Liam Hoofe reviews the eighth episode of Marvel’s The Punisher…
One of the main ingredients for The Punisher’s success is its ability to juggle several plot points at one time, while also continuing to give us complex, and interesting characters. One of these characters, is Billy Russo, Frank’s former best friend from the Marines, who in is his post-military career has taken a turn towards the dark side and over the last few episodes, established himself as the season’s chief antagonist.
‘Cold Steel’ opens and closes with Russo, and he is very much the focal point of the episode. At the beginning we see Russo going to visit his mom in a hospital. This serves as a nice narrative device, giving us an insight into Billy’s past. We soon find out that Billy spent the majority of his life growing up in foster homes, and that he never felt accepted as a child. This was basically his life before he joined the military and it is as a result of that, that he is the way he is now. It’s a nice development and one that really helps pad out his character. Marvel’s best villains are the ones who have been given a backstory, and Russo is certainly a return to form the Netflix Universe following The Hand debacle.
Russo is not the only interesting character in The Punisher though, and Frank and Micro’s relationship continued to evolve in this episode. Frank paid a visit to Micro’s wife in the episode and, after being teased for several episodes, she made a move on him, which Frank rejected. Micro, though, was still very upset at this and got himself into a drunken mess. This led to a scene where Frank and Micro got drunk together and it provided us with a nice insight into both of their former lives, plus it was pretty damn funny as well. Later in the episode, Frank was asked to speak to Micro’s son, and the scenes where he was playing surrogate father were very well executed, with Micro desperately wanting to return and mentor his own son, it was heartbreaking stuff.
The episode’s big set piece was a shootout between Russo’s men and Madini’s homeland agents. The Punisher has been fairly consistent with its action sequences, so I’ve nothing to report on here that I’ve not said about scenes in the past. It was an exciting sequence, one that ended with Russo killing Madini’s partner, Sam. I’m not sure if this was supposed to be an emotional moment – Sam has been nothing more than a sidekick for the majority of the season, so it’s difficult to care about his death too much. It was, however, a nice way of building Russo’s character – watching him take care of Madini after the incident was a chilling moment, one that really helped build him into a villain.
‘Cold Steel’ was yet another great episode of The Punisher, which is quickly becoming one of the best shows on Netflix now. Everyone is moving along at a great pace and the character work here is some of the best we’ve seen from Marvel in some time.
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