‘The Punisher’ Season 2 Episode 10 Recap: Rock Bottom

“The Dark Hearts of Men.” That’s the title of The Punisher Season 2 Episode 10, and as they say across the pond, it does what it says on the tin. Juxtaposing the usual one-on-one heart-to-heart conversations the show is built on—this time focusing on what really makes Frank Castle and Billy Russo tick—with all-out savagery and depravity, it’s as extreme a statement as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made to date.

Let’s take things one psycho at a time, shall we? First up: John Pilgrim, whose post-massacre booze-and-coke binge we join already in progress. Confronted and cornered by the members of the racist gang he used to not only run with but inspire with his wild-man dedication to the cause, he dispatches them with the cathartic intensity only someone who’s fallen off the wagon after a long, long time riding that thing can muster. Having to kill the people he once called brothers is basically a relapse, and man, he hits rock bottom hard. Like, hard enough to be prying dead men’s teeth out of his own skull hard.

After viciously murdering everyone who’d tried to murder him for the crime of betrayal, he seems to feel he has betrayed himself in some way, because he’s been completely stone cold after every previous killing. He winds up crashing a wild party in the hotel room next to his, at gunpoint, and either purchasing or commandeering the labor of one of the sex workers the ruddy-faced big shot who was throwing the shindig had hired for the occasion. Then, get this: He delivers a Deadwood-style shitfaced blowjob monologue, about brotherhood. “It’s a defense against your weakness,” he whines as the sex worker’s head bobs up and down. “Surrounding yourself with people as pathetic as you are. It’s just a way to avoid staring your own sins in the face.” Can’t avoid it when you’re killing those people off one by one, I suppose.

I have to give a tremendous shoutout to actor Josh Stewart here. Previously, Pilgrim has been fun to watch the way most supervillains are by default, but personality-wise he’s been boring as shit. As you know if you’ve been reading along with these reviews, my No-Prize explanation was that extremely religious people are boring, so the choice works. But now that he’s broken down, a whole new side of him comes out. Check out the exhausted little gasp of a laugh he lets out before he gets to work beating his old gang leader to death, the sound of a person so horrified by his own circumstances that he can see them as actively absurd. Listen to how all of a sudden he has a Noo Yawk accent as he drunkenly pours out his feelings to the woman fellating him. Even the flashbacks in which he remembers confessing his true identity and past sins to his wife, who forgives him, seem earnest rather than corny. Now you can see how he might hold his own against livewires like Ben Barnes’s Billy Russo and Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle.

Speaking of whom:

Yeah, despite spending hours and hours casing the joint with his buddy Curtis (do they have a profound conversation about living and taking life? you betcha), Frank gets thoroughly owned inside Billy’s “Valhalla” headquarters. Russo has rallied his troops into taking Castle’s willingness to kill all of them personally (which admittedly shouldn’t be that hard to do), and they gleefully participate in stabbing, beating, and maiming him.

Which makes Frank’s subsequent comeback, where he pops up like a babyface pro wrestler who’s hulking out toward the end of a real slobberknocker and murders every one of Billy’s minions, pretty goddamn funny.

But even this was a setup, though it’s safe to assume the dead men didn’t know it. Fleeing, Billy passes through an office with its blinds closed as Castle peppers it with bullets. When Frank finally bursts in, he finds it full of dead women caught in the crossfire. It was all part of a plan devised by Dr. Dumont, who’d spent an evening drinking wine and (you guessed it) having a heart-to-heart conversation with Frank’s oblivious pal Agent Madani and thus knows that Frank’s weakness is his need to feel he’s better than the killers he kills. Make it so that he’s murdered people who don’t deserve it and he’ll snap like a twig. That seems to be what the cops find when they arrive: a broken man.

Now, this is a superhero story, blowjob monologues notwithstanding, and Marvel in particular has been quite meticulous in dodging the idea that superhero battles ever cause collateral damage. (The comics have been much more willing to go there, albeit in a weird and sporadic fashion that kind of does more harm than good no matter whether you want to examine this issue or not.) So my guess is that these women were part of the crew of sex workers we see Billy’s men shuttling around, hand-selected and probably hand-murdered by Billy himself for the sole purpose of setting up this ruse. It’s not like he could risk them not getting killed, right? The whole plan would fall apart.

(Whether sex workers should so frequently be used as cannon fodder given their vulnerable position in society is a thorny issue in itself. Someone like Billy surely wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice them in order to make a point; Madani and Dumont talk at length about men’s ability to forgive themselves for their worst offenses if they feel those offenses lead to some kind of solution to their problems. Of course, you can scale this up to the show itself and ask if it’s doing the same thing.)

So I’m assuming it was Billy all along, and Frank will be let off the hook for the killings. Which is a dodge on the show’s part for sure—it’s letting itself off the hook. But about this at least, I don’t mind much. I think there’s still plenty of worthwhile ethical (and, as far as the military angle goes, political) mileage in the Punisher concept without needing to drag innocent bystanders into it. The core Punisher fantasy is that the wrong people die only at the hands of the unjust, and when men of honor step in, only the right people die, every time.

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 10 ("The Dark Hearts Of Men") on Netflix