The Punisher: Season 2

Frank Castle has left his old life as the Punisher behind him and has hit the road, travelling across America in search of something else. A pitstop at a bar leads to mayhem and a bloodbath, as hired assassins try to take down a teenage girl for reasons even she doesn't understand. Castle becomes her reluctant protector, at the same time his old nemesis, Billy Russo, escapes from custody back in New York and goes on a new rampage.

The first season of The Punisher wasn't part of The Plan that Netflix had originally developed with Marvel, but emerged due to the overwhelmingly positive reception to Jon Bernthal's portrayal of the character in a guest spot on the second season of Daredevil. The result was a very strong season of television (and a notable improvement in the Netflix-MCU's form at a time when the franchise seemed to be declining hard), although also one that seemed to leave it in up in the air where a second season could have gone.

The second season, intriguingly tries to do two things simultaneously. The first is tell a completely new story totally divorced from any previous events. In this storyline, a bunch of killers are on the trail of Amy (Giorgia Whigham), a petty young criminal who has stumbled across a secret which...isn't that big a deal, actually, but by the time that comes out the mayhem has escalated out of control (an interesting take the show doesn't really explore much). Frank's latent paternal instincts kick in and he ends up agreeing to protect Amy from her pursuers, though he grumpily insists throughout the season this is because they're now on his trail and his code requires him to kill them all before they can kill him. This storyline sees the pair targeted by born-again hitman John Pilgrim (a superb performance by Josh Stewart). It's a relatively strong story, although a bit overfamiliar: we're firmly in Logan/The Mandalorian/The Last of Us/God of War/BioShock/Terminator 2/Aliens territory here, complete with the kid breaking down the taciturn badass's barriers and him reluctantly tutoring her in weapons use and self-defence. But hey, the actors sell it really well.

The second storyline is a straight-up continuation of Season 1. Billy Russo (Ben Barnes) is in hospital, "hideously disfigured"* by Castle in the Season 1 finale, and suffering from memory loss and nightmares. Homeland Security agent Dinah Madani (Amber Rose Revah), still recovering herself after Russo shot her in the head, thinks he's lying and biding his time for a chance to escape, an obsession that endangers her career. Russo - spoilers! - escapes and goes on a rampage, abusing the goodwill of fellow US military vets and a sympathetic psychiatrist (Krista Dumont, played by Floriana Lima), and a number of competing interests attempt to track him down, with Madani eventually dragging in Castle to help out.

Having two storylines unfolding in tandem which have absolutely nothing to do with one another is a odd take, but a strangely effective one. The Netflix Curse - the urgent desire to stretch a story out to thirteen episodes completely regardless of how much story you have - has laid low several of the Netflix-MCU shows but intercutting between two strong narratives means this problem is minimised, with some episodes developing both storylines and some focusing on one to the exclusion of the other. The problem of the season feeling a bit on the long side for the story it's telling is certainly still there (at ten episodes this would have been pacier and punchier), but at least they try to overcome it.

The season features great performances - Bernthal is stellar as usual, and Revah, Barnes and Whigham are outstanding - and pretty good writing, as well as effective stunt work. There's a few gunfights and action sequences that rank almost among the best in the Netflix-MCU (not quite up there with Daredevil's best fights, but not far off), and the visceral nature of the violence is at times uncomfortable, which for the Punisher is as it should be. The show continues to ask hard questions of government and military accountability - the plight of veterans left to fend for themselves is another story continued from the first season - and also continues to avoid giving pat answers.

The main weakness is perhaps a feeling of redundancy: the season spends a lot of time mopping up dangling loose ends from Season 1, which sometimes lead to repetitive scenes (Frank gets beaten up and shot - again - but ultimately triumphs; Madani gets in over her head; Russo goes nuts). The season also peaks early: the best episodes are the first three, with Frank on a road trip through Michigan and Ohio culminating in an Assault on Precinct 13-aping shootout at a police station. The rest of the season is still good, but more predictable.

The second season of The Punisher (****) is entertaining, though also brutal and hard-going at times. It is driven by excellent performances and better pacing than most of the Netflix-MCU shows, but sometimes repeats some motifs and ideas from the first season a bit too readily. The show is available to watch worldwide on Netflix now.

* He has, like, two shaving scars and a slight gash in his forehead which is barely noticeable.

The Punisher: Season 1

Frank Castle, the infamous "Punisher", has hunted down and killed everyone involved in the murder of his wife and children. He thinks he can move on to another life, working construction in New York, but it's not long before the past comes back to haunt him...and he discovers that there may have been more behind his family's murder than he first thought. It's time for the Punisher to return.

Jon Bernthal's tortured, intense portrayal of the Punisher was the highlight of the second season of Daredevil, with a hugely positive viewer reception, so it's not surprising that Netflix and Marvel quickly moved to commission a dedicated series for the character. The Punisher, as a character, has always been a hard sell for a mass audience, as he is an ultra-violent vigilante willing to dispense lethal force to punish criminals rather than bring them in for trial and incarceration. After three mostly weak action movies featuring the character, Netflix seem to have found a way of depicting and humanising the character by seeing him through the eyes of other characters: Daredevil and his allies on that show and a new collection of characters on the new series.

The arrival of The Punisher comes at an awkward moment. In corporate terms, the previous two Netflix shows - Iron Fist and Luke Cage - both suffered serious problems writing, pacing and characterisation. The team-up show The Defenders, which united Iron Fist and Luke Cage with Daredevil and Jessica Jones, was fun but a bit lightweight, with a fairly underwhelming set of villains. More politically, the arrival of a series which could be said to glorify firearms and violence at a moment in the United States history when gun violence is, once again, squarely in the news could have been deemed insensitive.

On the first point, The Punisher can relax. It's the best-paced and best-characterised series in the Netflix roster since the first season of Jessica Jones, effortlessly outpacing Iron Fist, Luke Cage and The Defenders in quality (as well as the second season of Daredevil). The Punisher has a murky story to tell about black ops, illegal activities in the CIA, power politics in Homeland Security and the morality of using violence to answer such crimes, but it does so in a methodical, logical manner. It's not afraid to spend an entire episode setting up a character's backstory and dedicates one episode to a series of flashbacks to American military operations in Afghanistan. Another is based around Frank and another character, David Lieberman (aka "Micro"), trying to work out if they can trust one another, which is difficult as they are both paranoid loners. In fact, the relationship between the two characters is the centrepiece of the season and is extremely effective, light-years from the gimmicky, "the Punisher gets his radio guy" story it could have been. A superb touch is that Micro's family is still alive (although they think he's dead) and Frank sees a way through them of redeeming himself by saving them so Micro can - eventually - do what Frank cannot and go home.

The Punisher's other characters are equally excellent. Amber Rose Revah is outstanding as Homeland Security Agent Dinah Midani whose prominent side-story could have gone in one of two equally cheesy directions (an unwitting thorn in the Punisher's side or an outright ally) and instead steers a more interesting and nuanced path between the two options. The Expanse's Shohreh Aghdashloo is also very good in a small supporting role as Dinah's mother, and the casting is outstanding as they look like they could easily be mother and daughter. Deborah Ann Woll returns as Karen Page from Daredevil and The Defenders, albeit with significantly less screentime, and is as great as usual, combining toughness, intelligence and resourcefulness behind an apparently vulnerable facade. Ben Barnes is also great as the military vet turned corporate security expert Billy Russo, combining a smooth businessman's spiel with more raw moments of genuine anger from his past experiences.

These characters and the story advance with an ease and depth that most of the other Netflix Marvel shows (which come nowhere near filling their thirteen-episode runs with interesting stories) can only envy. More debatable is the show's relationship with violence and the stance it takes with regards to the issues of gun control in the United States. It's a very gory show, easily the most graphically violence series in the Marvel/Netflix canon, despite the fact that Castle goes surprisingly long periods without massacring lots of bad guys. The violence is handled very matter-of-factly, with less emphasis on "cool" shots and action scenes (well, one "cool guys don't look at explosions" shot excepted) and more on combat being ugly, quick and painful. So the show does a reasonable job of not glorifying violence, even when it does have quite a lot of it. The gun control issue is more interesting, as Karen Page is - despite being a card-carrying liberal social justice advocate on every other front - a firm believer in her right to carry a concealed weapon (after her experiences in previous shows, unsurprisingly) and puts this point across forcefully several times. The show seems to want to get into this debate but ultimately dodges the issue.

The other main thematic debate carried through the show revolves around military veterans. The US treatment of its vets is a hot political issue (as it is in the UK for that matter) and the show manages to avoid grandstanding instead of showing the reality for the returning soldiers on the ground: variable levels of support in how they readjust to civilian life. Russo finds a way of adapting his battlefield skills to (apparently) honest employment back home, Curtis Hoyle becomes an insurance salesman and a mentor to younger soldiers suffering from PTSD, O'Connor is a boastful blowhard and Lewis Wilson's early attempts to find a way of readjusting to life back home gradually deteriorate until he becomes a menace to society and those around him. This storyline has been controversial, with Wilson becoming a homegrown terrorist, but the series does enough to show that his choices and his way out is not the right one and could have been averted with more support and understanding.

The first season of The Punisher is not flawless. Castle's solution to absolutely every problem being the deployment of ludicrous amounts of firepower is true to the character, but risks becoming a bit one-note, and there is as an at times comical disparity between how much damage our heroes can take in combat and keep trucking, and bad guy goons who go down with a single hit. But these problems are relatively minor.

The first season of The Punisher (****) is a surprisingly nuanced story that tackles a number of important issues, from veteran rights to gun violence, whilst delivering a well-paced (if maybe more slow-burning than most were expecting) story through the eyes of a number of well-drawn characters. Freed from the baggage of the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Punisher shines, and hopefully this will be the model for the Netflix shows going forwards. The series is on general release on Netflix worldwide.