The Punisher, Season 1, Episode 2: Two Dead Men
It's more of a setup chapter for The Punisher, slowly giving us details but not really giving us a lot of concrete answers. And a good chunk of episode two is the cat-and-mouse game played between Punisher and this mysterious dude behind a computer, David "Micro" Lieberman. Micro's allegiance at this point is unclear, but he contacts Frank Castle while he's eating eggs in a diner and kind of asks for his help.
Frank, instead, goes around to do some investigating on his own. With the aid of Karen Page and his buddy Reverend Curtis, he ends up doing a lot of digging into Micro's background, even walks right into Micro's house and talks to his wife (his family think he's dead) and kills Carson Wolf, the corrupt military dude who ordered Micro's death. Oh, and Wolf's also Agent Madani's superior officer, which brings Madani finally into Punisher's immediate circle as opposed to only tangentially be involved in investigating the mysterious government conspiracy cover-ups that happened in Afganisthan.
In some ways, it makes Agent Madani's role similar to Misty Knight from Luke Cage or Defenders, where she's this competent policewoman who ends up stumbling into a far bigger world of threats than she's ready for, and ends up meeting the rough-and-tumble vigilante. Except there's one clear difference between Luke and Punisher. Punisher pretty much brutalized and murdered Madani's superior officer. Now Wolf is a racist dick, but I'm not sure that's going to be enough to cause Madani to think of the Punisher as anything else other than a monstrous murderer.
The conspiracy goes deeper than that, with Ray Schoonover being implied to be the man behind the killing of Madani's partner Ahmed Zubair, and Wolf revealing to Frank that the deaths of his family was, as hinted in Daredevil, was caused by an attempt for them to get rid of Frank Castle himself. I think.
It's still entertaining, considering that a good chunk of the episode is just people talking, but both Frank and Micro are very likable and it's very fun to see the cat-and-mouse game which ends up with Frank pulling Micro on the strings and tailing him back to his base. One thing that's perhaps the weakest part of the episode is the Agent Madani subplot, which ends up feeling very much a way to introdump things to the audience when it's really not very necessary.
Oh well, gotta fill up those 'B-plot' quotas, eh?
Karen's a welcome return, and that moment of frustration that Frank has at the pier, or the moment of vulnerability he shows when talking to Karen in her apartment, is definitely well-done. Frank's really a far more complex character than I gave credit for. Yes, by large he's just a vengeful super-extreme anti-hero, but the displays of vulnerability and intelligence make him very much interesting. Perhaps a little cliched, yes, but it's the Punisher himself that codifies a lot of the 90's anti-hero trope. The show clearly makes me so much more intrigued around Frank, Karen and Micro that I care about these characters so much more than I do about the government conspiracy in Kahandar... and when a show puts more focus on character than plot, it's when I really like it.
There are some neat moments in this episode that make me laugh more than I should, like everyone referring to Frank's beard getup as a 'hipster' look, and I really liked how Frank's flashback with his kids -- it would be so easy to just idealize his family as perfect children and wives, the way that Frank's daughter Lisa is, but Frank Junior gets to be a bit more of a character with his whole 'my dad killed lots of people!' insensitive speech and his constant head-butting with Frank, simultaneously accomplishing tugging-on-the-heartstrings and being an irritating kid. Perhaps less well-written is the almost-immediate cut to Micro looking at his alive family bickering through cameras, trying to hammer home a bit unsubtly that Micro and Punisher are alike.
Overall, though, not much to complain about -- I'm definitely enjoying myself watching the Punisher.
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