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.

The Dream Machine: ‘Superman: The Movie’ (1978)

Where to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

The machinery of the modern-day blockbuster — kick-started by Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” and thrown into high gear by George Lucas’s “Star Wars” — never operated in a more chaotic, or mercenary, fashion than it did in this big-budget work of art-by-committee. There was its small army of screenwriters, credited and uncredited (including the author of “Godfather,” Mario Puzo); the decision to shoot the film and its sequel simultaneously in order to increase the return on investment; the fortune thrown at Marlon Brando for just a few minutes of screen time as Superman’s Kryptonian father; the conflicts between director Richard Donner and his producers that led to his ouster before the sequel was completed (Richard Lester stepped in): All in all, the process was as industrial as building a car.

But all that fades away the moment the movie begins. The visual effects, most notably the Zoptic front-projection system that made Superman’s flight convincing, won an Oscar. The star-studded supporting cast, with Margot Kidder as a vivacious Lois Lane, Brando as Jor-El and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, gave the thing gravitas. Finally, there’s Superman himself: Christopher Reeve, in a performance so effortlessly charming yet rooted in thoughtful physicality, it forever associated him with the role. His instantaneous change in posture and expression when he switches between Superman and Clark Kent remains a wonder to behold.

The Reaganomicon: ‘RoboCop’ (1987)

Where to watch: Stream it on DirecTV Now or IFC; rent it from iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

Despite the success of “Superman” and its even better sequel, “Superman II,” the standard superhero seemed a little superfluous in the 1980s. With President Ronald Reagan telling tales of good versus evil straight out of a comic book, and action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis sculpting their physiques to cartoon-worthy levels, who needed spandex?

Enter “RoboCop,” the sci-fi satirist Paul Verhoeven’s biting black comedy in ultraviolent action-hero drag. In a dystopian future where hospitals are driven by profit and police departments use military-grade weaponry — imagine all that! — a badly-wounded rookie cop (played by the unlikely action star Peter Weller) is fitted by a creepy corporation with cybernetic enhancements that increase his lethality but wipe out his memory. The story of a super-cop literally fighting against his own programming in order to reclaim his humanity — in a city being stripped for parts by the superrich — is as poignant now as it was in Reagan’s America.

Blockbuster Begins: ‘Batman’ (1989)

Where to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

Almost as soon as the TV show “Batman” went off the air, darker material began to ferment in the comic-book depictions of the Caped Crusader and his peers. “Batman” was the blockbuster that brought this grimmer vision roaring into multiplexes and the mainstream consciousness. Directed with confident neo-noir style by Tim Burton, the movie pivoted off works like the cartoonist Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” and employed an array of talent — the composer Danny Elfman; the production designer Anton Furst; and Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson as Batman and his psychopathic nemesis, the Joker — working at or near their career peaks.

While “Batman” remains one of the genre’s best films (the best, if you want my opinion), its industry innovations sometimes overshadow its aesthetic excellence. The movie’s PG-13 rating became standard for tent-pole movies, while its record-breaking box office enshrined opening-weekend revenue as a key measurement of a film’s success. “Batman” was an inescapable last gasp of Big ’80s monoculture; that summer, the bat symbol was nearly as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola.

I’m really glad my editors at the New York Times talked me into writing a cultural history of superheroes on film and television, touching on changing mores, aesthetics, technology, showbiz, and American society in general. I’m very proud of how this piece turned out, especially of the effort we made to give proper credit to the characters’ original creators. And there’s links to where you can watch every single movie and show on the list online!

Bill Mantlo’s versatile writing and Ed Hannigan’s expressive art helped these au courant characters make a strong first impression. The two collaborated on the pair’s design in particular, and the results speak for themselves, from the swirling void of Ty’s dark cloak to the daring dagger-shaped décolletage of Tandy’s bodysuit. Not to mention that the color contrast between the characters’ costumes are a bit like if the black-and-white outfits that artist John Romita Sr. designed for fearsome figures like the Punisher or Bullseye had been split into two people. The look also anticipated artist Mike Zeck’s design for Spider-Man’s black costume and its eventual incarnation as Venom a few years later.

C&D earned their own mini-series in 1983 and an ongoing comic two years later, both illustrated by Rick Leonardi. But despite, or perhaps because of, their combination of two of the era’s biggest trends – teen teams and “good guys” who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty – they never wound up hitting the heights of other anti-heroes. Still, the strength of the design, and the mixed-up-kids-bound-by-fate concept, kept them from fading from the spotlight completely.

Sadly, both Mantlo and Hannigan have suffered debilitating health crises: Mantlo was permanently incapacitated after being struck by a hit-and-run driver in 1992, while Hannigan suffers from multiple sclerosis. Despite the strength of their creation, the financial struggles endemic in the dog-eat-dog comics industry have made them causes célèbres for fans and charities alike.

I wrote a primer on Cloak and Dagger in anticipation of their new Freeform tv series for Rolling Stone.

Call it the Lilyhammer of the Gods.

In February 2012, Netflix established its creative model right out of the gate. Its first original show, Lilyhammer, starred “Little” Steven Van Zant, fresh from playing a mobster on The Sopranos…as a mobster, albeit one who’s relocated to Norway for witness-protection purposes.

The road from Lilyhammer‘s quirky Sopranos rehash to Stranger Things‘ unabashed theft from ’80s pop-culture staples is not a particularly long one. All that changed was the company’s self-identification as a creator of original content rather than an online video store, and its subsequent accumulation of user data and development of a predictive algorithm to deliver the goods.

Many of the network’s original series —”original” being a relative term— speak to this desire to please the crowd with things that have already pleased them. Why have only one off-beat comedy about the mildly crazy lives of young people set in New York (Master of None), for example, when you can also have one in Chicago (Easy) and Los Angeles (Love) as well? It’s too bad Donald Glover titled his show Atlanta and took it to FX, or else I’m sure Netflix would have something on the docket for that youth-culture mecca as well. In a more traditional move, reboots are common, from the campy (Fuller House) to the acclaimed (One Day at a Time). And that little row of Netflix Original rectangles contains enough grim-visaged cops, crooks, and killers to look like a photo array you’d use to identify suspects in the world’s most focus-grouped crime.

Which is what makes shows like Dark, The Punisher, and Suburra: Blood on Rome stand out. From the outside, these 2017 debuts seem like status-quo programming. But each veered of the course they could have cruised down effortlessly, taking creative risks that yielded entertaining and provocative results.

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action: Over at Decider I wrote about the possibility that Dark, The Punisher, and Suburra represent a creative turning point for Netflix, in which the sheer volume of material the network puts out is now enabling some shows to complicate and interrogate their genre elements rather than serving them up straight.

2. The Young Pope: “Sexy and I Know It” by LMFAO

“Sexy and I Know It” is Paolo Sorrentino’s ambitious, emotional, confrontational series about an autocratic American-born pope in miniature. Granted, using LMFAO to represent your drama about faith, loneliness, power, corruption, and lies is a bit counterintuitive compared to, say, summing up Twin Peaks with a song from the Twin Peaks score. That’s the joke, in part: It’s very stupid, and therefore very funny, to watch the Holy Father dress up for his first address to the College of the Cardinals while Redfoo drawls about wearing a Speedo at the beach so he can work on his ass tan. Girl, look at that body … of Christ?!

But like so much of The Young Pope, there’s a much deeper and more serious meaning beneath the craziness and camp. To wit, the brand of tyrannical, uncompromising religion the pontiff formerly known as Lenny Belardo (Jude Law) embraces depends on craziness and camp. Look at the obscene decadence of his subsequent entrance to the Sistine Chapel, borne on a litter like an emperor of old. Listen to his megalomaniacal speech, demanding that the Church remake itself in his bizarre and imperious image. Watch how he demands his followers demonstrate their obedience by literally kissing his feet. It’s a contrast to the self-aware silliness of “Sexy and I Know It,” yes, but it’s a contrast achieved by taking that song’s boasts as deadly serious claims to superiority. He’s got passion in his pants and he ain’t afraid to show it. Spiritually speaking, anyway.

I wrote about the 10 best music cues on TV this year for Vulture. As is always the case with lists of this nature when I write them, it is objectively right and I shall brook no dissent.

There’s really only one thing I want to talk about where the season finale of The Punisher is concerned:

“You know, long as I was at war, y’know, I never thought about, uh, what would happen next, what I was gonna do when it was over. But I guess that’s it, y’know. I think that might be the hardest part: the silence. The silence when the gunfire ends. How do…how do you live in that? I guess…I guess that’s what you’re trying to figure out, huh? It’s what you guys are doing. You’re working on it. I respect that. I just…Um, if you’re gonna look at yourself, really look in the mirror, you gotta…yeah, you gotta admit who you are. But not just to yourself — you gotta admit it to everybody else. First time, as long as I can remember, I don’t have a war to fight. And I guess if I’m gonna be honest, I just…I’m scared.”

These remarkable words end the onscreen saga of Marvel’s most brutal antihero, a cold-blooded killer of Bad Guys whose logo has become literally emblematic of men, many of whom have been trained and authorized by the state to pursue a career in fully sanctioned bad-guy killing at home or abroad. They cut that whole dark myth off at the knees. More than that, they stand as a rebuke to the whole superhero genre, which as inspiring and uplifting as it can be nevertheless boils down to the idea that extrajudicial violence can put the world to rights. Here’s a superhero who wields that violence more effectively and remorselessly than any other — indeed, his proficiency in that violence is his sole superpower. And the message his show wants to leave us with about him? The note it chooses to end on? He kills because he’s scared not to.

I really can’t say enough about how stunning the final words of “Memento Mori,” The Punisher’s Season One finale, were to me when they slipped out of Frank’s mouth just before that last cut to black. There’s not a single live-action superhero adaptation I can think of that comes anywhere near that level of self-critique, or has anything approaching its courage to question the very wish-fulfillment elements its audience has come to see.

[…]

But that’s the story of The Punisher’s Netflix incarnation: A series that’s much better than it needed to be, could have been, and quite possibly even should have been when you consider the character’s pop culture profile. Its thoughtful approach to potentially fascistic subject matter, its suite of quietly powerful performances, its undercurrent of sexual and romantic tension, and its willingness to hold its protagonist’s feet of clay to the fire make it one of the best superhero adaptations of all time.

I reviewed the season finale of The Punisher for Decider. What a pleasant surprise this show turned out to be.

When I said in my review of the previous episode that Frank’s hotel battle was the all-out action extravaganza we were waiting for, I now realize I was wrong. It’s not action that a Punisher show promises—it’s punishment. And punishment is what we get. From director Kevin Hook’s eerie establishing shots of his nearly-abandoned headquarters’ empty rooms and corridors through the moment Frank suits up in his skull-emblazoned armor and into the ensuing massacre itself, the show positions Frank as an executioner rather than a soldier.

And he’s starring not in an adventure film but a horror flick. The way Castle dispatches the first few goons one by one, emerging from behind as if he’s a part of the walls themselves that somehow came alive, evokes the slaughter of the Colonial Marines when they enter the hive in Aliens. The industrial-basement setting is obviously a favorite of any number of forgettable genre flicks and shows by now, but when you factor in the gore and sadism you’re not far removed from mid-‘00s torture porn like Saw or Hostel. Meanwhile, Frank’s imposing physical comportment and even some of the music cues (I swear I heard a few Friday the 13th-style “chh chh chh”s) are straight-up slasher stuff, even before you see him walking around with a severed head.

Oh yeah, did I not mention the severed head? Maybe I should have led with that.

Frank Castle may draw on, and parallel, a long tradition of violent macho men famous during the character’s initial flourishing in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But neither John McClane nor John Rambo nor even the Terminator ever severed all the muscles in a man’s legs, allowing him to crawl across the floor leaving a snail trail of blood before finally plugging him in the head. The point is that while Frank’s rampage is thrilling in the sense of getting your blood up, you’ll never mistake it for anything but murder, as prolonged and ugly as it gets.

I reviewed the extremely violent eleventh episode of The Punisher for Decider.

“Virtue of the Vicious” is the knock-down drag-out action extravaganza we’ve been waiting for all season. Almost all of our major players — Frank Castle, Billy Russo, Dinah Madani, Karen Page, Lewis Wilson — are concentrated in a high-rise hotel, fighting through explosions, tear gas, and the gunfire of half a dozen different agencies and free agents in kill-or-be-killed scenarios. Secrets are revealed. Antagonists are killed. The Punisher escapes capture using a firehose and a zipline like a homicidal Tarzan. If that’s all the episode did, it would be fun to watch. But to my continued delight, it does much, much more than it has to.

Remarkably, the episode takes a fractured approach to its narrative structure, splitting itself between mutliple, overlapping, sometimes contradictory points of view and bouncing back and forth in time to cover the periods before, during, and after the attack. The effect is part Rashomon, part Lost, and all impressive in its willingness to break the Marvel/Netflix mold by risking confusion on the part of its audience, who could otherwise assume that when the show starts talking about an attack that had already happened, we’d somehow skipped an episode. (I had to double-check myself.) Like Vincent D’Onofrio’s bizarre stop-start vocal cadence for Wilson Fisk, or Tom Hardy’s Falstaffian theatricality as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, anything a live-action superhero adaptation does that’s more than the bare necessary-and-sufficient minimum to convey ideas and images should be celebrated.

I reviewed the hotel-fight episode of The Punisher for Decider. It’s nuts how strong the Frank/Karen – Bernthal/Woll stuff is, by the way.

“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.

I have a lot to say about “Cold Steel,” the eighth episode of The Punisher’s first season. That’s because the episode has a lot to say itself. But (deep breath) here’s how I’m going to start: As weird as this feels to write…uh, The Punisher is an incredibly sexy show? Like, it’s sexy in the way that The Americans is sexy — a complex, uncomfortable form of sexiness that’s all the hotter and harder to shake for it.

Sometimes that speaks for itself, like in the shower scene between Dinah and Billy. (I mean, come on.) And once again, there’s careful attention paid to the eroticism of aftermath and afterglow. When Dinah gets dressed out-of-focus afterwards, then leans over to kiss Billy’s battle scar? Ooftah. And before long their intensely intimate half-naked embrace by the bedside gives way, unexpectedly, to Billy’s tale of his rotten childhood in an orphanage, where a “good Samaritan” who played with the kids broke his arm in three places after Billy fought off the man’s attempt to molest him. The man called him “pretty,” a word that clearly triggers his rage when he kills Sam Stein later in the episode, after hearing Stein call him that over a listening device. All the while, of course, Billy is running game on Dinah, making an honest confession of his troubled past as a way to better preserve his cover. From the sex to the deceit to the weaponized truth, it’s straight out of the Elizabeth and Philip Jennings playbook.

Then there’s Frank’s dangerous liaison with Sarah Lieberman, his partner Micro’s “widow.” When he arrives at her house with flowers as a pretext to check up on the malfunctioning camera feed to Micro’s headquarters, it sparks long-dormant feelings of emotional and physical closeness in Sarah. Actor Jaime Ray Newman is every bit as gorgeous as Jon Bernthal, Ben Barnes, and Amber Ray Revah, so yeah, there’s that. But the real heat in her scene with Frank comes not from her looks, or his, but from the sense of growing desire — their inhibitions slipping away with wine, their body language slowly leaning into one another, the way the conversation dances around the issue at hand, the way her ostensibly platonic hug is an obvious pretext for her to work up the nerve to make the first move. When they finally kiss I was fanning myself, folks, not gonna lie. Wooooo, Lord.

There winds up being just as much to say about The Punisher Episode 8′s handling of abuse and trauma as there is about its handling of sex — you can see some of it above already — but sex sells so that’s what I’m using to link you to my review for Decider. As I say in the review, man, what an episode.

This is frequently the point where Marvel/Netflix shows run out of both story and steam. Both the woefully overrated Jessica Jones and the enjoyable but bloated Luke Cage made the mistake of dispatching their antagonists early (successfully imprisoning the telepathic rapist Kilgrave in episode 9 of the former, killing off the charismatic ganglord Cottonmouth in episode 7 of the latter), forcing them to generate preposterous plot twists (prison breaks, long-lost brothers, etc.) to run out the time for the rest of the season. Daredevil Season 2 did something similar by wrapping up its initial Punisher storyline by episode 4 before introducing secondary antagonist/love interest Elektra and eventually making the inert ninja master Nobu the season’s big bad, but since Castle never fully went away and Elektra was an entertaining substitute in her own right, it weathered things well enough. Of the shows from this corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe I’ve seen (life’s too short for Iron Fist and The Defenders), only the first season of Daredevil felt like it had a beginning, middle, and end that justified its length, rather than the other way around, and honestly even that could have been tightened up.

So I’m pleasantly surprised to see how engaged I remain in the questions and storylines remaining at this point in The Punisher. I fully expected Frank to successfully plug Agent Orange, a la Jessica locking up Kilgrave or Cottonmouth getting beaten to death by his cousin Mariah. But thanks to bulletproof glass, Frank blew it, and now I’m intrigued to see how he and Micro can overcome the obstacle of a target who sees them coming.

My review of The Punisher Episode 7 contains a brief Comparative Marvel/Netflix Studies lesson.

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.