Frankly depicted basic-cable-explicit sex scenes have been a staple of the Marvel/Netflix shows since Jessica Jones, but I’ll admit to being shocked that this one got through. Aside from nudity on Dinah’s part (you see Billy’s butt later in the scene), there’s basically nothing left to the imagination here, from the movement of their bodies while they have sex and as they de-couple to Russo’s audible post-coital pee in the adjoining bathroom. I appreciate the candor, and the fact that the sex is the start, not the point, of the scene, which is really about the two characters arguing about trust. Sex frequently isn’t the point, but a way for people to get to, or away from, the point. I wish more shows saw it that way.

As for the trust issue, Billy is a pretty convincing liar on that front, waxing outraged that Dinah is investigating his late friend Frank Castle when he knows all along the guy’s alive and is trying to help his master Agent Orange bring him down. As he broaches the topic of Frank first with Dinah, then with his and Frank’s mutual friend Curtis, and finally with Frank himself — who comes out of hiding to meet him — I was actually becoming convinced that I’d read the guy wrong, that he wasn’t an obvious heel turn waiting to happen. That speaks to the strength of the writing and Ben Barnes’s performance (he does a lot with just his eyes and the timbre of his voice) at least as much as to my gullibility, I like to think.

But more so than on many other series, this double-cross makes thematic sense. So much of The Punisher is about catastrophic disillusionment — with the military, the country, life itself. It all feels like one big web of trauma connecting everyone in ways great and small. The episode begins, for example, with Frank’s most horrifying nightmare yet, in which both his family and Micro’s throw a welcome-home dinner party for him, only for masked special-forces goons to burst in, blow David’s brains out, then open fire on the children at point-blank range. Actor Jon Bernthal’s raw terror during this scene, in which he also dreams he’s tied immobile to a chair and can only watch, is reminiscent of Marilyn Burns’s tormented “final girl” Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is a high compliment indeed coming from me. And it drives home the emerging idea that Frank resents David not for leaving his family, but for saving them, when he himself could not.

I reviewed episode 6 of The Punisher for Decider. These three grafs only partially demonstrate the range of the show. How about that?

Hot sex, brutal violence, lingering trauma, and an unflinching depiction of the United States military-intelligence apparatus as evil. Maybe comic-book shows aren’t just for kids anymore!  “Gunner,” the fifth episode of The Punisher’s first season, is yet another strong installment, combining the visceral pulp thrills of the action genre with one of the most strident critiques of American power on TV this side of The Americans or Mr. Robot. What’s more, veteran Irish director Dearbhla Walsh (late of Fargo’s amazing and underrated third season) makes it all look good, in settings and situations varied enough for it to almost feel like showing off.

I reviewed episode 5 of The Punisher, a show that has quickly settled into “this show does a lot of things very well” mode, for Decider.

“I don’t give a shit about the NYPD.” “When they first started Homeland, they wanted native speakers — Farsi, Pashtun, Arabic. The thinking was simple: Use the enemy to catch the enemy.” “You gonna give me a job mopping floors? Emptying trash? Is that ‘making good on the investment my country made in me?’ You’re just another liar in command.” These quotes, from three separate characters with very different motivations, sum up The Punisher’s take on cops, the surveillance state, the military, and mercenaries. Wild, huh? Marvel’s Blue Lives Matter/Take a Knee My Ass this ain’t, as “Resupply,” the series’ fourth episode, makes plain.

I reviewed episode 4 of The Punisher for Decider. This show is a real surprise.

Even when he’s not extrajudicially executing people, Frank’s actions are horrifying. The episode brings this home with a sequence that subverts the now-trademark feature of every Marvel/Netflix show, the hallway fight. Pinned down by enemies who deliberately set a trap for his infamously lethal unit (known in-country as “the American Taliban”), Frank launches a berserker attack against the building where the bulk of their opponents are holed up. What follows is the close-quarters combat you’ve come to expect, but in an entirely different format and tone. There’s no long take, no continuity of space and time — everything is jittery, choppy, and disorienting. Jump cuts skip past several seconds of action, as muzzle flashes toss us from one shot or enemy to the next. Incongruous fades stretch out time without actually marking its passage, as they do in traditional cinematic grammar. The music isn’t some hard-charging rock or hip-hop song, nor the usual ominous electronic burble, but “Wish It Was True” by the White Buffalo, a plaintive piece of what sounds like earnest country-grunge Americana until you listen to the lyrics: “Country, I was a soldier for you, did what you asked me to, it was wrong and you knew…the home of the brave and the free, the red white and blue — well, I wish it was true.” The music swells as Frank ends the sequence by bashing an already dead man’s skull in for what feels like half a minute, blood covering his face. It’s an unpleasant sequence, saying unpleasant things about the Punisher, the war, and their intersection in the public imagination, and using the street-level superhero genre’s own tools to do so.

I reviewed episode 3 of The Punisher, which by this point is revealing itself to be a very sharp show.

On a more frivolous note: Like most Marvel projects, even the middling ones, The Punisher gets far on sheer chemistry between its likeable, attractive actors. (Seriously: Take a quick dip in superhero-movie-fandom tumblr and you’ll see press-junket and behind-the-scenes gifsets aplenty which prove that the most important act of rebranding DC did with Justice League wasn’t lightening things up onscreen, but casting people — like Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Gal Gadot, and Amber Heard — who seem fun to be around, and who have fun around each other.) First in the scene where Frank meets up with his old ally Karen Page, then during Agent Madani’s dive-bar date with Castle’s former platoon mate Billy Russo, the physical connection between actors Jon Bernthal & Deborah Ann Woll and Ben Barnes & Amber Rose Revah respectively is just deeply pleasurable to watch. This has been true over and over across the Netflix end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Woll and Charlie Cox on Daredevil, Krysten Ritter and Mike Colter on Jessica Jones, Colter and Rosario Dawson on Luke Cage, and so on. But hell, turning superheroes into people you’d love to flirt with when you’re out together with friends some night, then waltz home tipsily daydreaming about the way their fingers held their glass, has been Marvel’s primary, and perhaps sole, innovation for the genre at least as far back as Kat Dennings freaking out about how hot Chris Hemsworth is in the first Thor flick.

I reviewed episode 2 of The Punisher for Decider.

The most chilling moment in the series premiere of The Punisher has nothing to do with the vigilante of the title. Nor does the show’s most searing, if subtle, condemnation of violence. They’re both found in a quiet conversation between his assumed-name alter ego “Pete Castiglione” and Donny Chavez (Luca De Oliveira), a young co-worker at the construction site where the former Frank Castle takes out his frustrations on the masonry day after day, hour after hour. Noticing Frank’s battle scars, Donny manages to elicit from the quiet man that he’d been in the Marines. So had Donny’s dad, says the younger man, a fact that made him something close to a superhero in his eyes. Donny goes on to explain that his father did three tours — two in Iraq, one in Afghanistan — before returning home to be killed alongside his mother during a drive home one night. “I was twelve,” he says. The war that had been going on long enough for his late father to complete three tours of duty by the time Donny was in the sixth grade is still going on today. As with Frank Castle’s bloody crusade, there’s no end in sight.

Written by showrunner and Hannibal veteran Steve Lightfoot and directed by Tom Shankman, “3 A.M.,” The Punisher’s debut episode, gets this latest Marvel/Netflix drama off to a thoughtful and compelling start by taking direct aim at the character’s most controversial aspect, his status as an emblem of redemptive violence, often embraced by agents of the state ostensibly tasked with protecting life rather than ending it,  and firing away. I won’t say there’s no way to look at the episode as a glorification of rough justice and misunderstood heroism — people have been misinterpreting the character in exactly that way for decades now, and there are no shortage of other shows since The Sopranos birthed the age of the anti-hero whose viewers have gotten things bass-ackwards — but if that’s the road you wanna go down, you’re gonna have an uphill battle.

I’m playing catch-up on linking to my work thanks to the busy holiday week, but I’m covering The Punisher for Decider, beginning with this review of the premiere. This show has been an unexpected pleasure to write about.