‘The Punisher’ Season 2 Episode 11 Recap: Tender Loving Karen

Guess who’s back? Back again? Karen’s back! Tell a friend!

The Punisher Season 2 Episode 11 (“The Abyss”) is basically another one of those placeholder episodes. You’ve had a bunch of action, a bunch of violence, and now you’re gonna get an hour of filler before we hit the next stretch of rapids. But unlike the previous dreary episode the season has aired in that vein, this one has Karen Page going for it. Reuniting the Daredevil costar with her other vigilante platonic-romance partner makes for must-see viewing.

Deborah Ann Woll is so goddamn good in this role at this point. She’s turned Karen into some kind of vulnerability vortex, sucking everyone within a ten foot radius into her maelstrom of pain, care, comfort, and psychosexual entanglement with men who get beat up all the time. Combine that with Jon Bernthal, who’s basically her male equivalent, and…just…man.

Oh man.

Man oh man.

During their time together, Frank recounts the absolute most painful aspects of his family’s death: the look of confusion and fear on his children’s faces in their last moments. “Why, Daddy?” he says, crying. “Why? Why?” It’s brutal.

And even though, again, it’s been screamingly obvious from the start that he isn’t responsible for the deaths of the three women found at the scene of the shootout, the show still wrings very fucked-up emotions out of the situation. “It doesn’t matter what you did,” Karen tells Frank. “It doesn’t change how I feel about you.” Whooo, lord.

So yeah, if you have to do a wheel-spinning episode, definitely make it so the audience spends a decent chunk of the running time wish two beautiful broken people would just start kissing each other like drowning sailors sucking down oxygen.

Alas, this does not happen. But the Frank/Karen relationship is echoed by both of the Punisher’s opposite numbers this season. Eliza Schultz flies all the way to New York to let her pet hitman John Pilgrim know his wife Rebecca has died, and his flashbacks to their happiness together, and the redemption he found in her love for him, come straight from the Frank Castle Dream Factory.

I feel like it’s no coincidence that he starts having second thoughts about going after Castle within minutes of hearing the news: “He never did anything to me.” He walks right up to the edge of blasphemy, too, noting that God, on the other hand, has messed with him and his family plenty. Eliza browbeats him back into compliance, partly by promising a better future for his kids if their aims succeed, partly by the implicit threat that she could move against his kids if he bails, and partly by the even more implicit idea of the sunk-cost fallacy. If he’s risked and lost all this to kill Frank Castle and his sidekick Amy, there’d be no point to any of it at all if he didn’t finish the job.

Elsewhere, Billy and Dr. Dumont reassure themselves that it’s okay for them to have brutally murdered three innocent women to fuck with a third party. “Those women—they’re dead because of you,” Billy says. “I didn’t know them,” she replies. “I’d do anything for us to be happy. I think we both deserve to be happy, together.” Even more than Pilgrim’s born-again Christianity or the Anderson’s vicious capitalist manipulation of same, Krista has summed up an entire toxic American mindset. An entire toxic human mindset, really.

Krista also recounts her own traumatic origin story, involving her suicidal Vietnam-vet father jumping out the window with her in his arms to spite her mother, who’d asked for a divorce. Her scars, her messianic drive to save messed-up people, her thing for ex-military men—it’s all there. So too, I suppose, are her bizarre ideas about love. Despite all the pain her father caused her in his twisted display of you are my everything paternal affection, she seems to have adopted his find someone you care about then destroy the entire world if that’s what it takes to preserve it approach.

Anyway, with the help of a foot-fetishist morgue attendant (what a weird, creepy, vibrant detail, the kind of thing you wish these shows did more often instead of letting everything come out in person to person conversation scenes), Karen and Madani figure out that Billy killed those women rather than Frank, duh. (An episode based on a twist that obvious has no business being this engrossing.) Along with Amy, who’s disguised herself as a nurse, and a cop turned hitman turned unconscious guy, whom they put in Frank’s hospital bed while Frank steals his uniform, they get Frank out of the hospital before every hitman in New York, including Pilgrim, can put him out of his misery.

Unfortunately, Frank and Madani wind up getting nabbed by Detective Mahoney, who locks Castle up in the back of an ambulance. The next two episodes will no doubt be about his rearrest, trial, and conviction haha just kidding he’s going to get free and murder a bunch of people. But he’s already murdered my heart. Aww.

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 11 ("The Abyss") on Netflix