“Front Toward Enemy” makes the now-standard Marvel/Netflix move of bringing a secondary antagonist to the forefront of the narrative for a while, something the shows wouldn’t need to do if they had shorter seasons. This particular baddie, wayward young Travis Bickle wannabe Lewis Wilson, is most reminiscent of Jessica Jones’ mad supersoldier Will Simpson, aka Nuke, a veteran turned cop who goes berserk when his puppetmasters pump him full of performance-enhancing drugs. That character was given short shrift by his show, though, which despite all the pains it had taken to show he was a decent person driven to violence by forces out of his control wound up treating him like just another abusive creep. By contrast, no matter how bad Lewis’s crimes get — blowing up government offices, horrifically beating Frank’s friend Curtis before turning him into a human IED, hanging out in a house with the stinking corpse of the man he stabbed to death for days at a time — and no matter how reactionary the ideas he spouts in ranting sic semper tyrannis, give me liberty or give me death letters and phone calls get, he’s always shown as a guy who was broken and thrown away before he became anything else.
I reviewed episode nine of The Punisher, still quite a show, for Decider.
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