‘The Punisher’ Season 1 Finale Recap: Fear Itself

There’s really only one thing I want to talk about where the season finale of The Punisher is concerned:

“You know, long as I was at war, y’know, I never thought about, uh, what would happen next, what I was gonna do when it was over. But I guess that’s it, y’know. I think that might be the hardest part: the silence. The silence when the gunfire ends. How do…how do you live in that? I guess…I guess that’s what you’re trying to figure out, huh? It’s what you guys are doing. You’re working on it. I respect that. I just…Um, if you’re gonna look at yourself, really look in the mirror, you gotta…yeah, you gotta admit who you are. But not just to yourself — you gotta admit it to everybody else. First time, as long as I can remember, I don’t have a war to fight. And I guess if I’m gonna be honest, I just…I’m scared.”

These remarkable words end the onscreen saga of Marvel’s most brutal antihero, a cold-blooded killer of Bad Guys whose logo has become literally emblematic of men, many of whom have been trained and authorized by the state to pursue a career in fully sanctioned bad-guy killing at home or abroad. They cut that whole dark myth off at the knees. More than that, they stand as a rebuke to the whole superhero genre, which as inspiring and uplifting as it can be nevertheless boils down to the idea that extrajudicial violence can put the world to rights. Here’s a superhero who wields that violence more effectively and remorselessly than any other — indeed, his proficiency in that violence is his sole superpower. And the message his show wants to leave us with about him? The note it chooses to end on? He kills because he’s scared not to.

I really can’t say enough about how stunning the final words of “Memento Mori,” The Punisher’s Season One finale, were to me when they slipped out of Frank’s mouth just before that last cut to black. There’s not a single live-action superhero adaptation I can think of that comes anywhere near that level of self-critique, or has anything approaching its courage to question the very wish-fulfillment elements its audience has come to see.

I include myself in that audience, by the way. I’ve made a lot of hay out of how The Punisher has criticized American gun culture, imperialism, and the runaway viciousness of its military, intelligence, and law-enforcement agencies. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have been perfectly happy to watch a tightly choreographed series of action sequences in which a grim-faced avenger mowed down entire organized-crime factions for 13 episodes straight. As a superhero concept, the Punisher is right up there for me with Superman, Batman, and the Hulk, in that its core speaks to readers and viewers irrespective of the creative talents behind any given adventure. Superman’s the guy who always gets it right and saves the day. Batman’s the scared little kid who transforms himself into something even scarier, something unstoppable. The Hulk is a mild-mannered nerd who transforms into a juggernaut of rage and muscle. And the Punisher is a man who responds to the wickedness of the world by reducing it, permanently, one human life at a time. (Great codename and costume, too.) To paraphrase Alien regarding another relentless killing machine, I admire the Punisher’s purity.

The guts it must have taken for showrunner Steve Lightfoot, actor Jon Bernthal, and their collaborators to complicate that purity frankly astound me. All the more so because they’re able to access it when need be. After all, the Punisher spends most of this episode fighting his way back from near-death by torture through sheer force of will, engaging his nemesis Billy Russo in a lethal cat-and-mouse game, and finally mutilating the man’s face and breaking his brain, consigning him to a fate worse than death. (Okay, so he does the last bit because every superhero needs an arch-enemy and that’s hard to do if your superhero’s schtick is just murdering everyone he fights, but whatever.) The episode depicts all of that in gory detail. Like, this is how Billy starts the episode:

And this is how he ends it:

This is what Frank Castle does, and the episode isn’t interested in denying that to soft-pedal its sad but still psychopathic hero.

But it’s also interested in fleshing out the character and his colleagues even before that amazing final line. During the prolonged build-up to the final battle, Frank finds himself in a standoff with Billy, as their mutual friend Curtis gets caught in the crossfire. The standoff ends because as far gone as both Billy and Frank are by now, they still retain a sense of brotherhood and camaraderie from their time in the Marine Corps to spare each other (and Curtis, in Billy’s case) and walk away from the scene so they can fight cleaner later on. Clean is relative, mind you — Billy’s not above taking two random teenagers hostage, or switching on the carousel where Frank’s family was murdered to trigger his PTSD — but the whole sequence in Curtis’s apartment is such a welcome detour from the expected road these things go down.

So is the time spent on watching Frank’s partner David “Micro” Lieberman’s rapprochement with his family, especially Sarah. Director Stephen Surjik uses blocking to depict their initial estrangement…

…which makes the subsequent, super-hot, endearingly awkward bathroom sex scene between David and Sarah that much more effective and affecting, even when the couple giggles through David’s apology for not being able to last much longer than a minute after all this time.

If you’d told me writers and filmmakers should study The freaking Punisher for how to write and shoot good sex scenes, I’d never have believed you, and yet here we are.

But that’s the story of The Punisher’s Netflix incarnation: A series that’s much better than it needed to be, could have been, and quite possibly even should have been when you consider the character’s pop culture profile. Its thoughtful approach to potentially fascistic subject matter, its suite of quietly powerful performances, its undercurrent of sexual and romantic tension, and its willingness to hold its protagonist’s feet of clay to the fire make it one of the best superhero adaptations of all time.

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.

Stream Marvel's The Punisher on Netflix