‘The Punisher’ Season 2 Episode 8 Recap: Gods and Monsters

The Punisher’s chief weapon is surprise. Surprise, and fear. Fear and surprise. His two weapons are fear and surprise, and ruthless efficiency…His three weapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to his slain family…His four—no. Amongst his weapons— amongst his weaponry—are such elements as fear, surprise….I’ll start again. Amongst his weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to his slain family, and a nice black uniform—oh, damn.

All praises due to Monty Python, of course, but the Spanish Inquisition has nothing on Frank Castle. He shares pretty much all of their weaponry, plus one that goes unlisted but is the whole point of the thing: humor. No, really! Hardly for the first time this season —Billy Russo had a laugh-out-loud moment last episode when he talks about how he’s learned lost “my company…apparently,” the latter tacked on as a can-you-believe-I-can’t-remember-this-shit afterthought— The Punisher Season 2 Episode 8 (“My Brother’s Keeper”) kept me entertained as much with well-executed moments of comedy as with guns and psychopathy.

It happens time and again in fact. You’ve got one of Billy Russo’s more truculent minions referring to him as “this jigsaw-faced bastard” after their robbery goes south due to his Punisher-induced freakout, and then promptly getting shot for it. You have Frank’s buddy Curtis saying “How long do you think it’s gonna take them to figure out who Frank Castle’s one-legged black friend is?” and Frank responding “I hate to say this, Curtis, but there’s somebody else” while barely suppressing a grin. You’ve got Amy opening fire on Curtis with a shotgun when he approaches her trailer without warning, then apologizing and saying “we’ve never been formally introduced,” and him responding “And you’re Amy. I’ve heard so much about you. Not about the part with the shotgun. That would have been useful!” You have a classic Marvel Cinematic Universe funny-meal maneuver, with Madani, Curtis, and Amy’s spaghetti and whisky dinner substituting for the Avengers’ post-battle shawarma. These light moments in the gritty street-level superheroic darkness really pop.

And you need all of them you can get in this episode, because the other thing it has plenty of is screaming and freaking out. The following gifs are just an incomplete sampling, mind you:

Basically, Frank and Curtis’s plan to kill Billy after the robbery goes south because they both get cold feet. Curtis simply couldn’t pull the trigger on an old friend with a sniper rifle, and Frank froze because he looked into Billy’s eyes and saw that, yes, he truly had no idea what he’d done to deserve the cruelty and hatred he’s received from Frank. That makes doing what needs to be done very difficult, because it goes against his entire vigilante raison d’être: How can you punish someone who doesn’t know what crime he committed? He damn near takes out his frustration on Amy before pulling back from the brink.

On the flipside, Billy is suffering the exact same torment Frank did when he realized his family was murdered by his own best friend. How could someone he loves, someone he considers family himself, turn on him like that? Since Billy doesn’t remember his time as a drug smuggler and cover-up architect who orchestrated the slaughter of his best friend’s wife and kids, he thinks Frank is the one who betrayed him, not the other way around.

Dr. Dumont, his partner in an extremely toxic and abusive romantic relationship and an extremely unethical and abusive therapeutic one, is all too happy to encourage this belief without looking into it any deeper. She reacts with open joy when Billy tells her “You’re the only one who can help me” and raw panic when he turns on her, incorrectly asserting that she kept the truth from him. A world in which he is a wronged party, stabbed in the back (er, face) by the person he was closest to, is a world in which she can become his new one-and-only.

She describes the choice facing him now in, unsurprisingly, terms better suited to kink or drug experimentation or religious conversion than therapy. “I came face to face with my hurt,” she says of herself, “and I swear to you, it is like touching God.” Clearly there’s still something she’s not telling Billy about her own origin—she mentions being “betrayed,” which doesn’t jibe with her childhood-fall story as previously delivered.

But Dumont’s rhapsodic pep talk convinces him to switch back to his original plan for him and his ex-military comrades: Instead of robbing banks, they’re gonna take on the world “We could be gods,” he tells them, echoing her rhetoric. (Shoutout to the Spanish Inquisition!) To quote Hannibal Lecktor [sic] in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, “If you do as God does enough times, you become as God is.” And what does God do? God kills. By that standard, ol’ Billy is well on his way. But what was it Frank said to that Russian billionaire a couple episodes ago? “If you wanna make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

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 8 ("My Brother's Keeper") on Netflix