It’s only been a little more than a year since Netflix released new episodes of the series The Punisher, yet somehow it feels much longer.
When we last left Frank Castle/The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) in the
first season, he had gotten vengeance on those who had killed his family
and had gotten a sort of free pass from the authorities on everything
he’d done since he’d taken out some very bad people. The second season
starts a year or two later with Frank traveling the country and ending
up in Michigan where he finds a connection with Beth Quinn (Alexa
Davalos) a bartender. But because The Punisher is, well, The Punisher things go bad one night and Frank winds up taking on a half-dozen or so
trained killers out to kidnap a girl named Amy Bendix (Giorgia
Whigham). Beth takes a bullet in the melee and Frank and Amy go on the
run since Frank isn’t about to leave her vulnerable and alone and that’s
pretty much the first episode.
There’s been quite a few attempts at “cracking” the character of the
Punisher outside of the comics the last few decades, none of which we
even able to get at the core of the character nor were too successful.
It’s ironic, then, that the one place that was finally able to deliver a
Punisher I’d recognize from the comics was Netflix rather than the big
screen. Always before Netflix he was too broadly drawn or the story was
too far removed from what made him work in the comics, but other than
updating a few things here and there the Punisher on Netflix is pretty
much the Punisher from the comics.
With one exception.
Usually, the comic version of the Punisher is like the Energize
Bunny, he keeps going and going. He never quits and there’s always one
more bad guy out there he needs to confront in the next issue. What was
so interesting with the Netflix Punisher was that at the end of the
first season his job is complete, the people who killed his family are
dead so his job was finished. This Punisher had a focused set of goals,
and when they were done his job was done.
So what was next? Well, ex-Marine/ex-Punisher Frank like a lot of
vets wasn’t sure. After all he’s been through what’s he supposed to do?
Get a job at the grocery? Go work at a factory? Instead, Frank chose to
travel the US, but rather than on the back of a Harley like so many
people do he chose to see the country via a van. While you can stay
ahead of your problems for a while when you roam like that, your
problems are always there as Frank discovers.
Here, it’s not so much there are still people out to get him since most of them are either dead or under the impression that he’s dead, Frank’s problem is that he can’t keep out of a fight no matter
what the consequences. And the consequence here are that Frank loses the
one chance he has at happiness since the death of his family to be with
Beth.
Which is what I’d kind’a expect in a series called The Punisher. We don’t tune in to see Frank Castle happy and content. We tune in to see him brooding, and going after the bad people.
Side note — I was very happy to see Bernthal reunited with Davalos
here. They played star-crossed lovers too in the mostly unseen TNT Mob City series of a few years back. That show by Frank Darabont had Bernthal as
1950s LA police detective Joe Teague with Davalos playing Teague’s
vampy girlfriend Jasmine Fontaine.
It’s going to be a long fall. Usually, when the weather starts
changing and the nights start getting longer I look forward to staying
in and checking out the new series on TV. But this fall isn’t looking
too good. Sure, there’s a few things to watch, but not enough for my
taste and only a handful of series on network TV. The template the
networks have taken for the 2018–2019 season is to debut a lot of
lame-looking sitcoms and tired cop/hospital/lawyer procedural dramas
that all seem to have been done before.
The good news is it isn’t all bad, there are quite a few new
series on cable and streaming services to look forward to. The bad news
is that most of these series don’t start airing until much later in the
year and even then quite a few not until 2019. Oh well, there’s always
horror movies marathons come Halloween to fill the gap.
New series
The Passage
On FOX the vampire thriller The Passage starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar is set to put a lot of stakes into the
hearts of the undead ghouls in the one network show I want to check out
in January. While the novel the series is based on took place mostly in a
future overrun with the blood-suckers, this new TV show looks to moved
things back a bit to the pre-apocalypse when these vampires were just
being created in the lab.
Manifest on NBC about a plane that takes
off one day but lands five years later with everyone on board not
realizing the time-jump departs September 24. I think I’d be more
looking forward to this show if it didn’t look like a clone of many
other series before it, especially Lost.
Matt Weiner’s follow-up series to his uber-successful Mad Man entitled The Romanoffs is set to debut on Amazon Prime October 12. I’m not totally sure how
this one’s going to go, but reportedly this anthology series will focus
on characters who think they’re related to the Russian royal family the
Romanoffs.
After the animated Star Wars: Rebels series on Disney ended earlier this year comes the new series Star Wars Resistance also on Disney October 13. This one is set to take place around the time of the current film series but before the events of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Nightflyers
SYFY is once again trying their hand at traditional sci-fi series with Nightflyers,
based on the George R.R. Martin book of the same name. Not at all
looking to cash in on Martin’s name and the fact that he wrote Game of Thrones and therefore SYFY can promote Nightflyers as such, here, it’s the near-future and as the ship of the same name
explores the solar system it uncovers something that threatens everyone
abroad the ship. Nightflyers does sound a bit derivative of things like Event Horizon (1997), except that the novel the series is based on was written way back in 1980.
The Netflix series Another Life has an
astronaut (Katie Sackhoff) leading a mission to find the origins of an
alien artifact, but this artifact might be deadly and the mission
one-way. Maybe the cast of Another Life and Nightflyers can team-up since their two shows sure sound a lot alike.
The iconic comic book mini-series then film Watchmen will become an HBO TV series of the same name sometime next year.
There’s not a whole lot that is known about this one, other than
apparently it doesn’t totally follow the story of the comics but instead
takes place in the same comic universe.
And as for new shows this season, that’s about it. I’m sure I’ll
checkout some of those lame-looking sitcoms hoping to be surprised with
something interesting, but I’m not holding my breath.
Returning series
Fortunately, there are a few returning shows this year to look forward to.
The Good Place
Returning network shows that will premiere this year include The Good Place,
the sitcom about a group of people lead by Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen
Bell) stuck between heaven and hell returns to NBC on Thursday,
September 27 and The Orville on FOX that is Seth MacFarlane’s love-letter to the classic series Star Trek squeaks into 2018 with its second season debut on Sunday, December 30.
Two Netflix superhero series return this year too. First up is the second season of Iron Fist which drops September 7. Then, sometime later in the year, comes a third season of Daredevil who appear last season on The Defenders. I honestly don’t really remember what happened in the second season of Daredevil since it aired more than a year and a half ago at this point. Weren’t there lots of ninjas?
Doctor Who
Doctor Who returns for its 11th season of
the modern incarnation of the character October on BBC America here in
the US. The big news with Doctor Who is that after 55 years and
more than a dozen versions of the character, this time the lead will be
played by a woman, Jodie Whittaker. Personally, I still like Peter
Davison’s version of the character the best, no matter how many Matt
Smith fans out there I have to go all “Sharks and Jets” with.
The Sundance series Deutschland 86 will
return for its second season October 25. The first season was about an
East German spy played by Jonas Nay infiltrating West Germany in order
to steal military secrets and had tinges of The Americans to it. The third season looks to pick up three years from there and just a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The British sci-fi series Black Mirror will
serve up more creepy goodness sometime this winter on Netflix. Even
after four seasons I still really dig this show and I think it’s
partially because even though there’s already been those four seasons, Black Mirror is an anthology series so each episode is a story unto itself. And to
date there’s been just 20 episodes of it produced in total, which is
less than how many episodes of a modern network series are produced in
just one year, so the show is still fresh.
Star Trek: Discovery
A second season of Star Trek: Discovery returns to CBS All Access this January. The first season of Discovery got good enough reviews from Trek fans, if those were the only people seemingly watching it, and the
second season looks to bring in the big guns to the show, namely the USS
Enterprise along with its Captain Kir… errr… I mean Captain Pike (Anson
Mount).
The Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things will
return for its third season summer of 2019. Last time we left the
plucky kids of Hawkins, Indiana seemingly having beaten the evil forces
that had emerged from the “upside down,” but if other sci-fi shows have
taught me anything it’s that every victory against evil is just
temporary. Until the final episode of the series, that is.
My favorite superhero series The Punisher also returns to Netflix sometime next year. The first season ended with
Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) having totally accepted the mantel of the
skull wearing vigilante by blasting all the baddies to smithereens with
the second season looking to pick up from there.
The Terror
A surprise to me this spring was just how much I dug the first season of the AMC series The Terror about an ill-fated expedition to the Arctic the 19th century. The
second season will reportedly have a new story and focus on Japanese
Americans during the second world war since the first season ended with
pretty much the entire cast dead. That’s not a spoiler since the first
season was based on a real-life expedition that ended in tragedy and I’m
not sure you can consider a historical fact a “spoiler.”
A third season of the critical darling then critically derided True Detective will debut on HBO sometime next year four years after the second. The
third season looks to “one-up” the first since that told a story over
two time periods by telling a story over three.
Shows that I think will premiere sometime in 2019
Mindhunter
My favorite series of the 2017–2018 season , Mindhunter is set to begin its second season on Netflix next year. This show about
the creation of a serial killer hunting unit within the FBI in the
1970s was one of the most well-written and acted shows on TV in recent
memory. Plus the series is co-produced and had a few episodes directed
by David Fincher which is always a good thing.
The sci-fi drama The Expanse will leave its
home of three seasons on SYFY and move over to the Amazon Prime service
next year. The third season ended on a high note, so I’m extremely
excited to see where the show will go from here.
Another sci-fi drama, this time Westworld,
is set to debut its third season on HBO. Now, I won’t even pretend to
say that I understood what all happened in the second season finale of Westworld, I don’t think it was quite on the level of the final episode of Lost or anything, but I suppose time will tell.
There was realistically no way I wasn’t going to like the first season of the Netflix series The Punisher. I’ve been a fan of the character most of my life, have collected Punisher comics for forever now and have watched all of the Punisher movies to date. So even if this new Netflix The Punisher was just good, I’d probably still be gushing over it no matter what. So it feels good to be able to write that The Punisher on Netflix isn’t just good, it’s great and is my favorite Marvel Netflix series to date.
Jon Bernthal
What I was surprised most with The Punisher was just how it deviated from where I thought the series was going to go from where the character ended up in the last season of Daredevil. It would make perfect sense if the first season of The Punisher would follow Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) hunting down the men who killed his family with later seasons having the character expand and doing something more. Except that’s not what happened. Here, in the first ten minutes of The Punisher Castle eliminates all these people in some very creative ways which pretty much ends that story. And instead of being a great revenger of crime he becomes a laborer on a construction site trying, but not quite ever being able, to put his life back together.
But since this series is called The Punisher and not Frank Castle of course we know that at some point he’s going to have to start battling crime and that comes in a very unique way here. In the show Castle meets David Lieberman (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) aka “Micro” an ex-CIA computer expert who faked his own death in order to keep his family safe. So, while Castle doesn’t have a family to go home to Lieberman does but can only watch them at a distance in order to keep them safe.
Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach
As the two character’s paths cross, Frank realizes that the death of his family might have some connections within the government and more specifically within a secretive special forces squad he was once a member of. And Lieberman realizes that if there’s any chance he’ll ever get to be with his family again it’ll probably be through helping Castle.
In the past I’ve lamented over the lack of blood in the Marvel movies. There, characters can be pummeled to pulp, thrown against buildings and be exposed to colossal explosions which leads to the injuries in the films like maybe a trickle of blood out of the corner of someone’s mouth. While I get that a) these are superheroes and b) they’re in what’s ostensively family movies, none-the-less this is something that’s bugged me over the years. So when something comes along like The Punisher where characters can be hurt and there is a level of blood and gore not seen in any Marvel movie to date, it’s something I notice and appreciate. I like that The Punisher is a show created for viewers who are looking for something a little more intense than PG–13.
That being said, I think maybe the gore was overly done here. Well, maybe that’s not right — I thought the level of gore was good, but maybe the level of recovery time for people like Frank Castle was a little short. In some episodes Frank’s so badly injured that he has punctured lungs and broken ribs yet is up and ready to fight in a few hours time which realistically would mean weeks or months of recovery. Even a character like Billy Russo (Ben Barnes) at one point is shot in the shoulder. Which, even assuming the bullet missed the bone would require a long recovery in order to gain mobility back, is ready to have a knife-fight mere hours later.
Amber Rose Revah and Michael Nathanson
But this is a small complaint about a show that I liked a whole lot.
What I find most interesting about The Punisher is that in a lot of regards the character of the Punisher is someone the government can, and in the series does, categorize as a domestic terrorist. The guy carries rocket launchers around New York city and isn’t afraid to use them, assaults federal agents and has gigantic gunfights so there is a bit of people wanting to bring the Punisher to justice if just so that it cuts down on the open-street firefights in The Punisher. What’s fascinating is that while in The Punisher it’s shown that the media and politicians go after him for being a dangerous criminal, since he’s trying to eliminate crime and demolish corruption he can be a nice little tool for them to use as a means to an end. They don’t mind turning a blind eye to the tactics of the Punisher from time to time if it means furthering their agenda.
Movies
The Movie Chain: #7: Dunkirk (2017)
Last week: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
The Movie Chain is a weekly, micro-movie review where each week’s film is related to the previous week’s movie in some way.
When the movie Dunkirk was announced I honestly didn’t think it would make for a great movie. It’s the story of the British army having to evacuate from France after being routed by German forces in the early days of the second world war. So how do you make an interesting movie about one of the greatest defeats in military history and not make the movie feel defeatist? How writer/director Christopher Nolan did that was that rather than making a movie about defeat, instead Dunkirk is a movie about survival and is one of the most timely films in memory.
Told via several different perspectives during the evacuation, including that of a pilot (Tom Hardy from last week’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), an army private (Fionn Whitehead) and a boat captain (Mark Rylance), in Dunkirk the British Expeditionary Force is trapped on the beaches of France waiting for rescue via the British navy from the encroaching German army. Except that the navy doesn’t want to risk too many boats picking up the stranded men when they have to save the craft for the next battle that will surly come. Enter private British citizens with boats of their own who can cross the short channel and rescue a few men at a time. But will this happen in time to save all the soldiers on the beach while the British airforce dukes it out in the air against the Luftwaffe in planes that run closer and closer to running out of fuel with each fight?
If there’s a theme to Dunkirk it’s to never, ever give up. Since when things are at their worst you never know if help is right around the corner.
“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…”
Next week: You can run, but they’re gonna catch you.
Serial killers have been stalking lots of TV series in one way or another for decades now. They play a sort of “boogeyman” to all sorts of various procedural shows and even turn up in regular old dramas from time to time. It wouldn’t surprise me if one day to lift sagging ratings that one might show up in a series like Modern Family. I jest, but it’s true that they’re all over modern TV yet there’s never really been a TV series to address where serial killers come from — that was until Mindhunter on Netflix.
Here, FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), Bill Trench (Holt McCallany) and professor Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) stumble upon the science of profiling active serial killers by interviewing jailed ones in prison. Back in the late 1970s when Mindhunter takes place everyone knew serial killers existed, but no one had taken the time to figure out how to find them. Then, the FBI was setup to take down bank robbers, not men who murder others for seemingly no reason. Enter Ford, Trench and Carr who spend the series trying to come up with ways of figuring out why serial killers are the way they are and if there’s any way to stop them in the future.
That’s why I think Mindhunter works so well as a series. The show isn’t about the FBI tracking down serial killers — that’s been done many times before on many other shows. Mindhunter is the thinking person’s CSI where the characters aren’t gunning down suspects, they interviewing and probing convicts to find out how they tick to try and develop a science as it were in order to be able to put together an intelligent profile of the killers to be able to catch them before they’re able to murder again.
Better Call Saul
Three seasons in and Better Call Saul is still one of the best things on TV — as of right now it’s the only reason to watch AMC. I’m constantly astounded at the quality of the writing, acting, directing, set design … well, everything about this show.
The third season of Better Call Saul finds lead character Jimmy McGill’s (Bob Odenkirk) life slowly imploding around him as important people in his world turn their backs on him while his law practice goes up in flames leaving him with very few options for a future where he’s got next to no money coming in with the bills still piling up.
GLOW
Another Netflix series, GLOW takes place in the 1980s at the heart of a real burgeoning women’s wrestling TV series called the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling — or GLOW. What, you don’t remember women’s wrestling in the 1980s!? The good thing is with Netflix’s GLOW you don’t have to as this show isn’t so much about the wrestling as it is about all of the women and men who went in to make GLOW a reality. Like Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie), an actress who can’t land a part to save her life where GLOW represents a last chance for her to be in the entertainment industry.
I think what works best about GLOW are the characters like Ruth — they’re all different and they all want different things out of their experiences with GLOW. Sometimes what they want goes together and sometimes what they want doesn’t.
Stranger Things
The second season of the bonafide pop-cultural phenomena Stranger Things debuted on Netflix a few months back and was easily the series the most people I knew were excited about returning. Stranger Things is a show that cuts across different demographics — I know 50 year olds who watch the show along with 10 year olds. It’s not necessarily a family show but is a show I think families can watch together. As long as those families don’t have kids who are too little and might be frightened of terrifying things that go bump in the night.
The Orville
I can’t say I was much looking forward to The Orville when I first heard about it last summer. A live-action sci-fi show from animated series impresario Seth McFarlane who seems to reveal in being controversial? And the first TV spots for The Orville sold the show as a sort of TV version of Galaxy Quest where the crew of the ship are buffoons.
But even watching a single episode of The Orville it’s plainly obvious that the series has got nothing to do with Galaxy Quest. In fact, The Orville might be the show that’s closest to the true spirit of the original Star Trek since, well, the original Star Trek.
The Punisher
Netflix really “hit one out of the park” with their latest Marvel series The Punisher. Like I’ve said before the character of The Punisher is one of my favs, so I suppose I’m predisposed to like this show. But I didn’t just likeThe Punisher, I lovedThe Punisher. It’s certainly one of my favorite series based on comic books ever, and is certainly my favorite Netflix superhero show.
Legion
I’ve never really been a fan of comic book TV shows. They tend to put the story ahead of the characters when to me it should be just the other way around. That’s why I loved the FX series Legion so much. There were parts of that show that literally take place inside of characters heads in this weird mental space where I had no idea of what was going on. Yet the characters of Legion are so strong I would, and did, follow them almost anywhere.
The Expanse
I know SyFy has been trying to turn their image around for years now. And while the quality of most of SyFy’s shows are questionable at best — as I write this SyFy.com which is a website that’s ostensively there to promote SyFy’s TV shows instead has articles about Stranger Things and Thor Ragnarok on its homepage, neither of which appear on SyFy — there’s one bright spot on the bleak thing that SyFy has become which is the TV series The Expanse. One of the best, if not only, hard-sci-fi series on TV these days, in its second season The Expanse continued to improve and tell quality stories about life in the future where humanity, on the brink of extinction, is still squabbling over trivial matters.
When the movie Dunkirk was announced I honestly didn’t think it would make for a great movie. It’s the story of the British army having to evacuate from France after being routed by German forces in the early days of the second world war. So how do you make an interesting movie about one of the greatest defeats in military history and not make the movie feel defeatist? How writer/director Christopher Nolan did that was that rather than making a movie about defeat, instead Dunkirk is a movie about survival and is one of the most timely films in memory.
