Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
“I don’t give a shit about the NYPD.” “When they first started Homeland, they wanted native speakers — Farsi, Pashtun, Arabic. The thinking was simple: Use the enemy to catch the enemy.” “You gonna give me a job mopping floors? Emptying trash? Is that ‘making good on the investment my country made in me?’ You’re just another liar in command.” These quotes, from three separate characters with very different motivations, sum up The Punisher’s take on cops, the surveillance state, the military, and mercenaries. Wild, huh? Marvel’s Blue Lives Matter/Take a Knee My Ass this ain’t, as “Resupply,” the series’ fourth episode, makes plain.
On a plot level, the episode concerns the parallel attempts of the Punisher and DHS Agent Dinah Madani to intercept a shipment of weapons being smuggled into the country by Greek gangsters. Dinah and her partner Sam Stein are just doing their job, and hoping to pull off a win after so many of her investigations have gotten shitcanned by the higher-ups over political or jurisdictional sensitivities. Frank and his reluctant, gun-shy partner David “Micro” Lieberman need the guns and ammo to fight their war against the military-intelligence monsters responsible for their respective plights. The two groups’ duel ends with a high-speed car chase between Dinah and Frank, who play chicken — until David, egged on into action by his wife’s comments to Frank’s kindly “Pete” identity that her husband never liked to get his hands dirty, rams Dinah’s car with a stolen van. (Honestly, blasting Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” into a Homeland Security communications feed seemed heroic enough to me, but whatever.)
Yet the main thrust of the hour, like that of the whole series, remains the trauma inflicted by war, and anger at those responsible for orchestrating it. There’s no better illustration of that than the continuing sad story of Lewis Wilson, the young veteran who’s part of Frank’s pal Curt’s support group. The episode begins with this poor guy digging a foxhole in his own backyard, a place he feels more comfortable and safe in than his own civilian bedroom.
Lewis goes out for a job at Anvil, the mercenary firm run by Frank and Curt’s buddy Billy Russo. He’s got both physical skills and a true sense of fellowship with the other applicants, all of whom share his sense of being out of place in the society that weaponized them; the bit where he voluntarily does extra pull-ups just to encourage one relatively out-of-shape applicant to keep going is quietly moving. He’s a good guy, or at least he could be. But after receiving a warning from Curt about the backyard business, Billy cuts him loose, leading to that scathing line about “making good on the investment my country made in me” I quoted above — itself a quote from the pep talk Russo gave his potential recruits earlier in the day. Actor Daniel Webber stretches out the words till they all but vibrate with contempt. I remain pleasantly shocked, frankly, at how sensitively yet unsparingly the show is treating PTSD.
It’s not just the writing or performances that sell it, either. Director Kari Skogland emphasizes grids, frames, and squares pretty much wherever you turn: the big checkerboard windows in the Anvil training facility, the bars and monitors in Micro’s hideout, the glass-doored cupboards in the Liebermans’ kitchen, the big rectangular panes that make up Dinah’s office wall, Lewis’s perfectly proportioned foxhole, the windshields and surveillance screens through which we see the concluding chase, and on and on and on. It’s a trick Better Call Saul uses as well, creating the sense that its characters are perpetually boxed in. Plus, it just looks impressive, and there’s something to be said for that!
Meanwhile, I like how much our perception of the Punisher is framed by the people around him when they see the work that he does. That means one thing when he’s helping Sarah Lieberman fix her garbage disposal or get out of a jam with her insurance company. But when he’s not playing nice, it means something else entirely. It’s the hostage of the car-theft ring Frank massacres pissing his pants when the Punisher’s dud grenade rolls between his legs. It’s David choking back vomit when he enters the scene of the slaughter. (“It smells more than I thought.” “You get used it.” “I’d rather not.”) It’s Turk, the hapless crook-for-hire who countless Marvel/Netflix heroes have muscled for intel, becoming one of those proverbial non-atheists in a foxhole while at the business end of a gun barrel. (“You believe in God, Turk?” “Right now I want to!”) It’s in the concussed perspective of Dinah Madani after her game of chicken against Frank ends in a car crash, seeing him as a spectral, black-clad presence emerging out of and disappearing into the haze, like the grim reaper himself. Frank may be a soulful and sad figure when left to his own devices, but anytime he comes in contact with others in the course of his vigilantism, that favorable impression has as low a survival rate as his victims. He’s paying his trauma forward.
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.
