‘The Punisher’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Joker and Harley Revisited

Now this is a weird one. Alternating between some of the series’ most vicious writing and some of its corniest, between passages of silent and dark visual poetry that suck you in and out-of-character moments that knock you right back out again, The Punisher Season 2 Episode 6 (“Nakazat”) is a viewing experience as fractured as Billy Russo’s psyche and Jon Bernthal’s prizefighter nose.

One thing’s crystal clear, though: My Joker/Harley Quinn comparison from a couple episodes ago was not far off the mark where Billy “Jigsaw” Russo and Dr. Krista Dumont are concerned. Okay, fine, not to toot my own horn or something but I hit the bullseye (no pun intended, Daredevil fans) so dead-on that a trained sniper like Frank would approve. On Billy’s end, you have the facial disfigurement; he’s just got lots of not so bad scars instead of one big awful one and/or a kisser turned into a permanent clownface due to immersion in acid, depending on which model of the Clown Prince of Crime you prefer. You’ve got the mysterious backstory, though in his case it’s only mysterious to him, which is a nice touch. You have the determination to wreak havoc with the help of society’s castoffs; just sub in traumatized and bitter veterans for escaped mental patients. And you have the obsession with a vigilante who dresses in back and wears a cool gothy symbol on his chest, though he has yet to actually find this part out.

He and Dr. Dumont spend the episode in an on-again off-again pattern of sexual tension and actual tension. There’s a particularly strong scene, with no dialogue at all, where he sees her getting dressed scars and all, she sees him seeing and openly admiring, and she walks over and closes the door on him—but without chewing him out or covering up. It’s their whole dysfunctional relationship in miniature.

(As a side note, this silent passage is echoed later on, when Pilgrim surprises a target as elevator doors open and silently executes all three men inside, exchanging meaningful glances with his victim but not a single word.)

And now the final piece of the Jigsaw puzzle slips into place, if you’ll pardon the potentially vulgar metaphor. After one of their several fights regarding his extracurricular activities and her covering up for them, he grabs her, she stabs him, he toughs it out, and then he kisses her. It’s extremely frightening and nonconsensual—but for people this obviously fucked up in supervillainous ways, I don’t think it will remain so for long.

Dumont sees Billy as a test case, a chance to redeem her failure to save some unknown patient in her past and heal her own physical and psychological scars of unknown origin—unless the initials “KM” in her journal refer to herself somehow, in which case it’s one and the same. Feelings that intense can easily slide from dedication to fixation to attraction. It also doesn’t hurt, frankly, that Ben Barnes could have sexual chemistry with a wet paper bag, Floriana Lima makes smart psychologist skirts and pantsuits look like something you have dreams you’re embarrassed to tell your partner about, and their (surprisingly huge) size discrepancy coupled with the characters’ caretaker/patient relationship augurs power exchange like nobody’s fuckin’ business.

Oof, I’m sorry, where was I?

Right, so, beyond that. Frank and Amy team up to uncover the exact nature of the blackmail scheme that landed them both in such hot water. She and her friends were taking pictures of the wedding of the closeted son of evangelical hypercapitalists Anderson and Eliza Schultz, whom she describes as funding alt-right websites and buying Congress like a combination of the Mercers, the Kochs, and the Adelsons. They were paid to do this by a Russian industrialist who hoped to use the photos as leverage over the son, who’s being groomed to become president, which would mean they’d “own him.” So you’re looking at a gang war, only between rival right-wing billionaire scumbags. Ha, we should be so lucky.

Anyway, Frank locates and then spares the lives of a child-pornography photographer and the scumbag Russian industrialist during this search for info, which is…odd, for Frank Castle, as was leaving the Russian underboss alive in the previous episode. Fortunately, Schultz’s assassin Pilgrim took care of it in the end, just as he takes care of the billionaire this time. Pilgrim also menaces Agent Madani, which he gets away with because she can’t arrest him without a charge, which is totally how DHS does things, sure. I’m going to go follow an agent around and threaten to blackmail them and ask for the location of a federally protected asset and say I can find them anytime and see how that works for me too.

That’s the other thing about this episode: Politically, it’s all over the map. Amy’s note-perfect summary of billionaire-supported fascists and billionaire-owned politicians is offset by Frank’s dopey “Call me old-fashioned: I don’t work with Russians” jingoism. (I get that Frank is not supposed to be the voice of reason, politically speaking, but even if Russia is the current bête noire of #Resistance, Cold War jingoism is still reactionary and shitty, and Frank has historically been unwilling to swallow the patriotic party line like this.) Dr. Dumont tells Detective Mahoney that cops and criminals are both motivated by a desire to control others and a fear they can’t control themselves, which should do the heart of anyone who’s participated in a Black Lives Matter march good, but then there’s the naive bit where Madani can’t lock up an obvious bad guy because it would break the law to do so, despite the fact that we have children in concentration camps right now. Billy’s squad of disaffected veterans degenerates quickly from what seemed like some kind of potential brownshirt uprising into a bank-heist crew, after beating up yet another guy who talks shit to the clearly dangerous and deranged Russo, which is the least New York thing I’ve ever seen anyone do on these New York shows.

But there are still so many lovely shots, which was the case last season too but which never really enters the conversation when this show is discussed. And Bernthal remains so compelling as the Punisher no matter how uneven the material gets, whether he’s training Amy to be as efficient and remorseless as he is when defending herself or tearing up and nodding his head seemingly uncontrollably when forced to remember his slain daughter. That’s more than most shows have. That’s enough.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream The Punisher Season 2 Episode 6 ("Nakazat") on Netflix