In the Flesh: The Punisher, Season 2

Rival crews meet by night in an abandoned warehouse. At issue is some unknown valuable, possessed by one side and desired by the other, and when no solution is forthcoming the two gangs quickly discover that neither of them called the sitdown. Tempers flare. Guns come out. Then, at the precipice of violence, in walks a man in black. This is how the Punisher's story ends, Frank Castle roaring in rage and hurt as he shreds men with automatic weapons, a dark figure spitting fire and lead into the abyss of his own fundamental brokenness, his inability to get up from the ground where he lies bleeding in the wreckage of his family, years ago. No homecoming for jittery, coffee-chugging Frank. No hanging up his spurs, no second chance, no riding off into the sunset. 

More than anything else, that's what Netflix's way-better-than-it-should-have-been adaptation of writer Gerry Conway and artists John Romita Sr. and Ross Andru's The Punisher brings to the table: the idea that the men who use violence to right wrongs never really come home afterward. Part of it, the show suggests, is the trauma. The weight of blood and savagery and moral mutilation. But the other part, more terrible for how true anyone who's ever known a violent man knows it to be, is that they don't want to come home. The linear, simplifying nature of murder gives order to Frank's world. He sees a problem, pulls a trigger, and poof. Solid gone. Why come back into the real world after you've experienced that? Why give up that power, that simplicity?

So you make excuses. You go looking for wars. You grab hold of every fight you come across and feel your way back up its string of raw causality, stabbing and biting and clawing and shooting everything along the way, and when you reach the source you find another string, and you say I just need to finish, I need to end this, I need to protect people and make them safe. And then you're sweeping a busy street with an automatic shotgun, grunting and snarling like an animal, because you're too afraid to go home to the kid who's counting on you. Too afraid to stop throwing yourself in front of bullets because what if you have time to think, time spent doing anything but clinging white-knuckled to the ragged edges of your own wounds? So much of action cinema is about the heroic defiance of death, the risking of everything in service to some greater good. The Punisher is about a man afraid to live his life, and the terrible things he does to avoid having to.