SPOILER WARNING: spoilers for Jessica Jones, Daredevil and the Punisher.
So season 2 of Netflix’s The Punisher is finally out. After a confusing and honestly overwhelming amount of inexplicable build up of questions that mainly centre around Ben Barnes’ face, we are finally provided with an opportunity to learn what actually happened following Frank Castle’s brutal altercation with Billy Russo. My roommate, binge-watching buddy, dog-loving soul mate and fellow marvel fan Lauren has been counting down the days since we finished watching the first season. I mean the wait was ok, we entertained ourselves with season 3 of Daredevil, but that was pretty much it. No more Luke Cage, no more Iron Fist (although who’s crying about that one) and no more tortured vigilantes to help us in our absence of caped violence. While we thought we could bank on the cold whiskied tones of Jessica Jones to take us through this difficult time, the second season was simply a disappointment from start to finish. Now I confess we’re skeptical to watch The Punisher as Marvel has quite frankly shown that they themselves don’t have faith in their own TV shows anymore, cancelling them rather than letting them develop in the way we know they can. We talked at length about why this might be the case, trying to understand why what once had such great potential leaves us feeling as unsatisfied as a Premiere Moissson sandwich.
Perhaps the characters just don’t develop, while we didn’t mind Karen in Daredevil’s first season, by the time the third rolled around there wasn’t an episode we watched where we weren’t screaming for her to be stabbed by one of the mobs. I mean, every single mob in existence is in that city you’d think she’d run into bad luck at some point, but unfortunately not. For lack of any better story, the writers turned a Karen who was going on a relatively interesting path, finding her passion for investigative journalism and learning how to cope in the wake of murdering her kidnapper to a woman that had nothing interesting about her other than a snippet of backstory in which her brother died after he lashed out at her drug-dealing boyfriend. Not only was this backstory never alluded to until the third season, making it frankly weird and unprecedented, it was pointless to her character, it perhaps explained why she jumps every time anything around her moves but doesn’t really add to the development of her intellectual capacities, which are what make her an interesting character. It’s also almost insulting that the episode which is dedicated to a female character in the show is clearly only being used as a ‘filler’ episode, contributing nothing to the actual plot of the show and giving us no substance to her character. Not only this, but the writers are spending so much time on a female character that they are evidently struggling to write while they let a stellar character go in the form of Claire Temple. Claire is a nurse who helps out the protagonist on multiple occasions, until she was upgraded as a main character on the show Luke Cage only to be cancelled and ignored when her personality was both well-rounded and well-written. She was the only one who gave us hope that there might be some well-characterised element to the show and yet that hope was heartlessly ripped away from us.
However, there may be some comfort found in the fact that it’s not only the women that were struggling to be written, the villain of the show was also a victim of a downwind spiral in his character arc. Wilson Fisk, who was once a terrifying mob king, violent, omnipotent and invincible was taken to a self-destructive extreme where all he did was stare at a painting and serve endless, endless, endless monologues. He lost his drive and frankly it got old, there was great opportunity for an entirely new villain in the form of agent Poindexter, an FBI agent who was dealing with violent tendencies. But alas, all he ended up becoming was Fisk’s puppy, simply an example of Fisk’s pre-established control.
Furthermore in a Riverdale-esque identity crisis, Daredevil and indeed the entire marvel television universe is trying to rectify the existence of aliens and magic alongside the seemingly mundane streets of New York, fighting mafia and corruption instead of frost giants and asgardian gods. However, while this dichotomy could provide some interesting tension in the setting of the show it actually only serves to confuse viewers and sever the connections that the shows have with each-other. Could this constant shift between realism and fantasy be the downfall of such shows? Our conclusion was along those lines but more focused on the fact that failure is just an intrinsic characteristic of these shows, particularly when they start so strong.
Jessica Jones’ first season was incredible, the villain (Kilgrave) was absolutely terrifying, not only because he was unpredictable but because he was also intelligent and knew how to use his powers in creatively awful ways. The idea of Kilgrave was that when he told someone to do something they could not control their actions and had to do what he said (like if Ella Enchanted had ever been ordered to shove her hand inside a garbage dispenser). Thus, turning the individual against themselves with no hope of salvation. His defeat was followed up by a frankly overused and boring storyline with Jessica Jones’ mother returning after being thought dead, revealing she had murdered her daughter’s ex-boyfriend and managing to string this along for a 10 hour season.
Perhaps Marvel isn’t solely to blame here. The way in which we consume TV has completely changed, and I would argue the very notion of what a TV show consists of, as I’ve noticed much of Netflix’’s shows don’t really stretch beyond one season. Their premises all have expiration dates and thus lose both their novelty and structure once we reach their conclusion. The first season is what hooks people in and thereafter the writers lose the nuiance of what made their shows interesting, attempting to futilely adapt a one-trick storyline with pointless backstory and irrelevant narrative, all the while hoping the viewers wouldn’t notice, or terminating their projects before even giving them a chance.
Images obtained from
https://revengeofthefans.com/2018/12/07/charlie-cox-speaks-out-on-darede…
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/forums/gen-discussion-1/wilson-fisk-and-t…
https://ca.ign.com/articles/2018/02/28/jessica-jones-what-you-need-to-kn…