The Punisher S02E10-11 Review: Billy's Reckoning

The Punisher, Season 2, Episode 10: The Dark Hearts of Men; Episode 11: The Abyss

Episode 10: The Dark Hearts of Men
As we go through the final four episodes of The Punisher, we go into a pretty fun episode in "The Dark Hearts of Men". I have complained in length about the sheer amount of inconsistency in many characters' motivations, and I have praised the acting of the actors involved. And that's really what's been carrying this very inconsistent season on its back.

Still, if nothing else, while the season's really kind of messy in terms of building up believable motivations or well-paced storylines, what we can count is for solid individual episodes and pretty great action set-pieces as the Punisher and Curtis basically set up a raid on Billy's Valhalla warehouse base, and the framing scenes are, as much as we've seen those sort of scenes before in other shows, pretty effective. The episode opens up with Frank and Billy in their army days doing some macho-man bonding exercise or hazing or whatever as they sort of get playfully beat up by their soldier buddies, and we get a similar scene later on with Frank getting beaten up by Billy's Valhalla goons. There's also some attempt to try and make this thematically relevant by highlighting the sort of violence and brotherhood that is considered good and bad, and how eerily similar the hoo-ha attitude of Frank and Billy's army unit is to Billy basically building a cult around his charismatic self. As creepy as it is, that scene where Billy convinces the Valhalla boys that fighting Frank Castle is basically going to lead to the cohesion of a group and family that will fight and die for each other is amazingly cult-like and very well done.

Again, there's really not a whole ton of depth here. Frank and Curtis decide that Billy Russo needs to be put down for good, and Billy has basically re-embraced what's essentially his crazy supervillain self from the end of season one, and while it does kind of make a lot of the "rebuild the jigsaw, I need my memory back" stuff feel extra redundant since we really didn't explore anything particularly interesting with the amnesia, a confident and cock-sure Billy Russo is a very entertaining Billy Russo.

Frank Castle is the goddamn Punisher, though, so we get to see a lot of cool things. Sure, the bit where the Valhalla soldiers use a combination of strobe lights and the power of outnumbering Frank to get the drop of him and lead to a painful-looking beatdown is pretty brutal, but since it's the Punisher he immediately turns the tables on the goons and we get a glorious, fun slaughter-murder scene that we all tune in to a show like the Punisher for. And then the huge bomb drops at the end when Frank Castle unleashes machinegun hell onto an office, and when he arrives... he finds the bullet-ridden corpse of three civilian women, and Frank Castle, who has a code of only killing those that needs to be punished just breaks down at the thought of killing innocents. And it's... it's definitely something that's going to break Frank Castle, particularly Frank who, as the season keeps reminding us, is at the cusp of not being as brutally punishing as he used to be, sparing a couple of less-evil villains thanks to the influence of Amy.

And as we learn while the episode is going on? All of this is thanks to Dr. Dumont. Dumont has been a very bland and uninteresting character, who basically exists just to be a romantic interest and someone for Billy to talk to, but she has a pretty great actress and as unfortunately bland as she's been written, actress Floriana Lima manages to really convey the role of her trying to fish for information about Frank Castle from Madani as they have some 'girl time'. Having the excuse of patching up after the shared history of both lurking over Billy Russo in the hospital, as well as having the go-to handwave of "oh, forgive me for being inquisitive, shrink habits, y'know". It's from this conversation that Dumont ends up finding out about Frank Castle's Code of Superheroism(tm) and while a properly written character might have doubts about what's right and wrong, Dumont's just so all-in about being 110% about Billy, and that's kind of a flat character... but in terms of this episode, she does work pretty well.

There's also Curtis, who gets a pretty great scene of being a badass sniper before maiming some young soldier and ending up patching him up. Curtis is a great character, and he gets a lot of great scenes. I really do enjoy Curtis a lot.

There's a bland B-plot of the Pilgrim being violent and being crazy and wiping out his old gang and shit, but at this point... I really don't care about the Pilgrim, just waiting for him to be relevant to the overall plot. I guess there's meant to be a thematic significance with how, like Punisher, Pilgrim's lost his code or something? But where Punisher gets a very cool moment where he apparently murders civilians, the Pilgrim just steals a bunch of hookers from the dude next to him in the cheap hotel, and that doesn't quite have the same amount of significance.
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Episode 11: The Abyss
...of course, there's the 'easy way out', because turns out that, hey, Frank didn't actually kill those women. Surprise! It was Billy Russo and Dumont all along, who killed them and staged the whole sequence to make Frank think that he killed the civilians. And it's kind of a shame, because exploring the fact that Frank could've very well done so in his Punisher crusade would've been so much more interesting than a typical "damn you, vile villain, you tricked me". But we need to have the Punisher be technically squeaky-clean and never murder any non-villain. That's part of the IP, I suppose, and there really is no point to Billy explicitly pre-killing the civilians other than to make Frank's hands technically clean. Billy and Dumont could've just as easily tied up the women in that room and Frank would've actually killed them even though he didn't mean to.

And, to the show's credit, Jon Bernthal does an amazing job portraying a completely defeated Frank Castle, who realizes he fucked up. He plays a great Frank Castle if Frank Castle had actually killed a civilian, and the response that he would take is to hand himself over and let the law do with him what they will, since he no longer is the Punisher, he's the punished. But after wallowing in this self-pity (and, mind you, those are great self-pity scenes) Frank finds out that he's framed after all and goes back to Punisher mode almost instantaneously. I would've thought that this would've actually left a bigger impact on Frank, though, like... okay, sure, this time it's a Billy Russo trick, but what if it actually happened for real? There's really no introspection, which is kind of a shame considering it could've been worked in so easily.

Anyway, "The Abyss" basically puts Frank Castle in the hospital for the most part while three women in his life end up trying to break him out, finding out that Frank doesn't want to be broken out, and deciding to prove that Frank maybe doesn't kill the women... even though, again, Billy could've very easily left the women in that room alive. Still, it does allow Madani, Amy and guest star Karen Page a lot of great scenes together and with Frank. It's just such a shame that the Frank/Karen stuff fell so flat for me -- they were great together in Daredevil and the first season of Punisher, but here poor Karen ends up finding herself kind of devolved into a star-crossed love interest and the shipping hammer is heavy in this scene, and that's really unfortunate because it really ends up distracting and being such a wild and bizarre jump from the Frank/Karen dynamics of their previous encounters.

Karen and Madani end up meeting up with a weirdo of a morgue worker and there's this very uncomfortable joke about the morgue worker wanting 'something, hint hint' from Karen and turns out it's nothing overtly sexual or creepy, it's just her shoes, but the joke itself really doesn't land. They figure out that the women were killed from close range, and they arrive just to help Amy rescue Frank from a police officer who tries to collect the bounty on Frank. I do like that scene, where Frank just basically gives in and allows the bounty hunter to kill him, and he doesn't even protest until the corrupt cop attacks Amy.

And we've got a bunch of other B-plots that don't necessarily work either, mostly because they involve the Pilgrim and Dr. Dumont, two of the most consistently problematic characters in the show in that we're almost done and we're only starting to explore their characters and their motivations. Dr. Dumont shares to Billy (and the audience) about her oh-so-tragic backstory, about how her dad is a mentally ill person who very nearly killed her during divorce talks, jumping out of a window with a young Dumont with if "if I can't have you, no one will" mentality. On paper, it's a tragic backstory, sure, and it explains the fear of heights, but I still really don't care at all, and most importantly it doesn't really properly explain just why Dumont is so devoted and in love with Billy. The Billy/Dumont scenes... again, they're well-acted, but it's hard to say I really care.

Oh, and the Pilgrim's sick wife died, right when he's going around getting blowjobs from prostitutes he appropriated from someone else, and there was a weird vision and everything and Pilgrim's sad that his devotion to his assassination work caused him to be unable to be there for his wife when she died and all, but then his boss Eliza Schultz shows up and basically gives him one of those "for a greater purpose" speeches to get him hyped up to murder Frank Castle and Amy Bendix. Sure, Pilgrim, whatever you say, gotta build you up for the final fight.

Anyway, the episode ends with Karen Page going off because the studio can only get Deborah Ann Woll for a single episode, Madani tries to sneak Frank out of the hospital, and good ol' Officer Mahoney gets clued in to what's going on and arrests Frank in an ambulance. I do like Mahoney being basically a cop that wants to do the right thing and is a decent man.

This two-parter really highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the season as a whole. The actors and the individual angsty scenes are fantastic. The action scenes are great. But taken as a whole, the story doesn't quite work as well as many of the huge story beats or themes just aren't adequately explored.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Karen Page makes another appearance, after being a supporting character to Frank Castle in Daredevil's second season and parts of the first season of Punisher.