8. Mindhunter: “M.E.” by Gary Numan

After a shaky first season that was all over the map in terms of what we were supposed to feel about its main characters — remember the stiff Holden Ford romance subplot? — Mindhunter settled into a comfortably macabre groove in its second season, chronicling the drudgery involved in tracking down some of the world’s worst people. In the case of the musical montage set to “Cars” singer Gary Numan’s synth stomper “M.E.,” the drudgery is the whole point.

The sequence follows FBI Agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench as they stake out bridges where they hope to trap the perpetrator of the Atlanta Child Murders. It’s a joyless slog of bad sleep, shitty room service, buzzing mosquitoes, muggy weather, cigarette smoke, and ever-shortening patience. Numan’s song, sung from the perspective of a machine that survived the apocalypse alone, provides a surprisingly apt accompaniment to a routine that breaks Ford and Tench down until they feel unmoored from the very humanity they’re trying to protect.

In case you missed it—I know I did!—I wrote about the ten best TV music cues of the year for Vulture.

Here’s something I wrote about an episode of The Punisher in which the female lead extracts a bullet from Jon Bernthal’s bare ass.

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 [the Punisher] 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.

And then there are the moments of triage that occur after the battle is over. I’m thinking Luke Cage tending to Misty Knight’s mangled arm for damn near an entire episode (overlong thanks to Netflix Bloat, but still notable), or Frank Castle and Karen Page leaning into each other in an elevator after spending an entire episode trying to avoid being murdered by a mentally ill gunman. In this case it’s “Rachel” (if that is her real name), the shifty fugitive Frank’s been protecting for two episodes, removing a slug from Frank’s right buttcheek. Earlier in the episode, it’s her taking his boot off for him when he proves unable to do it himself. You see the same principle at work when Daniel Craig hugs a crying Eva Green in the shower after a killing spree in Casino Royale, or when Bruce Willis has a heart to heart with Reginald Vel Johnson while he picks shards of glass out of his bare feet in Die Hard, or even when Patrick Swayze and Kelly Lynch meet cute while she staples a knife wound in his side in my beloved Road House. Sylvester Stallone, the actor who at his best most reminds me of what Jon Bernthal does, constructed two entire franchises around the idea that there’s something interesting about watching his perfect body get beaten to shit. Moments like this make the violence real and draw those of us who’ve never experienced such combat into the moment by reminding us we all share the same basic physical vehicle for navigating the world around us.

When I went searching for this quote I’d forgotten all about including Road House as an example of the tendency I’m discussing, but there you have it. The first thing Dr. Elizabeth Clay does with Dalton, after ribbing him for having gotten the shit kicked out of him over and over for years, is staple shut the gash in his side. She’s up close and personal for this, face inches away from armpit and chest hair and nipple. Often she looks up and grins at him, and if you’ve ever seen the phrase “slow smile” used in reference to a sexy person in a book and want an illustration of the concept, you’ve got one. I’m sure I don’t need to underline what the relative positioning of their heads suggests. I mean, this is a person who meets the man she will fall in love with for the first time when he’s shirtless and waiting for her to touch and heal his body. At this point she’s never seen him with a shirt. (Start as you mean to go on, I suppose.) And in the reverse, Dalton first sees the woman he’ll fall in love with when she’s approaching him to inject him with a needle and fire metal staples into his knife wound, a fate to which he stoically submits, other than that he rejects the needle and the dose of anesthesia that comes with it for reasons described in the title of this essay series.

To say that all of this supercharges their subsequent interactions with erotic intimacy is to understate the case considerably. I know people have mixed feelings about their sex scene but if you can watch their first couple of dates without wanting them to bang instantly you’re a stronger person than I am. It all begins here. So does the sexualization of Dalton’s mentor Wade Garrett, whose chemistry with the Doc is phosphorescent and who exposes his pubic hair to her in the course of revealing a scar given to him by a woman as part of their getting-to-know-you evening out as a threesome. I think there are even echoes, faint but audible, of the way Elizabeth looks at Dalton during this scene in how various men who either want to or will commit violence against Dalton look at him as well. When they finally do battle, Jimmy in particular will sexualize that violence.

Considering how resolutely un-sexy most of the bouncer-goon combat is in this film, to inject this pain-pleasure connection into the proceedings and have it pay off frequently moving forward is a minor miracle. Most action movies of the period were content with the corniest, fanserviciest, most sexist, least interesting ways of depicting sex. Road House has some thoughts in its head after all, and they’re kind of dirty.

When was the last time you walked away from a season of a Marvel/Netflix show with basically no complaints? The final bullets of The Punisher Season 2 have flown and I’m just freaking delighted to report that pretty much all of them hit the bullseye. Other than that one episode spent playing for time early in the season, this was…great, just great, just a terrific interpretation of the character of Frank Castle and how to tell stories with him. It avoided all of the usual pitfalls of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s TV end, like doubling up on villains but then not knowing how to balance them, or reaching an obvious endpoint about three-fifths of the way to the finale and then concocting some absurd plot contrivance to keep the story moving. It played to the general strengths of superhero stories, using violence and action to convey outsized emotion and treating the fallout as a metaphor for psychosexual vulnerability. The specifics of the violence and action were brutal, as befits the character. The politics were, in the main, sharp and counterintuitive given the Punisher’s often reactionary fanbase. Every major actor in it was good. Some (Amber Rose Revah, Annette O’Toole, Josh Stewart, Ben Barnes, and especially guest star Deborah Ann Woll) were fascinating. And one, Jon Bernthal, was an all-timer.

I reviewed the season finale of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

Take Officer Frank here, for instance.

Has the Blue Lives Matter Flag Punisher Skull found its human avatar at last? Hardly. Frank’s wearing a uniform he stole from a crooked cop who was going to kill him both for money and out of loyalty to a gangster relative. He’s pictured here sometime between resisting arrest and kidnapping a Republican senator whose industrialist parents are covering up the fact that he’s gay by murdering teenagers. I’m not sure this will stop the meatheads from misappropriating the image, but it will mark them as the morons they are, that’s for sure.

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

The Punisher Season 2 Episode 11 (“The Abyss”) is basically another one of those placeholder episodes. You’ve had a bunch of action, a bunch of violence, and now you’re gonna get an hour of filler before we hit the next stretch of rapids. But unlike the previous dreary episode the season has aired in that vein, this one has Karen Page going for it. Reuniting the Daredevilcostar with her other vigilante platonic-romance partner makes for must-see viewing.

Deborah Ann Woll is so goddamn good in this role at this point. She’s turned Karen into some kind of vulnerability vortex, sucking everyone within a ten foot radius into her maelstrom of pain, care, comfort, and psychosexual entanglement with men who get beat up all the time. Combine that with Jon Bernthal, who’s basically her male equivalent, and…just…man.

Oh man.

Man oh man.

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

“The Dark Hearts of Men.” That’s the title of The PunisherSeason 2 Episode 10, and as they say across the pond, it does what it says on the tin. Juxtaposing the usual one-on-one heart-to-heart conversations the show is built on—this time focusing on what really makes Frank Castle and Billy Russo tick—with all-out savagery and depravity, it’s as extreme a statement as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made to date.

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

The storytelling flaws that keep The Punisher from being even better than it is still linger. With the exception of a very strong cold open in which Frank admits to his small circle of friends that “This is always who I was” and says his wife knew and loved him for it, so said friends should just “Let me be what I’m meant to be,” pretty much every conversation happens in the exact same way. Two people stand or sit together, usually after one of them arrives where the other has been waiting. After that there are two options: Either one character demands to know something and the other character tells them, or one character spills their guts and the other character does so in turn. Billy and Dumont, Anderson Schultz and John Pilgrim, Anderson Schultz and his closeted son David, Pilgrim and some guy who knows a crew of hitters, Curtis and Amy, Frank and a bartender who knows Billy’s location, Madani and Billy, Amy and her old friend and future betrayer Sean, Frank and Amy over the phone, Billy and Dumont again, Madani and Dumont after the latter lures the former to her place, Pilgrim (formerly known as “Robbie, apparently) and his old boss in whatever Nazi gang he used to run with, Amy and Frank after she shoots a person for the first time…you get the picture. You can tweak it around the margins a bit—Curtis and Amy are both in the same place when they start their little chat, Dumont and Billy are in bed during one of theirs, at one point Curtis talks to multiple veterans instead of just one—but virtually every human interaction on this show could be staged like My Dinner with Andre.

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

The Punisher’s chief weapon is surprise. Surprise, and fear. Fear and surprise. His two weapons are fear and surprise, and ruthless efficiency…His threeweapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to his slain family…His four—no. Amongst his weapons— amongst his weaponry—are such elements as fear, surprise….I’ll start again. Amongst his weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to his slain family, and a nice black uniform—oh, damn.

All praises due to Monty Python, of course, but the Spanish Inquisition has nothing on Frank Castle. He shares pretty much all of their weaponry, plus one that goes unlisted but is the whole point of the thing: humor. No, really! Hardly for the first time this season —Billy Russo had a laugh-out-loud moment last episode when he talks about how he’s learned lost “my company…apparently,” the latter tacked on as a can-you-believe-I-can’t-remember-this-shit afterthought— The Punisher Season 2 Episode 8 (“My Brother’s Keeper”) kept me entertained as much with well-executed moments of comedy as with guns and psychopathy.

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

You know how I spent the last review comparing the relationship between Billy “Jigsaw” Russo and Dr. Krista Dumont to the one between the Joker and Dr. Harleen Quinzel?

Yeah. If you need me, I’ll be over here, awaiting my Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Episode 7 of this season of The Punisher is titled “One Bad Day.” I know, I know: one bad day? Do any of these characters have any other kind of day? But the title references a key component of the definitive, if not technically canonical, Joker origin story, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke. The thesis there is that all it took is one awful, awful day (albeit one that culminated in an acid bath) to turn a down-on-his-luck family man and wannabe standup comic into the deadliest serial killer on the planet. The Joker, who only vaguely remembered the details of his own life pre-Clown Prince, was determined to test this thesis on Commissioner Gordon, whom he kidnapped, stripped naked, and forced to look at gigantic photos of his daughter Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon, also stripped naked, after the Joker shot her in the spine, paralyzing her from the waist down.(It’s a problematic fave.) So it’s hardly like the show is trying to hide its homage to the Distinguished Competition’s supervillain supercouple.

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

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!

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.