He sits shirtlessly listening to the growly music of Glenn Danzig and muttering inaudibly. He stares at his crazy wall, which is pinned with news clippings and photos and scraps of paper. He rips it down in a rage. “Raaagh,” he says.
He does sad, grunting pull-ups until his hands bleed. He punches a mirror until it breaks. He yells. He speaks to the ghosts of the long dead. He stalks around the place in slow motion, again, shirtlessly.
But enough about my writing process. (“Patrick, put your shirt back on, file your column and stop talking in the third person,” my editor says.) What of Frank Castle, the Marvel anti-superhero known as the Punisher?
The Punisher (the charismatic Jon Bernthal) is a particularly murderous Marvel superhero. He is the star of the one-off “special” The Punisher: One Last Kill (Disney+), and he acts exactly like me when I’m getting in the mood to write. (See opening paragraph.)
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He is, consequently, no fun. Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider and developed spider-related powers. The Incredible Hulk was exploded by a nuclear bomb and turned into a big rampaging green yoke. Captain America was given a super-soldier serum and got swole. The Punisher, on the other hand, witnessed all of his family being murdered and bought a bunch of guns. That’s quite a downer.
In this one-off, he spends a lot of his time at the graves of his dead family, muttering incoherently to himself. Frank Castle really needs both bereavement counselling and elocution lessons, but writers lean heavily into the cathartic properties of undertaking a vigilante massacre instead.
It just goes to show that men will go to war with and ultimately destroy all the main crime families in New York City rather than go to counselling.
The gist of The Punisher: One Last Kill is that now the ultraviolent loon has avenged his family’s deaths he loses his interest in vigilante murder and doesn’t know what to do with himself. For about 20 minutes.
In truth, One Last Kill is not an accurate title. It only makes sense if used ironically or if the Punisher said it before each new murder in the same way I say it about Instagram reels or biscuits: “Just one more before bed.”
Murdering criminals seems to be just moreish. I lose count of how many people the Punisher kills over the course of 50 minutes. It would be quite funny if he said “one last kill” before each one. Sadly, there is nothing funny about the Punisher. He doesn’t even make puns.
You see, the surviving matriarch of a crime family the Punisher murdered murderously is seeking revenge and sets hundreds of rampaging toughs on the Punisher’s apartment block. He must murder them all while muttering and grunting and hooting to himself. We’ve come a long way from catchphrases like “Avengers assemble!” to end up with “uh” and “oof” and “guh”.
Despite this programme taking place in the United States, where you can pick up firearms while doing the weekly shop, a surprising number of the Punisher’s enemies in this programme are carrying axes and crowbars and knives. They also come at him one by one while screaming.
And so, the Punisher wanders from room to room, sometimes on fire, breaking people’s bones and gouging their eyes and shooting them in the brain.
I know what you’re all wondering: does the Marvel universe have a sociological explanation for its lawless, crime-ridden streets? To which the creators say: go back to college, nerd. Tough on crime, not particularly interested in the causes of crime, that would be Frank Castle’s slogan if he was a politician. (And under the Trump administration he might well become one.)
He tackles crime by shooting at it. I imagine he’d also tackle municipal transportation and water-supply infrastructure in the same manner.
My favourite part of this programme is when, towards the end, a girl is so touched by the Punisher’s frantic stabbing of a muscley, blood-vomiting baddie that she gives him a heart she has made out of felt. Aw. How touching. Instead of being in a traumatised and catatonic state, she has learned that the best way to deal with urban decay is violence.
My second-favourite part of this programme is when, at the very end, a punk rocker steals an old man’s hat and Frank Castle murders the punk rocker with an axe. Ha! Yes! Justice! Take that, you sicko! Hat theft will not be tolerated in Frank Castle’s United States. It will, in fact, be punishable by death.
At this point, the Punisher is no longer wearing the dirty hoodie and scruffy beard he wore throughout the rest of the show but is clad in a long black coat and a shirt emblazoned with the Punisher’s skeleton logo. He has, rather movingly, regained both his love of murder and his love for efficient branding and graphic design.
We hear triumphant music, and the Punisher logo jumps up on-screen. I think we’re supposed to feel uplifted. And I kind of do, to be honest.
Over on Netflix, I check in to see what the Duffer brothers are up to and find that the Stranger Things kids have aged terribly since I saw them last. Oh, how the years have withered Mike, Will, Dustin, Eleven and the rest of the paranormally bothered teens.
I did think that in the final series of Stranger Things they’d all got quite tall, but now they appear to be in receipt of pensions and Medicare. I guess living in the contemporary US can age a twinkle-eyed stage tot.
In fact, it turns out The Boroughs has nothing to do with Stranger Things canonically, despite the executive-production skills of the brothers Duffer.
Our heroes here are not teens at all but the ageing residents of a retirement community at the edge of the desert. This facility has many amenities and services, but there is also a vicious creature with spindly legs who lives in the walls and occasionally comes out to kill people. Would I let my parents live there? That’s a hard one. What’s the yearly rate?
Thankfully, the show reaches beyond Scooby-Doo-style fun into something that also deals with feelings of bereavement, mortality, loneliness and obsolescence.
This largely works thanks to the strength of the cast. Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters, Geena Davis and Denis O’Hare bring a lot more to their roles than is required by the hokey old plot.
Of course, being folks of a certain age, they take their time about their paranormal investigation. If the Punisher was here, he’d just shoot repeatedly at the spindly creature behind the walls to get it over with. “Uh,” he would say, in his customary manner, and “Oof” and possibly “guh”.
