The Punisher S02E08-09 Review: Never Billy's Fault

The Punisher, Season 2, Episode 8: My Brother's Keeper; Episode 9: Flustercluck

Episode 8: My Brother's Keeper
Okay, a bit of a confession. After finishing episode 7, I ended up accidentally skipping episode 8 and going straight into episode 9 thanks to a mis-click, and watched almost the entirety of episode 9 before I realized that I skipped an episode. I just sort of thought that we skipped the conclusion of the huge fight between the Punisher and Billy after the robbery and that it's just resolved off-screen. Which is to say... episode 8 is probably not the most super-engaging episode of The Punisher, all things considered, if I can still follow the show of a supposedly binge-this-while-watching show while skipping the episode.

One thing that I do feel like Punisher's second season doesn't do as well as its fantastic first season is that things are just... scattered all over the place. Theoretically there are three huge plotlines -- Frank and Amy's 'badass and a cute kid' relationship; the Pilgrim and the photography conspiracy; and Billy Russo's return, with Madani's story sort of weaving in and out of the three storylines. But so much of the focus is placed on the Billy Russo part while the Pilgrim basically gets a brief scene every episode of him doing ker-azy fanatical-religion-assassin-nut stuff without much explanation, while the Frank/Amy relationship doesn't quite work that well with Amy spending huge chunks of various episodes sidelined and basically left at home while Frank goes out punishing. And while we do get decent scenes -- like Frank teaching Amy to use a gun, and in this episode, Frank flipping out on Amy when she 'plays' with Frank using an empty gun after a day of intense shooting -- but I don't feel like the episode really ended up exploring Frank and Amy's relationship as well as it could, and when it does, the scenes are great because Jon Bernthal is a great actor, but the pacing and storytelling is kind of uneven.

The episode basically spends a chunk of its first half with action scenes, where Frank and Billy and Curtis shoot at each other and Billy goes even more crazy with shooting people with that insane assault rifle of his, before his buddies drag him away to their hideout. And then a good chunk of this episode is spent around Billy, as he's starting to question why the fuck would his closer-than-brothers buddy, Frank, be the Punisher and the skull he sees in his nightmares. Interestingly, this means that Billy Russo himself ends up trying to figure out what makes Frank hate him so much, and, again, why Billy himself is so vile of a villain in the first season. He flips out and kills the two members of his little Valhalla* Army that questions him, before running off on his own. And Ben Barnes is a fantastic actor, but a lot of his scenes basically have him bounce off the terribly uninteresting Dr. Dumont.

*As a side-note, considering that the show takes place in the MCU and Valhalla certainly exists there with Thor and all, I'm going to assume Billy Russo just really likes Thor. 

I guess Dumont is apparently super-duper in love with Billy or something, but after Billy basically rampages through her house and even triggers her fear of heights by pushing her next to a window, Dumont seems to still be super-devoted to Billy, which... yeah, I don't really care for her, she is so inconsistently written and I'm genuinely just sort of tired of her at this point. She's playing devil's advocate, trying to paint it so that it's Frank's fault for scarring Billy's face instead of killing him, but I genuinely do feel that the amnesiac Billy Russo questioning his own past actions and morality and then jumping straight into "fuck you, Frank" is clunkily handled. And, again, while Ben Barnes is a great actor, it really does make me be kind of baffled why they even bothered with an amnesia storyline for seven episodes if they're not going to actually milk the interesting paths that will raise.

Frank himself just sort of goes around, sort of angsting it in the rain next to the gravestone of his wife after flipping out on Amy (and Curtis, to a lesser extent), but ultimately the episode is mostly there to give us an action scene and focus mainly on Billy. There's a bit of a subplot with Officer Mahoney getting involved in all this madness, and by the end of the episode the Punisher Support Squad of Curtis, Madani and Amy are assembled in the trailer, but ultimately, well, the episode doesn't really offer as much as I would've expected from a full hour of television. Really wished they made Billy's turn to confused-amnesiac into crazy-brotherhood-of-ex-soldiers cult leader be a lot smoother, too.
___________________________

Episode 9: Flustercluck
That's kind of an appropriate episode title to describe the storytelling this season. And honestly, I don't want to be so down on this -- there are a lot of great moments this season, a lot of great action scenes, a lot of great individual acting moments (particularly for Ben Barnes and Jon Bernthal) and anything involving Curtis Hoyle is always fantastic, but the season so far has been pretty inconsistent and kind of messy in juggling its various plot threads. I'm still enjoying this, but every Punisher episode I watch this season is just a reminder for the far better-plotted and far more satisfying first season, and that's a hard specter to shake off.

But while I'm not the biggest fan of how fast Billy went from "existential crisis" to "crazy vengeful villain" in the previous episode, at least there's a lot of decent acting and some focus, y'know? "Flustercluck" is just... it's just moving characters into what the plot needs them to be, but not in a particularly satisfying way. We're way past the mid-season mark, and while Billy Russo is still the far more prominent (and interesting) villain, we still have the whole Pilgrim business to take care of, and that ties into the Amy stuff, and neither of them are barely built up. We are told what the Amy stuff is all about, but it doesn't quite land because it's a case of 'tell don't show', and the Pilgrim is honestly just a one-dimensional bag of religious crazy mixed with a random scattering of quasi-tragic backstory... which, again, is something that's more of an informed quality considering how paper-thing of a personality Pilgrim actually has.

Meanwhile, as mentioned before, the transition of Billy Russo deciding to ignore any sort of culpability in his actions in causing the death of the Castle family gets brushed aside for a simple "it's never my fault" mentality, saying that Frank is super-cruel for (slightly) scarring his face as revenge for killing his family or whatever. Dumont sort of edges Billy to accept the victim role last episode, and while both actors are decent with what they're given, it's... it's very clunky, and even rewatching the Billy scenes in episode 8 and 9 after my little mix-up really doesn't make it as organic as the show was hoping it to be. And after eight episodes... is this all we have to show for the amnesia? Don't get me wrong, Ben Barnes's acting is A-star, but the writing isn't the best, because what would've been interesting -- Billy trying to wrestle with the knowledge of the heinous crime he did against Frank but without the memory, and maybe an attempt to reach out to Frank -- is glossed over within two sentences.

Speaking of odd character developments, though, while Billy has been convinced that Frank is the one wrong and Billy Russo is always having injustices heaped upon him, I... don't get Dr. Dumont's motivations at all. She went from maybe a little lovesick and a doctor that believes in the best in his patient to... basically planning to be Billy's criminal accomplice? What? Okay? Sure?

Meanwhile, Amy has spent most of the season basically being put on the backburner. She's constantly put in either a motel room or Madani's apartment or the trailer-base (which is a responsible move for Psycho-Papa Frank, in-universe, for sure), but it ends up leaving Amy with not a whole lot of screentime to really bond with Frank. Episode 8 gives us a nice scene, and there are a couple of scattered nice scenes between episode 3 and 7, but ultimately I don't think that's quite enough to make Frank basically accept Amy as what's essentially his surrogate daughter. That said, though, when Amy's friend sells her out and Frank has to come and murder the ever-loving shit out of the bounty hunters, it's a great moment. Best of all, of course, is Amy using the gun-stealing trick that Frank taught her, and then immediately opens fire on the fucker who pointed the gun at her. The fact that Frank goes up and comforts Amy, telling her that she didn't kill the dude (before promptly shooting the dying dude in the head to end him) is the sort of fun, heartwarming-yet-clearly-psychotic scenes we signed up for. I just wished that the show earns this moment a bit better.

John Pilgrim, meanwhile, gets to finally shine beyond being a vague backstory mixed with enigmatic bosses and a love for flagellation and quoting scripture, and we learn that his reluctance to come to New York is that because... he was part of a gang there, and an attempt to put a 5-million-bounty on the Punisher and Amy Bendix ends up with Pilgrim's old gang coming back to talk to him. Okay? This might be interesting, but at this point, nine episodes in, and I really wish that the Pilgrim was actually more of an interesting character than a list of traits. It's really hard to care about a character when he has no real personality to speak of.  Like, the gangsters call him by his name "Robbie" or something and I really don't care considering how little of an identity we even attach to Pilgrim.

The Schutlzes get a scene here when Papa Schultz talks to Gay Senator Schultz, but other than telling us what we already know (David's a nice guy; his parents are psychotic and homophobic) the show doesn't really make me care about them beyond them being one-dimensional dudes. I sometimes complain about shows like Jessica Jones or Luke Cage over-developing their secondary cast, but at least when Jeri Hogarth or Bobby Fish or Joy Meachum does something, they're actual characters at that point, y'know? Like, take the singular scene where Curtis gathers the rest of his ex-soldier support group and talks to them. I actually care about Curtis even in this small, brief scene, and while I'm not sure if it's going to amount to much other than maybe giving Team Punisher a clue next episode, but Curtis being a supporting figure in his community and actually feeling like a person makes me automatically more invested in his scenes than anything that the flat, one-dimensional Schtultzes are.

Again, the episode itself isn't necessarily bad at all. It's just that structurally the season as a whole is messy, and while most of the actors are very much competent and the action scenes are nice, the season as a whole looks to be, to quote the episode title, a flustercluck.