Now this is a weird one. Alternating between some of the series’ most vicious writing and some of its corniest, between passages of silent and dark visual poetry that suck you in and out-of-character moments that knock you right back out again, The Punisher Season 2 Episode 6 (“Nakazat”) is a viewing experience as fractured as Billy Russo’s psyche and Jon Bernthal’s prizefighter nose.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

There should be a term for the “now that’s more like it” episodes every Marvel/Netflix show busts out after the ones that would be better off not existing. Maybe they follow a tonal miscalculation, or a filler episode, or a sudden turn for the implausible even by superhero standards. But they’re usually there somewhere, at least once per season, getting things back on track like a three-year-old realigning Thomas the Tank Engine’s wheels in the grooves of their wooden railroad playset. “One-Eyed Jacks,” the The Punisher Season 2 Episode 5, is exactly that kind of course correction.

I reviewed the fifth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

Before we get to the specifics, here’s my thinking on this, see if you agree. Superhero stories are a subgenre of multiple genres, depending on the character and the approach; there are elements of science fiction, fantasy, crime, sometimes mystery, sometimes war, usually a soupçon of character-based drama, often some comedy, and the basic template of heroism that you can map everything from Greek mythology to professional wrestling onto. But the key component is action, and great action films and shows employ action to convey emotion. They set up a closed system where conversation is insufficient to vent the turmoil beneath the surface, so it comes out in punching and lasers and so on, the same way that in opera or musical theater it comes out in singing, or in horror it comes out in demonic possession or people getting their faces torn off.

Now, a really good superhero story can manage the conversation bit too, of course. Or it can express intimacy in other ways, like we’ve talked about in this space before—tending to injuries, physical closeness, etc. But what it cannot afford to do is stop everything for an hour of samey two-person dialogues that a show with a smaller episode order could easily eliminate and lose absolutely nothing of value.

I reviewed the fourth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

The Punisher is a murder machine. He’s not a gunslinger or a samurai, there to dazzle the audience with brio or technique. To the extent that his lethal maneuvers are impressive at all it’s down to how casual and calculated they are, especially when contrasted with the expression actor Jon Bernthal wears on his face for such scenes. Close-quarters hand-to-hand shit is one thing—that’s where he goes beastmode, growling and bellowing. But when it’s a firefight and his job is to advance on and kill his enemies until none are left, he has the attitude of a person tasked with a difficult but eminently doable task, like mowing the lawn. He puts people down like he’s using a hedge trimmer. Got it, next.

The most interesting thing about “Trouble the Water” (The Punisher Season 2 Episode 3) is how it shows the cost this ruthless efficiency extracts in human suffering.

I reviewed the third episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

In this episode of The Punisher, a lady uses tweezers to take a bullet out of Jon Bernthal’s bare ass.

There. Never let it be said that I’m one to bury the lede.

But if there’s one thing the Marvel/Netflix shows, even the ones I’m not crazy about, have been good at, it’s tying their superhero/vigilante violence to moments of physical intimacy. Sometimes this involves the main characters having sex, and from Jessica Jones and Luke Cage to Luke Cage and Misty Knight to Matt Murdock and Elektra Natchios, those scenes have been hot across the board. That’s certainly true on this show as well, from Agent Madani and Billy Russo to David “Micro” Lieberman and his wife Sarah to “Pete Castiglione” and Beth the bartender just last episode.

At other times the violence itself is intimate. This naturally tends to be the case more for the characters who lack super-strength than for those who do, but it’s true. Watching mortal men like Matt Murdock and Frank Castle be made vulnerable by the infliction of violence on their bodies is a display of intimacy. To quote myself quoting Barbara Kruger regarding another show, “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” Hallway fights are an intricate ritual indeed.

I reviewed the second episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

Have we—as a nation, a society, a people—done enough for Jon Bernthal? No, that’s not even the right thing to ask. What viewers of The Punisher, and all other media, must do is take a fearless personal inventory on the Jon Bernthal Question: What have I, personally, done to show respect and gratitude to this great man? If nothing else, The Punisher Season 2 will give all of us the opportunity to look inward and see if we’ve done right by the Last Action Hunk. You hear that, America? Fix your hearts or die.

I reviewed the season premiere of The Punisher for Decider. Jon Bernthal is perfect in this role.

(Note: These episode review summaries will be short while I play link catch-up. You’ll just have to read the reviews!)

I returned to Elana Brooklyn’s Graphic Policy podcast to talk about The Punisher Season One from the perspective of the Left (and goths). Give it a listen!

If the Man gave Marvel its persona, he also created his own. Born Stanley Martin Lieber in 1922, he adopted his pen name in part because he held out hope of becoming a serious writer under his real name. Meanwhile, he was cranking out comics of every kind for his uncle Martin Goodman’s publishing company, which eventually evolved into Marvel. That name and everything that came with it — the jocular personality, the never-changing look, the vague but unmistakable air of creative wizardry — was as grand an identity as any superhero’s.

Of course, he had a secret identity too. He was a hopelessly devoted husband to his wife Joan, a British ex-pat whose death in 2017 seemed impossible for Lee to ever truly wrap his mind around. And as recent exposés and interviews have illustrated, he was subject to the same depredations of age as any other person — confusing legal disputes with business partners, elder-abuse allegations — a sad coda to a life lived large.

And he was Stan the Company Man as well. Ask the late Jack Kirby, the creative dynamo (he helped invent both Captain America and romance comics with writer Joe Simon, long before he and Lee teamed up), who by all accounts did much of the heavy lifting not just as artist but as co-writer during their fruitful collaboration, despite Lee earning the lion’s share of the credit and compensation. Kirby’s legacy as “The King of Comics” includes a lengthy legal war against Marvel for rights, royalties, and even the physical pages he drew on. Though Lee assiduously pointed out the role his collaborators played in the formation of the company and its characters during interviews later in his life, he usually took Marvel’s side in these battles when they occurred. To many within comics, “The Man” has the same pejorative connotations it does when used to describe politicians or police.

But whatever his faults (many) and autumn-years misfortunes (also many), Lee’s ambition, imagination, and ability to combine high melodrama, high-octane action and playful, personable banter on the comics page was the foundation upon which the entire Marvel empire was built. And most importantly, long before his characters ruled the box office, they populated the back pockets and bedroom floors of countless kids, thirsty for adventure and desperate for connection. Peter Parker, Tony Stark, T’Challa, Natasha and the rest of the gang brought incalculable hours of enjoyment to their readers, and eventually their viewers. All of it based on Lee’s basic premise, reflected in his own life in so many ways, that radioactive spider bites or not, heroes are only human.

Without Stan Lee, it would be a poorer, lonelier, drearier life, in which picked-on kids would dream fewer dreams. Forget the Marvel Universe. Stan the Man reimagined our own.

After his death, I wrote about Stan Lee for Rolling Stone. I tried to be specific and fair about his faults and achievements.

Rushed, slapdash, illogical, and — horror of horrors — even poorly fight-choreographed, “A New Napkin,” the final episode of Daredevil‘s enthusiastically received third season, feels less like a considered episode of television than a mistake someone made along the way to making one. The funny thing is that it has the opposite problem of most shaky-to-downright-bad Marvel/Netflix episodes, which bloat and drag tediously along to the closing credits. This one feels like the writers went to work one day and realized they’d lost track of how many episodes they’d already done, forcing them to wrap things up as quickly, and therefore as clumsily, as possible. It’s a suitcase packed by someone who overslept their alarm and has a flight to catch in 45 minutes, in television form.

[…]

Daredevil is a fun, and usually fine, show, don’t get me wrong. It and The Punisher are the only live-action franchise superhero things I’d recommend to anyone with any enthusiasm at all since the first Tim Burton Batman movie, and this doesn’t change that. Some of those fight-centric episodes and the Karen Page spotlight were killer, and Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Deborah Ann Woll have all been fantastic from the start. But man, what a letdown — and what a bucket of cold water on the very popular idea that this season represents some sort of major breakthrough for the ailing Marvel/Netflix cinematic universe. Daredevil was better than people gave it credit for being before, and it’s not as good as people are giving it credit for being now. No bullseye, in more ways than one.

So there you have it. I reviewed the finale of Daredevil (for now or forever, who knows) for Decider. A good series goes out on a bad note.

“We’ve been manipulated by a sociopath who doesn’t care about the truth, or about who he hurts, or about anyone other than himself,” said the publicly shamed woman about the crooked New York billionaire hotel owner who seems able to flout the law and inflict suffering at will, in an episode where the judicial system is undermined and a sadistic white man murders a brown man and a Holocaust victim in cold blood. Sometimes, a show writes your review for you.

Directed by prestige-TV favorite and Daredevil veteran Phil Abraham, the penultimate episode of Daredevil Season 3 (“One Last Shot”) feels painfully familiar. It’s not so much the specific details that hurt, though despite the disparity between when the show was made and when I watched it, it’s hard for certain similarities between recent events in its world and ours not to hurt. And I tend to be skeptical about any writing premised on the idea of franchised corporate art speaking truth to power; if you thought, say, Black Panther had a message worth hearing, you and the CIA have something in common.

It’s the mood of the episode that makes the metaphorical resonance between Wilson Fisk and Donald Trump so strong. The odyssey of fear, shame, confusion, rage, horror, and despair through which Agent Ray Nadeem travels on his way to court, and then to his death — the sense that anything could happen at any moment, that it will almost certainly be bad, and that nothing that’s supposed to stop it actually can or will — this is the emotional tenor of our age.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Daredevil for Decider.

Written by Tamara Becher-Wilkinson and directed with both restraint and explosiveness by Alex Garcia Lopez, “Karen” is one of the best episodes in the series’ history. Actually, divided into segments designated “Before” and “Now,” it’s almost two of the best episodes in the series’ history.

[…]

All in all, this is as good an hour of superhero entertainment as you’re likely to see. The raw and nuanced performances of Tergersen and Woll, Garcia Lopez’s proficiency with both New England light and hand-to-hand combat, and a structure in which the realistic and fantastic work together to make each other better than they would be alone — it’s a model the unending onslaught of Marvel and DC movies and shows, up to and including the forthcoming adaptation of Watchmen from the Leftovers team, should seek to emulate. Amen.

I reviewed the Karen Page flashback/church fight episode of Daredevil for Decider. If the series really is over (i.e. Marvel doesn’t restart it when it launches its own streaming service), hopefully some smart casting director gives the brilliant Deborah Ann Woll the showcase she deserves.

NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*
NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*
NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*

Okay, I lied: There isn’t any actual sex in the flashback sequence that dominates the first reel of “Revelations,” the ninth episode of Daredevil Season 3. And I’m sorry, but this isn’t just a dropped ball, this is a Bill Buckner–level debacle. It’s not just that Isabella Pisacane, the actor cast to play the young Sister Maggie as she falls in love with local boxer Battlin’ Jack Murdock, looks like a cross between actual young Joanne Whalley (the modern-day Sister Maggie) and Game of Thrones‘ Maisie Williams, which is to say she’s stunning. (Ol’ Battlin’ Jack is definitely punching above his weight class, if you’ll pardon the pun.) It’s that the tension between Catholic iconography and guilt on the one hand and raw physicality on the other is Daredevil‘s stock in trade. I believe it was Chekov (or perhaps Sasha Grey?) who said that if you have a sexy nun on the mantle in the first act, she’d better get off by the third.

I’m joking, but only a little. Co-written by Sam Ernst and showrunner Erik Oleson and directed by Jennifer Lynch, a name I remain amazed to see in television credits whenever it pops up, “Revelations” is another one of those oddly structured episode that feels more like a botched solution to the problem of Marvel/Netflix’s overlong seasons than a cohesive unit that needs to exist on its own. There’s some good stuff in here, and some stuff that could have been better, and some downright baffling stuff too.

I reviewed the Sister Maggie flashback episode of Daredevil for Decider.

They call this episode of Daredevil “Aftermath” for a reason. As seemingly mandated by the by-now anachronistic 13-episode model all the main Marvel/Netflix series —the few that remain standing, anyway— follow, the seventh installment of the show’s third season is at least fifty percent conversations between characters about things that happened in the sixth installment of the show’s third season. At least Wilson Fisk gets to watch it on the news all at once instead of spreading it out over the course of 45 minutes of streaming television.

I reviewed the mixed-bag over-the-hump episode of Daredevil S3 for Decider. This series too is no longer standing.

Does Dex’s devolvement into a grinning mass murderer in someone else’s superhero outfit scan, as far as psychological motivation goes? Well, no and, uh, no. A hard “no” in the sense that, as witnessed last episode, his backstory and history of mental illness is kind of sketched-in and scattershot and hard to swallow. You can’t methodically pick apart a character who was never a cohesive whole to begin with, no matter how hard Daredevil showrunner Erik Oleson, writer Dylan Gallagher, director Stephen Surjik, and actors Vincent D’Onofrio and Wilson (!) Bethel work to prove otherwise.

But also a soft “no,” in the sense that no human being in the history of human beings has everdevolved into a grinning mass murderer in someone else’s superhero outfit, because there are no superheroes. There are also no supervillains whose unerring aim and throwing capacity enable him to turn any household object into a lethal weapon, whether they’re dressed up as Daredevil or have their own snazzy black-and-white costume to do their killings in.

The point I’m trying to make here is that this season, Daredevil decided it needed Bullseye, so Daredevil created Bullseye. It could have gone the route of both the comics and the original Ben Affleck/Colin Farrell movie version and had the Kingpin hire an out-of-town hitter with a badass reputation, but it tried to grow one organically from within, tying his origin directly to both the protagonist and the antagonist of the show. Is there any way to do that in a wholly realistic manner? Not when your show is Blind Radar Ninja, Attorney-at-Law there isn’t.

So, y’know, have a little fun with it! Do some creepy voices and camerawork, put some baggy eyes and flopsweat on your handsome new actor, give your main heavy a chance to play master manipulator and guide a new killer to follow in his footsteps a la Hannibal Lecter. Kinda churlish to complain that the end result isn’t in the DSM, no?

I reviewed episode six of Daredevil S3 for Decider.

Dex’s brain is revealed to be a cocktail of conditions that sound spooky to the layperson: borderline personality disorder, psychotic tendencies, obsessive-compulsive disorder. He killed his beloved baseball coach for yanking him from a perfect game as an orphaned kid, and was laboring under the delusion that said perfect game would bring his parents back somehow while he did it. (I’m gonna guess he killed his parents, too, because why not.) The only person he’s ever really cared about since then was his therapist, who he threatened to kill when she was dying of cancer because he was so angry at her for leaving him. He worked at a suicide-prevention hotline, just like real-life serial killer Ted Bundy, and would occasionally steer suicidal callers into thoughts of homicide instead, or at least daydream about doing so. He’s a stalker, as we learned in the previous episode, but what we learn here is that the woman he’s stalking — a former colleague from the hotline, where he no longer works — is someone he barely knows. When she gets a job at the hotel where Dex is guarding Fisk (clearly his handiwork), she recognizes him from the hotline and asks him to meet her for dinner after their shifts; within about two minutes he’s letting slip all kinds of personal details about her he could only know if he stalked her, and he physically tries to stop her from leaving before she shouts loud enough to draw the attention of other diners and force him to let her go.

You can add all this to the fact that he uses unnecessary lethal force on the job — a job he has because none of this was picked up during the FBI’s background checks for some reason. He served in the military first, and that I can buy since the Forever War we’ve been fighting since 2001 has seen the standards for enlisting get lowered considerably, but the Bureau’s stringent requirements for its agents are already a plot point on the show, in the form of Agent Nadeem getting passed over for promotion because he’s too deep in debt and thus a recruitment target for enemy agents. I’d love to hear how a fairly obvious basketcase like Dex sailed through.

But then, there’s a lot going on this season that, shall we say, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. (Blind ninja lawyer aside, I mean.) Fisk has used phones and computers while under house arrest. He was only convicted of RICO violations when he staged a gigantic lethal firefight against the police on a major metropolitan bridge. Despite having enough hitmen after him to level an entire FBI motorcade, he’s placed inside an operational hotel that’s open to the public for safekeeping. The Feds bust down Matt Murdock’s door on the basis of Fisk’s word and a single paycheck they found from when Murdock & Nelson accidentally represented someone on Fisk’s payroll, but the security-camera footage of him blind-ninja’ing his way through a prison riot apparently slipped their notice, even though they know he was there and that he used Foggy’s name to get in and that he saw a low-level Albanian soldier while visiting.

Well, whatever. You don’t come to Blind Ninja Lawyer for a tightly written procedural.

I reviewed the wonky black-and-white Bullseye origin flashback episode of Daredevil for Decider.

You knew the time would come. Ever since Daredevil established the template in its first season, Netflix’s Marvel shows, good bad and indifferent, have staged elaborate single-take fight scenes in which their protagonists battle their way through hordes of assailants in cramped indoor spaces, typically hallways. (Stairways, warehouses, storage facilities, and hospital wards will do in a pinch.) I’m no statistician, but with a fight that spans one single unbroken shot that lasts for over ten and a half minutes, “Blindsided,” Daredevil Season 3 Episode 4, may have just taken the crown.

HALLWAY FIGHT! HALLWAY FIGHT! I reviewed, y’know, the big hallway-fight episode of Daredevil Season 3 for Decider.

There’s a bit in Daredevil Season 3 Episode 3 (“No Good Deed”) where the FBI agents assigned to guard Wilson Fisk after he’s been relocated from a prison to a stripped-down penthouse suite in a Manhattan hotel where they get McDonald’s to eat, since the hotel room service is out of the Justice Department’s price range. I don’t eat McDonald’s anymore because I’m a vegetarian, but I know my way around meatless fast food options, that’s for sure, so I can relate. It’s not just that it’s relatively cheap — it’s that it’s reliable. Once you’ve found an item or a meal you enjoy, you can order it basically any time you want to enjoy eating, and guess what? You’ll enjoy eating.

Daredevil works the same way. Despite all the people getting punched in the head until they lose consciousness, it’s comfort viewing. You know what you’re getting, and if you like it, you’ll like it. Reader, I like it.

I reviewed the third episode of Daredevil’s third season for Decider.

I’d imagine this episode will test the patience of anyone who isn’t as sold on the rhythms of this cast and this concept as I am. I know how they feel: Every time characters on Luke Cage are filmed walking half a block just to talk to someone and then leave, every time Jessica Jones had a scene of its dully sardonic protagonist making quips and shooting daggers at someone while wearing the same pair of jeans, every time one of these series stalls out seven or eight episodes into a season because they basically dispatched the most interesting villain and have to figure out how to drag it out for another school day’s worth of screentime, I rue the day superheroes went from nerd culture to monoculture too.

But the thing is I am sold on the rhythms of this cast and this concept. I love looking at the faces of Charlie Cox and Deborah Ann Woll as Matt and Karen, love their soft beauty, love their warm voices. I love how Elden Henson quickly grew into the roll of their friend Foggy, who turned from an obnoxious comic-relief character into a bonafide character with an engaging way of moving through their weird world while still seeming basically normal.

I reviewed episode two of Daredevil Season Three for Decider.

That simple pleasures are, in fact, simple makes them no less pleasurable. On the contrary! Drinking the last beer in the fridge at the end of a hard day, listening to the first ten or so Beatles singles, playing Rainbow Road in Mario Kart Wii for the 500th beautiful lunatic time — there is great satisfaction in the straightforward, great fun in the familiar. And as television, Daredevil is exactly that: satisfyingly straightforward, familiarly fun. Returning for its third season (third and a half, if you count the characters’ involvement in the Defenders crossover miniseries), it is simple, and it is pleasurable.

I covered Daredevil for Decider again this season, starting with my review of the premiere. 

Before he was a character, Venom was a costume.

Imagine if the Joker started out as a clown outfit that Batman wore for circus-themed missions and you’ll have some idea of just how odd the path that this character took to antihero superstardom really was.

Back in 1982, comics reader Randy Schueller submitted an idea to Marvel for a storyline in which Spider-Man acquired a black costume (with a red spider logo, rather than the familiar white one) made of “unstable molecules,” i.e. the Marvel Universe material from which the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards made his team’s uniforms. More than mere fabric, this outfit would be able to adjust to Peter Parker’s needs, as well as enhance his powers. Controversial Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter bought the idea from Schueller for a cool $220.

It took a couple of years for the new white-on-black look to make its first chronological appearance in the pages of the company-wide crossover “event comic” Secret Wars #8, courtesy of a design by artist Mike Zeck and a script by Shooter that saw the Webslinger acquire the costume on an alien planet.

Though the issue came out in December 1984, the costume had popped up several months earlier — first as a sketch in March’s comic-length newsletter Marvel Age #12, then in a Spidey story set after the events of Secret Wars in May’s Amazing Spider-Man #252, plotted by Roger Stern, written by Tom DeFalco, and illustrated by Ron Frenz.

… And also an alien parasite.

During their Amazing Spider-Man run, DeFalco and Frenz fleshed out the origin of the liquid-like black outfit, which would respond to Peter Parker’s thoughts; it would even hijack him in his sleep for late-night crimefighting binges. Sure, it looks badass, but it’s not merely a futuristic crimefighting costume or the self-repairing clothes writer/artist John Byrne had devised for the martial-arts hero Iron Fist (an influence on Stern’s concept for the costume). It’s a sentient, symbiotic alien entity, one which bonds to a human host and bestows them with incredible powers while still maintaining a mind of its own.

That “mind of its own” thing is the rub. Though he digs the power-up, Parker quickly learns that this “Symbiote” wants to bond to his body permanently. By exploiting the alien’s vulnerability to fire and sonic energy — and with a little help from the Fantastic Four — Spider-Man separates himself from the costume, which slithers off to find another host to inhabit.

I wrote a quick cheat sheet to catch people up on the history of Venom in comics and film, just in time for the new Tom Hardy movie, for Rolling Stone. I like doing pieces like this because it’s a way to give some shine to the writers and artists who made this multibillion-dollar industry possible.