Marvel & Netflix’s The Punisher Recaps by Penny – Episode 2; Two Dead Men

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We open in a flashback. Frank is on the ferry to the statue of Liberty with his kids, and telling them a silly nonsense story. His son thinks it’s boring and stupid, and when the conversation turns to Frank’s combat tours his son says some pretty racist shit about Middle Eastern people, which Frank slaps him for and tells him that shit isn’t okay. Back in the present Frank has breakfast at, I THINK, the same old style diner that we’ve seen Matt, karen, Claire and Luke all eat at in the other Netflix MCU shows. HE gets a call on the diner’s landline and I was right, that WAS Microchip, now just Micro, at the end of the last episode. Micro asks Frank if he got the cd he left at his old house, as seen at the end of DD Season 2. Frank says yes. Micro says they’re both “dead men”, ghosts haunting New York. Frank tries to catch him where he thinks he’s been watching him from, but finds only a phone, a DVD and a note, and a mirror with a flashlight to misdirect him. He looks over at the diner and sees Micro was on THEIR roof the whole time. Opening credits.

No Netflix, I do NOT wish to skip the opening credits, because they are awesome.

Frank wakes up yet again from the dream with his wife waking him up then getting shot. He loads Micro’s DVD into a laptop and finds a video of his old unit in Afghanistan interrogating then murdering the witness/undercover cop that Dinah was investigating before being transferred back to the States. The interrogation is clearly illegal and it’s his unit that murders the man in cold blood. Frank closes the laptop in disgust. Speaking of Dinah, she slyly tries to work around Wolf’s stonewalling by proposing that she and other agents do tactical training with a New York based PMC run by a man named Billy Russo, who just so happens to have been on Frank’s squad.

Frank goes to see Curtis at the support group space, worried that whatever happened in khandahar may mean his family was murdered because of him and what happened there. Curtis tries to reassure him but fails. Frank leaves to seek out help from Karen Page. He feigns homelessness and asks her for coffee money to get her attention, then shows her who he is. They go back to her place, and he asks her to look into this Micro guy. Dinah runs through the PMC’s training course and impresses Ben, but Wolf was there watching on cameras and comes out to glare at Dinah and remind her Khandahar is in her rear view. Ben invites her out for a drink, where Wolf can’t eavesdrop and she’ll be free to say what she likes.

Karen digs up a little info on Micro at the Bulletin, learning that her editor had a story to publish about Micro, AKA Paul Lieberman, an NSA analyst whistleblower supposedly shot and killed while resisting arrest for “selling state secrets”, but Wolf himself dropped by and told Karen’s editor to drop it in the name of national security. Karen gets the info to Frank, but worries what he’ll do with it. Micro meanwhile, is hanging out in a pretty sweet Farraday cage, watch video feeds from his house, depressing himself seeing his family still mourning his “death” a year later. Later he sees Frank is AT his house, letting his wife “accidentally” hit him so he can get a look at the life Micro walked away from. Micro panics, grabs a gun and drives to his house, almost giving himself away until he realizes Frank is just doing harmless recon.

Frank later uses the other useful tidbit he got from Karen, namely that Wolf was in charge of the investigation into Micro’s alleged treason. He pays Wolf a visit in his home, they beat each other up pretty bad, and eventually Frank tricks Wolf into thinking he has the upper hand, at which point Wolf grabs the Idiot Ball and runs with it, gloating to Frank how THEY killed his family trying to kill him and this time death would be permanent, but Frank planned for it and had only one bullet in the gun. He snaps Wolf’s neck and leaves.

Dinah and Billy have drinks at Rhonda’s, and she grills him about Frank and any possible connections Frank may have had to any drug operations. Billy dismisses the very idea of Frank selling drugs as preposterous, and tells him Frank may have been a hardass, but he was painfully upright. Dinah gets a call about Wolf’s murder and leaves, but says she’d like to see Billy again. She arrives at the scene and her weaselly partner Sam says she’s the senior agent now.

Frank leads Micro on a scavenger hunt of meeting locations until he gets Micro to the cemetary, where Curtis tells him to stop looking for Frank. Even money says Frank is sneaking into Micro’s trunk right now. Micro gets back to his secret hideout and sure enough, Frank climbs out of the trunk and punches Micro clean out cold. End of episode.

Penny is a now divorced intersexed disabled lesbian in BC Canada. She's been watching wrestling and reading comics since she was a kid, and knows her stuff. She lives with her pets and passes her free time writing, drawing, doing paid photoshop work (including logos done for Pulse's Own Mike Gojira), and is a part-time Queer model.