Favorite Characters: Frank Castle a.k.a. The Punisher (The Punisher)

It would’ve been relatively easy to make Frank Castle the uncomplicated face of a high-octane revenge scenario, all ultraviolence style and little substance.  And to be sure, Frank’s action scenes, on both Daredevil and The Punisher, are extremely well-done, brutal but deftly crafted and executed.  Frank could’ve been a cool enough character that way, a similar sort of satisfying to watching Hit-Girl in action (although less darkly comic and more just dark.)  Marvel’s Netflix shows, however, resist that temptation, going deeper with Frank so that you never lose sight of the man behind the vendetta (premise spoilers.)

Frank has the tragic backstory of many a comic-book protagonist.  His wife and children were killed, not by his own mistakes, but by his proximity to those of others.  After witnessing something he shouldn’t have, Frank loses his family in a bloody, devastating way.  He’d already been dragging around a lot of damage from his time in the service, and this violent injustice utterly breaks him.  He divorces himself from whatever life he might otherwise have had and devotes himself to taking revenge on everyone in any way connected to the deaths of his loved ones.  In season 2 of Daredevil, he dispatches those who had a hand in the killings one by one, with ruthless efficiency, and in his own series, he moves on to those at the heart of the conspiracy.

The franchise doesn’t absolve Frank’s actions, but it doesn’t condemn him for them, either.  On Daredevil, Matt wants to draw clearly-delineated lines between the Punisher and himself, painting Frank as a dangerous murderer who’s taken the law into his own hands, while Karen gradually begins to see him more as a victim of circumstance who’s responding the only way he can.  But Frank is both of these things, and neither, and more.  He makes immoral decisions about his means of punishing immoral people, and even as he cuts a swathe of bodies through those who destroyed his life, he has certain ethical boundaries that spring up in unexpected places, pulling him just back from the brink of becoming the same as what he hates.  At this point, it’s not even clear what Frank is still doing it for.  I think he’s lost hope of it bringing him release, and he never expected salvation.  But despite the despair and futility behind his quest for vengeance, he can’t give it up.

Frank’s damage runs deep, and in The Punisher especially, that takes center stage.  He’s an imposing figure, a lethal killer who rarely thinks twice about taking a life he’s decided to take, but he’s also a man wracked by PTSD, both from his experience overseas and from the loss of his family.  Bloody memories punctuate his nightmares and waking hours alike, and sometimes, amid all his careful plans of revenge, it’s a struggle for him simply to function.  He sees other veterans try to deal with their demons in different ways, but he’s chosen his own path to address his, even if he knows it won’t bring him any peace.

Relationship Spotlight: David Lieberman & Frank Castle (The Punisher)

Given that both are men who the world at large believes to be dead, it makes sense that Frank and Lieberman find their most significant relationships in The Punisher are with each other.  With such heavy secrets to keep and dangerous enemies to investigate, neither has many other places to turn, and even though the two spend much of the season wishing for anyone else as a partner, they’re mostly left with what they’ve got (spoilers.)

Since faking his death to escape dirty government agents, Lieberman has been holed up in high-tech hideaway, where he watches his family through hidden cameras and uses the web as his information treasure trove.  As such, he’s not exactly socialized or well-adjusted when he discovers that Frank Castle, a.k.a. the Punisher, is alive, and so he reaches out by making creepy phone calls and sending him what for all intents and purposes are incriminating tapes from Frank’s time in Kandahar.  Is it any wonder they don’t get off on the right foot?

Both guys have been put, not just through the wringer, but through the wood-chipper by the U.S. government, and it’s an understatement to say that both have serious trust issues.  Their early relationship is largely a string of incidents of one getting the jump on the other, one blackmailing the other, one imprisoning the other, one threatening the other, and one head-tripping the other.  Because of the horrible things they’ve been through, both feel the need to have the upper hand in the situation, and that means neither is willing to surrender any ground to the other.

But there are bigger things at play here, and ultimately, they have to cede at least a small amount of trust to one another in order to work together to bring down the corrupt soldiers and officials who destroyed their lives.  Even though their partnership is plagued by obvious issues, when they do work as a unit, they’re a force to be reckoned with.  Lieberman’s tech prowess and intelligence-gathering skills are vital in giving Frank the names and details he needs to go after the bad guys, where he puts his own, very bloody skillset to use.

It’s interesting to watch them work.  They’re capable of being so efficient together, but they’re also seriously dysfunctional.  And it’s not just their mutual, justified paranoia – both are also guys with strong opinions who’ve gotten very used to going it alone, and when they clash over mission tactics, they risk derailing what they’re trying to do because neither wants to let the other be right.  At the same time, though, as the season goes on, both realize they really can’t lone-wolf it.  Frank doesn’t have the technical skills Lieberman does, and the higher-ups hide themselves too well for him to find them through anything other than the most covert methods.  And even if Lieberman had Frank’s hardcore military training, he doesn’t have it in him to do what Frank does.

And so, they’re kind of stuck with each other, warily working alongside each other as they work toward the same goal for similar but not identical reasons.  They give each other hell along the way, side-eyeing one another and playing power games to try and convince themselves that they feel safe, but if either of them has a hope of seeing this through to the end, it has to be together.

Relationship Spotlight: Frank Castle & Karen Page (The Defenders)

In Daredevil’s second season, one of its best assets was the addition of the Punisher.  Frank is an intriguing character in his own right and, as a vigilante with a dark side, he provides a neat foil for Matt, but I think he’s at his most interesting when paired with Karen.  Their interactions make up some of the season’s best scenes for both characters, a dynamic that’s carried over into The Punisher (some Frank-Karen-related spoilers.)

Karen first encounters Frank in the midst of a lot of personal upheaval and professional uncertainty.  She’s already been trying to figure out how she feels about the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, and now here comes another vigilante who takes matters much farther and darker than the Devil ever has, brutally murdering drug dealers and gang leaders with ruthless efficiency.  Her desire to make this clear-cut is thwarted.  Murder is wrong, so these murders ought to be wrong, but the more she digs into the Punisher and his tragic history, the more complicated that gets.  He’s been wronged, devastatingly so, and that broke him.  The slaughter he now carries out is, in his mind, equal parts justice and vengeance, and yet the trauma he’s endured doesn’t erase what he’s doing; Karen can’t quite come to a conclusion about that.

It’s further complicated by Karen’s own confusion about herself.  Extreme circumstances in the previous season led her to kill a man, and her feelings of anguish and guilt over that manifest in part through her obsession with the Punisher.  As those around her condemn him as nothing but a murderer, she wonders if she’s really so different.  As she follows the stories of how he only kills the guilty, she wonders how he would judge her.  Everything she feels about the Punisher is tied up in how she feels about herself, and as she becomes increasingly invested in what becomes of him, his chance of salvation becomes hers in a way.

These personal issues draw Karen to the Punisher and his story, and professional entanglements actually bring them together.  When Nelson and Murdock represents Frank in his trial, Karen is instrumental in building his case.  Her obsession fuels her research and evidence-gathering, and it also drives her to take on new roles within the firm (Foggy, recognizing her talents, suggests she become a lawyer herself.)  Frank sees how deep she is into this, and he insists on her conducting his pre-trial interviews.  And while Karen’s interest in journalism begins in season 1, it grows tremendously here, ultimately leading to a career change.  Again, it’s the Punisher and his story that spurs this on:  Karen’s need to know what happened to him, why he does what he does, and how she feels about it.

I’m still in progress on season 1 of The Punisher, but so far, I’m enjoying Karen’s presence in Frank’s story there as well.  With old ghosts haunting him, a man who’s supposed to be dead has allies in short supply, and Karen is one of the few people he can turn to.  He looks to her for information, which she somewhat warily provides.  After everything that went down between them on Daredevil (not to mention Karen’s experiences on The Defenders,) she’s trying to do what she can to help while still maintaining the boundaries she needs.  She’s gone pretty far down the rabbit hole with him, and she needs to know she can keep from getting sucked in.