Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
He may shave off his beard, take his haircut back to the traditional high-and-tight, and beat an evil Homeland Security agent to death, but Frank Castle takes a bit of a back seat in this episode of The Punisher. His co-star is NSA whistleblower David “Micro” Lieberman, the second of the “Two Dead Men” who give the ep its title. Played by Eben Moss-Bachrach (magnificently awful as Marnie’s hipster shitbag husband Desi on Girls), Micro’s attempting to put the Punisher on the trail of the same corrupt military types who forced him to play dead and go into hiding in order to protect his still-living family. Micro is a new sort of character for this neck of the Marvel Universe, a guy who manages to get the drop on the freaking Punisher without ever posing a serious physical threat or coming across like a diabolical mastermind. He’s just a smart, paranoid dude whose swings between cockiness and anxiety are calibrated just well enough to make him willing to go toe to toe with a killing machine. It’s certainly no coincidence that we get our first real experience with him in the same episode where Frank brutally tortures and murders a rogue government agent with extensive black-ops and wetworks training. That kind of enemy is one Frank understands. This dude is a bit more confusing to him.
He’s even offensive to him, in a way, as Frank implies when he chews Lieberman out over the phone for risking his family’s safety to “play Deep Throat.” Considering the extensive government and military corruption responsible for his own plight, this may seem like an odd thing for Frank to say. But it makes sense. Frank felt responsible for his family’s death even when he had no reason to suspect they were deliberately targeted, more so now that he’s been told his own actions in Afghanistan may have had something to do with it. Why on earth, he’s got to wonder, would anyone deliberately put their nose where it doesn’t belong, knowing what could happen as a result? Frank has no way of knowing Micro is watching his every move when he fakes a minor car accident so he can meet his wife and scope out her home, though he may well suspect; either way, both that scene and the ending sequence, in which Frank sends Micro on a wild goose chase so he can sneak into the trunk of his car and essentially get chauffeured into the hacker’s sanctum sanctorum, come across like he’s trying to teach Lieberman a lesson about how easily the safety we value can be violated.
On a more frivolous note: Like most Marvel projects, even the middling ones, The Punisher gets far on sheer chemistry between its likeable, attractive actors. (Seriously: Take a quick dip in superhero-movie-fandom tumblr and you’ll see press-junket and behind-the-scenes gifsets aplenty which prove that the most important act of rebranding DC did with Justice League wasn’t lightening things up onscreen, but casting people — like Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Gal Gadot, and Amber Heard — who seem fun to be around, and who have fun around each other.) First in the scene where Frank meets up with his old ally Karen Page, then during Agent Madani’s dive-bar date with Castle’s former platoon mate Billy Russo, the physical connection between actors Jon Bernthal & Deborah Ann Woll and Ben Barnes & Amber Rose Revah respectively is just deeply pleasurable to watch. This has been true over and over across the Netflix end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Woll and Charlie Cox on Daredevil, Krysten Ritter and Mike Colter on Jessica Jones, Colter and Rosario Dawson on Luke Cage, and so on. But hell, turning superheroes into people you’d love to flirt with when you’re out together with friends some night, then waltz home tipsily daydreaming about the way their fingers held their glass, has been Marvel’s primary, and perhaps sole, innovation for the genre at least as far back as Kat Dennings freaking out about how hot Chris Hemsworth is in the first Thor flick.
In the case of The Punisher’s first two episodes, this is just a part of a very solidly constructed edifice for the story so far. Lots of little details stand out to me that are peripheral to the plot or the core theme. Englishman Ben Barnes’s convincingly low-key New York accent, about the best I’ve heard from a non-tri-state-area resident. Some of the best location shots in the whole Marvel/Netflix/NYC canon. Like, get a load of this:
The way the sound of “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” blaring from the stereo in DHS Agent Wolf’s palatial home gets muffled when the camera cuts to an exterior view of him battling Frank for his life. Castle’s sense of humor, which goes beyond deadpan into something akin to a nervous tic meant to repel discomfort. (“We don’t get many hipsters around here.” “Yeah well you still don’t, lady.”) Moments of menace between Frank and Micro that feel serious even though we suspect they will be working together before long: Micro’s eerie appearance on a distant rooftop, waving to Frank like a ghost; the trunk of Micro’s car popping up, and with it the knowledge that Castle has come; “Frank Castle, the dead man.” “That makes two of us now.”
Some of those moments really reach out and grab you, too — almost literally. In the episode’s cold open, Frank remembers a day he and his kids took the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. The resultant conversation about America and fighting for freedom and so on lead his young son to make callous, racist comments about his father’s presumably Muslim enemies. Frank is so incensed and horrified that he grabs the kid by the face and orders him never to talk like that again before quickly becoming embarrassed at his own behavior. Violence against the vulnerable stays with you, even when you’re trying to make a stand against violence against the vulnerable.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
