TV Show of the Week: The Punisher

This will be a spoiler free review. All plot details will be included in the article where I cover the entire series as a whole once I’ve eventually finished it. If I had the opportunity, I would definitely binge watch the entire series in one day, but that’s just not possible. I’m only able to pick off one episode a night.

During the first episode, in one particular scene where he helps someone out by doing things his way, I remembered the conversation he had with Daredevil in series 2 episode 3. It was a detailed discussion about how different him and Daredevil see the world and what must be done to protect it. This series focuses on that entire conversation. I’ve watched the first six episodes, and it’s exactly as I expected it to be, dark, extremely gritty; it’s staying true to the character in the comics. Frank is an anti-hero. He still saves the day, but he leaves plenty of destruction in his wake – seeing his viewpoint in an entire thirteen-episode run, extends upon that conversation, and adds a lot more meaning and weight to both character’s words.

With seven episodes to go, they’ve officially announced the main antagonist of the series, there have been plenty of action sequences, and plenty of character building which does involves a lot of conversations. I would be lying if I had expecting non-stop action that rivals or even blows all that featured in Daredevil out of the water, and in context of the show, it most definitely rivals, but there isn’t as much as I had expected, and after watching the first six episodes, that’s perfectly understandable. It would be boring if they did nothing but action, I’m seeing these six episodes as a way of building up to something awesome. Two former special forces agents battling each other whilst Frank struggles to maintain some sanity in his life. What started out as an intimidation act for Micro, turned into Micro’s only form of communication between him and his family. Using Frank as a Proxy, we get to see many characters open up in ways that wouldn’t have happened in any other way.

Each episode sucks me in. The world it’s in may be filled with people with superpowers, so it does make a change to follow someone who’s an ordinary human being with an incredible amount of will power and determination to keep going – right up to the moment where he physically cannot move any further. He does take some heavy hits in the first half of this series, and of course he does recover to fight another day, and if this series doesn’t take a sudden turn, Frank is the type of character that learns from past mistakes and goes back into the fight much more ferociously than before – hopefully it’ll be fun watching him knock anything and anyone that gets in the way of his main objective, avenging his family.

This spinoff did exactly as it intended to do and added to an already established world; it didn’t introduce Frank, just put him in a situation and we learn everything he does only, something no other Netflix series as done, giving The Punisher a new look and feel, keeping it purely original and a true standalone to the others before it.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)