom key if not supervised, forget the war. Frank and Billy would have been perfectly fine as NCOs; it would have better suited their skill sets and actions. Billy's transition to CEO isn't compromised by not having had a commission.
* For all that Billy Russo and Wilson Fisk were improved with the transition to the screen, nobody has gotten a better redemption than Karen Page. Karen's comics history is sad and miserable and some of the early stuff was just Of The Time crap, but a lot of it was the inherent misogyny of comics and the way the lack of creativity resolves into cheap and easy answers that often require destroying the girl. Getting Karen away from Matt was the best thing they could have done -- she has very little value to him in the comics except as a reason to feel guilty. Giving her a purpose and a drive on top of giving her back her agency is fantastic. She was her own damned woman by the end of Daredevil, could have gotten a little more respect in the Defenders, but here in the Punisher series, she's gotten to progress as a character. She has a life she's happy with, a job she's good at and passionate about, and instead of just getting kidnapped yet again, she gets to save Frank right back.
Every single Frank-Karen scene was awesome, both for what did happen and for what didn't. I'll buy a ticket for a stateroom aboard that 'ship, but I'm pleased that it didn't set sail this season. Frank is still mourning Maria and coming to terms with his feelings for Karen and what that means in terms of whether he is still respecting Maria's memory. It's fucking hard to move on after losing a spouse, whether or not you feel you had any role in their death. Sarah Lieberman struggles with it and Frank does, too, with the added bonus of not having full control over his responses because of that bullet through his brain. Frank's progress from trying to creep on Karen from a distance to that beautiful headbutt in the elevator after they saved each other... That's so powerful because it shows real love without using the shorthand of lust. [Which they leaned on far too heavily with respect to Maria.] Frank's not ready. He hasn't moved on from Maria and, after avenging her murder, he needs some time and peace to understand that he can put her ghost to rest without dishonoring what they had.
* I spent so much time looking at backgrounds trying to figure out where everyone was and where they were supposed to be. Mostly in the liminal space between Brooklyn and Queens; lots of Greenpoint, I'm glad something besides UPS has a use for Maspeth, but apparently Micro's lair was shot on Roosevelt Island and we're just going to pretend it's somewhere else because, really, so impractical. The Lieberman house could have been anywhere, but I'm gonna say Brooklyn from the part of the address we can see. (It's not Queens, the format is wrong.)
* The Lewis arc was the worst. Seriously, what was the point of it? That war damages the combatants was plain enough without giving one of them a psychotic break and turning him into a terrorist with super-unclear motives, triggered by a conspiracy-minded Stolen Valor fabulist. He can't be the flip side of the coin from Frank if we don't know what he's doing or why -- he never actually says specifically what he wants done or who he wants to change and how, just that if you don't agree with him, you're One of Them and deserve to die. He wasn't necessary to get Frank exposed as not-dead. Or to put Karen at risk/show her competence. And trying to use him for all of that at once made him seem even more pointless and sadly ridiculous. Also posted at DW.
In no order whatsoever:
* I loved this, almost unreservedly.
* I spent the first half annoyed af whenever Madani showed up. I deeply resented her being forced on us as a co-lead and thought the show started to drag whenever attention focused on her. Which was too often. She had zero interesting traits, she was deeply unlikable, she objectively made bad choices... and totally not coincidentally, she was a prototypical Male Action Lead. She was a Lone Wolf who was Determined to Find the Truth Regardless of Consequences and No Matter How Many Toes [S]he Had to Step On and Used Sex With a Pretty Partner As Investigative Strategy/Distraction and her Recklessness and Determination Annoyed her Superiors and Got People Killed while she also required a Sympathetic Ally to Explain Their True Emotions because she didn't show any. Also, like a male action lead, she showed no real nudity while her partner bared quite a bit.
By the end, however, I was very mildly disappointed to see her shot in the head and seemingly killed at the carousel. So brava for that character arc going from "why isn't she dead yet?" to "well, that's a shame." Which is not to say that I ever want to see her again in any other Netflix show, because all she really did was stop being so goddamned annoying, but I cared about her life by the end.
* Micro... Micro stopped being annoying much earlier on. He had earned some quarter by the time he sighed "are we still doing this?" at Frank's shenanigans. By the time he stabbed Frank with his drug pen, he was a good guy. The David-Frank partnership was the most important in the show and I thought it was played so well. David had his own poorly thought out choices to examine on top of having a lot of heavy lifting to do with Frank, trying to corral and re-socialize him. David did both partially through his own actions and partially through getting himself into situations that required Frank to access his humanity and carry David emotionally as well as act physically himself. Also, David showed himself a good father through his care of Frank more than through his angsting over what his absence had done to Leo and Zach. He didn't treat Frank like a child at all and the two of them had a purely adult-adult relationship, but he was patient when Frank was toddler-like in his stubbornness and he chose his battles, he gave Frank his independence but set boundaries when necessary, and he let Frank figure out who and what he was going to be. And Frank, in this weird childhood of his rebirth, needed exactly that.
* Good grief, Bernthal nailed this. Frank blossomed like a flower in this series, from murderous death machine to a man coming to accept what he has lost and, well, a man. A human being capable of great violence, but also great compassion and great humor and great love. His self-loathing remains his dominant trait, but if you go back and look where he was at the end of DD2... the progress he has made, sometimes despite his own intentions, is so remarkable. He's still indifferent to his own survival and the rage that burns in him will never be banked, but he has gone from being willing to die for anger to being willing to die for love -- for that, in the end, is what he chooses. Repeatedly. He stays with the claymore-bedecked Curtis well beyond the point that would have been useful for his mission or safe for himself. Everything he does for Karen. He trades himself for David Lieberman and his family more than that he puts himself in a position to face his archenemies. That he gets to to both is good, yes, but his primary objective was to free the Liebermans of the crazy hell they'd been in for a year because he genuinely liked and even loved all of them. His arc has been remarkable and the final scene, where he speaks so candidly and shows himself so raw, is breathtaking. And it makes the looming fear that a second season is going to have to undo at least part of this growth heartbreaking.
* I'm kind of annoyed that Sam Stein had to be handed the Stupid Stick to die for the plot. Give the man an honorable death, don't have him screw up disarming and subduing a dangerous prisoner like a probationary officer.
* You know how in the MCU they keep making the villains so very underwhelming? I know the movie and tv people don't talk over at Marvel, but the former really need to take a lesson from the latter in how to establish comics-canon bad guys. Kingpin, the Purple Man, Cottonmouth, Jigsaw... all of them are cartoonish in the comics to some degree, either through how they're consistently drawn or their half-assed character development. But in the Netflix MCU, these are all pretty strong bad guys. Wilson Fisk remains the gold standard for how to run a four-color villain through the realism machine and spit a monster out onto the screen, but Billy Russo had pretty much nowhere to go but up and they cleared the very low bar of "not lame" easily. They nailed the vanity that's so essential to Russo's pre-Jigsaw life, but they didn't turn it into a caricature -- he's aware of his beauty, but he doesn't preen and in fact is very casual about it. There's one scene of his skin regimen and plenty of offhand comments about how well he dresses and how handsome he is, but he's not that fastidious or vain, he doesn't pose or make self-referential comments about his good looks, and his parting words to the dying Sam Stein make it seem like he's actually annoyed by the His Prettiness nickname.
And everything else? Everything else is stratospherically better than Jigsaw's comics-canon backstory. Billy Russo might be a psychopath, but he's not a cartoon imitation of psychopath. He might very well have zero true attachments, but he can fake them really, really well. The family scene with the Castles is perfect. His relationship with Curtis is note-perfect, down to his implied reluctance to face his own demons by instead giving money for others to face theirs and his later real insult at being lied to. His flashback scenes with Frank ring true as two men of deep connection who find themselves in well over their heads. His care of Madani while he's still playing that part is thorough and considerate -- his emotional and physical comfort is offered without demand (and gawd, is that bathing scene creepy) and he refuses sex when it really won't do Dinah any good. There are no close-ups of his dead-eyed stare into the distance as he goes through these motions despite the fact that the audience is already in on the ruse; it's played totally straight because he's playing it totally straight. His shockingly warped relationship with his birth mother is as close as it gets to mustache-twirling behavior and that's brief and almost an aberration because his cruelty is otherwise much-better clothed in kindness.
And his real feelings about Frank... it's the most fucked-up love story ever. He sees Frank as his soulmate, his match, maybe even his equal. And like Hannibal Lecter with Will Graham, he will wait for Frank to realize it and accept it, sometimes interfering and sometimes choosing not to interfere depending on whether the result will bring Frank closer to him. He wants Frank for himself, to himself, and Frank is the only one he ever chooses ahead of himself. He is courting Frank honorably -- he would have nothing to do with the planned family annihilation, even as he seemed maybe to have been sure that Frank would survive it, and you have to wonder if he would have actually killed Frank if Frank had turned up at the ship -- and is deeply wounded when Frank will not accept the gestures. "We're the same," he pleads on the carousel.
* On the other hand, Rawlins was a cartoon. He would have probably have been more or less okay as the amoral Clandestine Service head, efficiency and ambition having burned away any semblance of reasonable humanity, but then they got into the gratuitous sadism. Leave the BDSM with Morty, yeah?
* Can we pause for a moment and have a good giggle over just how much alcohol is consumed in this series? We are, what, ten episodes in before nobody's pouring a drink? If that? The Liebermans use wine glasses more than juice glasses (bless you, Sarah) and everyone else is hitting the whiskey when they're not using it for disinfectant. The Madani family even has rituals built around wine. It's great. I love it and I'm not kidding at all.
* For a show about a dude with a dude sidekick and a couple of dude villains, this series had a very respectable array of powerful women. I didn't like Madani, but there she was, along with Mrs. Madani. Sarah Lieberman was never quite the damsel in distress and while she was grateful for Pete's presence as an adult male, she was doing very well on her own as woman and mother and head of household. Even in flashbacks and David's story of their meeting, she had two hands on her own agency and never let go. Leo Lieberman is the archetype of every spunky young girl Wolverine ever adopted and she's gonna grow up to be a star. Marion James didn't need no man to get where she'd gotten and did the right thing in the end. And Karen... all of everything about Karen.
* I know Marvel/Disney's cheap, but they could have sprung for a military advisor to at least once-over the stuff that could have been easily gotten correct without changing the plot. Some things are okay, some are grin-and-bear-it, and some of it is 'seriously, did you guys ever hear of Google?"
We're going to have to assume that Frank and Billy Russo are prior enlisted Marines who got commissions because there is no way on God's green Pentagon lawn that you can be in any US military service for at least eight years and still be an O-2 if you started off as an officer. Unless you're some kind of special screw-up who keeps getting busted down and has enough political connection not to get thrown out, in which case there's no way you're leading a handpicked Goldwater Act Special SOCOM team seconded to the CIA. Actually, there's no way any pair of lieutenants is doing that. This was a raging case of Make Him An Officer Because Officers Are Noble and Important and Intelligent and Capable, which is something that afflicts Hollywood and makes everyone who has ever significantly dealt with a military laugh uproariously. Seriously -- you don't put lieutenants in charge of anything important. They'll lose the bathroom key if not supervised, forget the war. Frank and Billy would have been perfectly fine as NCOs; it would have better suited their skill sets and actions. Billy's transition to CEO isn't compromised by not having had a commission.
* For all that Billy Russo and Wilson Fisk were improved with the transition to the screen, nobody has gotten a better redemption than Karen Page. Karen's comics history is sad and miserable and some of the early stuff was just Of The Time crap, but a lot of it was the inherent misogyny of comics and the way the lack of creativity resolves into cheap and easy answers that often require destroying the girl. Getting Karen away from Matt was the best thing they could have done -- she has very little value to him in the comics except as a reason to feel guilty. Giving her a purpose and a drive on top of giving her back her agency is fantastic. She was her own damned woman by the end of Daredevil, could have gotten a little more respect in the Defenders, but here in the Punisher series, she's gotten to progress as a character. She has a life she's happy with, a job she's good at and passionate about, and instead of just getting kidnapped yet again, she gets to save Frank right back.
Every single Frank-Karen scene was awesome, both for what did happen and for what didn't. I'll buy a ticket for a stateroom aboard that 'ship, but I'm pleased that it didn't set sail this season. Frank is still mourning Maria and coming to terms with his feelings for Karen and what that means in terms of whether he is still respecting Maria's memory. It's fucking hard to move on after losing a spouse, whether or not you feel you had any role in their death. Sarah Lieberman struggles with it and Frank does, too, with the added bonus of not having full control over his responses because of that bullet through his brain. Frank's progress from trying to creep on Karen from a distance to that beautiful headbutt in the elevator after they saved each other... That's so powerful because it shows real love without using the shorthand of lust. [Which they leaned on far too heavily with respect to Maria.] Frank's not ready. He hasn't moved on from Maria and, after avenging her murder, he needs some time and peace to understand that he can put her ghost to rest without dishonoring what they had.
* I spent so much time looking at backgrounds trying to figure out where everyone was and where they were supposed to be. Mostly in the liminal space between Brooklyn and Queens; lots of Greenpoint, I'm glad something besides UPS has a use for Maspeth, but apparently Micro's lair was shot on Roosevelt Island and we're just going to pretend it's somewhere else because, really, so impractical. The Lieberman house could have been anywhere, but I'm gonna say Brooklyn from the part of the address we can see. (It's not Queens, the format is wrong.)
* The Lewis arc was the worst. Seriously, what was the point of it? That war damages the combatants was plain enough without giving one of them a psychotic break and turning him into a terrorist with super-unclear motives, triggered by a conspiracy-minded Stolen Valor fabulist. He can't be the flip side of the coin from Frank if we don't know what he's doing or why -- he never actually says specifically what he wants done or who he wants to change and how, just that if you don't agree with him, you're One of Them and deserve to die. He wasn't necessary to get Frank exposed as not-dead. Or to put Karen at risk/show her competence. And trying to use him for all of that at once made him seem even more pointless and sadly ridiculous. Also posted at DW.