Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
“Virtue of the Vicious” is the knock-down drag-out action extravaganza we’ve been waiting for all season. Almost all of our major players — Frank Castle, Billy Russo, Dinah Madani, Karen Page, Lewis Wilson — are concentrated in a high-rise hotel, fighting through explosions, tear gas, and the gunfire of half a dozen different agencies and free agents in kill-or-be-killed scenarios. Secrets are revealed. Antagonists are killed. The Punisher escapes capture using a firehose and a zipline like a homicidal Tarzan. If that’s all the episode did, it would be fun to watch. But to my continued delight, it does much, much more than it has to.
Remarkably, the episode takes a fractured approach to its narrative structure, splitting itself between mutliple, overlapping, sometimes contradictory points of view and bouncing back and forth in time to cover the periods before, during, and after the attack. The effect is part Rashomon, part Lost, and all impressive in its willingness to break the Marvel/Netflix mold by risking confusion on the part of its audience, who could otherwise assume that when the show starts talking about an attack that had already happened, we’d somehow skipped an episode. (I had to double-check myself.) Like Vincent D’Onofrio’s bizarre stop-start vocal cadence for Wilson Fisk, or Tom Hardy’s Falstaffian theatricality as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, anything a live-actions superhero adaptation does that’s more than the bare necessary-and-sufficient minimum to convey ideas and images should be celebrated.
The plot developments are delivered in a similarly crazy tangle. Dinah and Frank talk face to face for the first time. Frank finds out that Micro (absent from the episode) gave her all their info on Bill Rawlins and the Kandahar drug racket. Billy attacks Frank, leading to a standoff between him and Dinah in which he reveals that he was, indeed, the man who murdered her partner (which she already suspected) and that he’s in on everything with Rawlins (which Frank definitely did not already suspect). Billy’s connections to the four dead suspects in Dinah’s failed sting already land him on the radar of her supervisor Rafi, while Dinah gives him the info about Rawlins as well. (This strikes me as ill-advised, but whatever!) Lewis murders his way through a million Anvil guards, but Frank and Karen escape his clutches; Frank encourages him to kill himself (!!!), which he does, and is then helped to escape himself by Karen, who pretends to be his hostage. This leads to the hottest post-massacre not-quite-kiss I’ve ever seen.
Man, what these folks can do with body language should be studied in laboratories. When it puts its mind to it, this show smolders.
It does a lot of things effectively, in fact — portraying a manipulator and abuser among them. Not for the first time this season, I was struck by how much Billy Russo comes across like a less cartoonish and thus vastly more interesting, and frightening, version of Jessica Jones’ Kilgrave. They’re both nattily attired, vain monsters, but Billy has neither magic powers nor a mustache-twirling demeanor to fall back on when he does his gaslighting. (“If you’re trying to make me feel like the bad guy here, congratulations,” he says to Dinah at one point. The nerve of this fuckin’ guy!) Nor is he presented as pure evil. Kilgrave had a child-abuse backstory that was introduced only to be revealed as a misinterpretation of the facts; Russo really was abandoned, neglected, beaten, and nearly (?) molested. We’ve got nothing to lose when we examine the painful histories of predators, except a smug sense of superiority and a lack of understanding of factors which can help us help more people moving forward.
But I’m most moved by the last day of Lewis Wilson. It begins with this incredible shot, no pun intended, of him through the newspaper and the peephole through which he’d just blown away an Anvil guy.
So far so good — the face of American violence, staring right at us. But what happens next made me say “wow,” out loud. Lewis discovers that his victim had a pair of pet birds. Sympathetically, he opens a window and the door to their cage, cooing and whistling and taping the bars so they’ll fly away rather than starve to death. When they don’t budge, he wheels the cage over to the window; they’ll be free the second they leave their perch and flutter through the door. But there they sit. It’s just as well, as it’s hard to imagine them standing much of a chance of survival in the wild, but damn, as metaphors for self-imposed prisons and our secret desire to be constrained, even punished, go, this is like something you’d see in a late-season Sopranos in the house of someone who got whacked.
In the end, Lewis sees all his plans run to ruin. The gun-control senator he wanted to kill escapes (not before he has a debate with Karen “responsible gun ownership is good for your mental health” Page dresses him down), as do Karen and Frank, and all he has to show for it is a hotel full of dead security guys. But he’s still got his suicide vest, which he reactivates after Karen defuses it. (She was subtly instructed in how to do so by Frank during one of the episode’s tightest action-suspense sequences, right up there with the big stairway chase in which Frank escapes via firehose in my book.) He then begins muttering lines from Rudyard Kipling’s fatalistically patriotic, or patriotically fatalistic, poem, “The Young British Soldier.” Those lines gave me chills:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
This poem was written 122 years ago. It never ends, does it?
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.
