Marvel's The Punisher

© by Gerald So | 11:00 p.m.

The Punisher is far from my favorite comics character, but after a long week, including a planned neighborhood power outage and three days deciding my 2018 healthcare package, I happily dived into the full first season, which premiered on Netflix today.

Introduced in Season 2 of Daredevil, this show of his own fleshes out and humanizes Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal). Building on the Daredevil arc of Frank discovering his former commanding officer was behind a heroin ring, the main plot concerns the cover-up of unsanctioned CIA Operation Cerberus, which tasked Frank and fellow Force Recon marines with capturing high-value targets in Afghanistan.

As we begin, Frank is doing a good job letting the world believe he is dead while carrying out personal missions of vengeance. Phone calls from a mystery man calling himself Micro (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) draw Frank into the plot, exposing him to pursuits by Homeland Security agent Dinah Madani (Amber Rose Revah) and former Cerberus operators.

The Punisher is tonally similar to Luke Cage in its street-level action, but more realistic because none of its characters have superpowers. Frank has only his considerable tactical prowess and incredible will to survive, the latter shown by imagery of Frank's thoughts, sometimes diverging far from what happens to his physical body.

As he comes to know and collaborate with Micro, Frank reveals the people he trusts, people then to whom he is inevitably vulnerable. As narratively sound and satisfying as the show is, be warned it also features violence, gore, and sex. Taste for any of these is up to you as viewer.