WARNING: This article contains spoilers for the first six episodes of Marvel's The Punisher, arriving Friday, Nov. 17, on Netflix.


There's no pretending that Marvel's The Punisher isn't violent; in the premiere alone, Jon Bernthal's Frank Castle kills at least 14 men, with guns, with a van, with a sledgehammer, with his bare hands. But strangely, surprisingly, the Netflix drama isn't a glorification of violence, like some '70s or '80s revenge thriller. It's far more nuanced than that, concerned not as much with bloodshed -- but make no mistake, there is bloodshed -- as with its causes and consequences.

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That's because The Punisher isn't about violence, not really. It's about grief and guilt; it's about trying, and often failing, to move past trauma. It's also about the marginalized, embodied, of course, by Frank Castle, but also by other veterans who return from Afghanistan, from Iraq, from wherever, and find themselves out of place in society. Virtually all of its key players in the series are grappling with loss, and the ghosts of their pasts, but none more so than Castle.

In the drama's opening montage, he hunts down the last remaining members of the Kitchen Irish, the Mexican Cartel and the Dogs of Hell, the three gangs involved in the shootout that killed his family, and then burns the flak jacket emblazoned with the iconic skull, symbolizing the end of his crusade. But like any combat veteran, Castle knows the war is never truly over. Haunted by visions of his smiling family, pleasant memories that frequently contort into grotesque horrors, Castle effectively sentences himself to hard labor, breaking up concrete from morning until night on a construction site. It's one-part punishment, one-part salvation from the nightmares that stalk him in his prison cell of an apartment.

Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle and Nicolette Pierini as Lisa Castle on The Punisher

Disguised behind a bushy beard, Castle adopts the alias Pete Castiglione (in the comics he illegally changed his surname from Castiglione to Castle so he could reenlist for a third tour in Vietnam) and largely keeps to himself, except for occasional visits to his friend Curtis Hoyle (Jason R. Moore), who's among the few people that know The Punisher survived the explosion at the docks. That changes, however, when he's tracked down by David Lieberman (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), aka Micro, a former National Security Agency analyst caught up in a conspiracy centered around a video of an execution carried out by Castle in Afghanistan. They have a common enemy: The same people who framed Micro as a traitor and gunned him down in public, forcing him to go underground, are also responsible for the murders of Castle's wife and kids.

The oddest of Odd Couples, Castle and Micro form an uneasy alliance dedicated to exacting revenge against everyone involved in the bloody conspiracy, intended to cover up the execution of an Afghanistan National Police officer who learned too much about a heroin operation run out of a U.S. military base. (Remember Clancy Brown's Col. Schoonover from Daredevil Season 2? It's all connected.)

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The first six episodes of The Punisher, provided by Netflix for review, are riveting, with twin investigations into the slowly unraveling conspiracy -- by Castle and Micro, and by U.S. Homeland Security Agent Dinah Madani (Amber Rose Revah) -- punctuated by intense combat sequences and even a car chase. However, the strengths of the series come through in the quieter moments, when it reveals its surprising emotional core. The most difficult scenes to watch don't involve gunfire and bloodshed, but rather the harsh exposure of the anguish barely contained within these characters.

Micro on The Punisher
Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Micro on The Punisher

Micro is in many ways a fun-house mirror version of Castle. Following his own "death," Micro wired his home with cameras, allowing him to monitor his wife and two children (a girl and a boy, like Castle) from the confines of his underground bunker, yet unable to ever interact with them. Trapped in his own quiet hell, he's doomed to play voyeur to the slow disintegration of his family. Castle, as Pete Castiglione, is free to visit them, first to send a message to Micro, that he knows his true identity, and then ... well, maybe because he finds in the "widowed" Sarah (Jaime Ray Newman) someone who understands loss, and maybe because he sees in the Liebermans shades of the family ripped away from him.

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Deborah Ann Woll's Karen Page knows loss, too, although Matt Murdock's presumed death in the finale of The Defenders isn't mentioned in these early episodes. But grief is written across Woll's expressive face, alongside the relief at seeing Castle again, and her concern for where his relentless crusade will lead. She laments "this endless, echoing loneliness," telling Castle, "I want there to be an after, for you."

Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle and Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page on The Punisher

However, there isn't likely to be an after, for Castle or for most anyone else in this world (although he clearly hopes the Liebermans can be made whole again, to experience a happiness now foreign to him). Through a veterans support group run by Castle's friend Curtis Hoyle, who lost a leg in Afghanistan, we're introduced to Lewis Walcott (Daniel Webber), a disillusioned young man struggling to find a place in civilian life. After nearly shooting his own father, he digs a foxhole in his backyard because he can't get used to sleeping in a bed again. Walcott believes he's found a means of escape in Anvil, the private military corporation founded by Castle's slick-talking best friend Billy Russo (Ben Barnes), but who can trust the guy who sleeps in a foxhole to watch their backs? Rejected, Walcott turns to blustery fellow veteran O'Connor (Delaney Williams), only to learn he's peddled lies about his own service. For Walcott, home is little more than betrayal and disappointment, which emerge almost as a secondary theme of the drama.

But The Punisher is Bernthal's series, and as compelling as some of the other performances are (Moss-Bachrach and Woll, in particular), it's the star who truly shines. Shifting from a sympathetic antagonist in Daredevil's second season to the protagonist here, Bernthal is able to move past gritted teeth and growled pronouncements to display a wide range of emotions. His Frank Castle emerges as a three-dimensional character, smiling wistfully while reminiscing about his wife's ziti or the way she swayed to music, and regretfully acknowledging his shortcomings as a husband and a father. He's still filled with rage and driven by revenge, but he's also haunted by guilt over what he did (in Afghanistan and at home), and what he wasn't able to do.

Bernthal delivers one of the strongest performance of his career, and of Marvel's Netflix dramas. Although it's a little difficult to imagine The Punisher as a multi-season series -- how long can his crusade continue without losing its emotional resonance and devolving into farce? -- these first six episodes are so engaging, so challenging and so unlike the rest of the previous offerings in Marvel's Netflix stable, that most viewers will undoubtedly be willing to sign on for another tour of duty.


Arriving Friday, Nov. 17, on Netflix, Marvel's The Punisher stars Jon Bernthal, Ben Barnes, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Amber Rose Revah, Deborah Ann Woll, Daniel Webber, Jason R. Moore, Paul Schulze, Jaime Ray Newman and Michael Nathanson.