Daredevil: Bang
March 18, 2016 1:56 PM - Season 2, Episode 1 - Subscribe

In the void left by Fisk’s removal, a new threat to Hell’s Kitchen emerges. Murdock and Foggy take on a client with a questionable past.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich (31 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I binged the first six episodes last night beginning from about three minutes after the new season was available. So I'm not sure what I have to say about these first two episodes, because it's always a bit difficult to discuss individual episodes when you've binged, but I figured that many people will be watching these first two episodes today or tonight.

DeKnight has left the series as showrunner and Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez have replaced him. Drew Goddard, who created the series and was showrunner for the first part of season one, continues to act as a creative consultant for the show.

Bernthal appears in this episode as The Punisher and, really, anyone who remembers his performance from The Walking Dead will recognize the sustained, deranged menace he can bring to the screen. The gun violence is graphic and it gets even more so in later episodes.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:10 PM on March 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Watched this episode during lunch. There was little of anything amazing in it, but it served much more to reassure me that the show appeared to be in capable hands. It was very much a setup for the season, introducing the Punisher ("bang" ) and the criminal environment of Hell's Kitchen after the fall of our crime syndicate from last season.

I'm kind of uncomfortable with Karen making moon eyes at Murdock (No office romances!) and thought it was interesting how Foggy outside of a biker club seems like a large enough guy and confident, but his actor managed to make him quiet small and vulnerable at the Dogs of Hell clubhouse.
posted by Atreides at 2:46 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've watched it up to episode 4 - we are so going to have to find a good way of dealing with these all-at-once releases - and I actually like it a lot more than season 1 (and, so far, than Jessica Jones, although there was a point that that series went so far south it coloured my view of the whole thing). Loving the brutality, the chiaroscuro, the moral ambiguity and the fact that a lot of it looks so much like Gene Colan drawings come to life.
posted by Grangousier at 4:24 PM on March 18, 2016


I'd really like it if we could try and keep ep threads to discussing just that particular ep (and previous eps) rather than alluding to ones in the future. We failed to do this in the Jessica Jones discussions, which upset a bunch of people, and led to the suggestion of whole-season posts that could be spoiler happy.

If people don't want to do that, that's perfectly cool (seriously!), but in that case I won't read any of the posts until I'm done with the whole season.

As for the ep itself, I enjoyed it - felt like we got into the action rather faster than last season, what with all the origin story stuff. Unfortunately, the fact that the Punisher is starring was heavily promoted beforehand so the whole "oh shit it's definitely an army!" thing loses its impact.
posted by adrianhon at 5:16 PM on March 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


One of the things the show captures that most of the comics do not is just how goddamn *awful* what Frank Castle does would be in reality. In the first episode, he's essentially a horror-movie monster and we're seeing what it would be like to have to pick up the pieces after one of his "missions." From this they're not going to play him all that sympathetically, and this is precisely right.

I'm a bit less enamored of the "we're broke" subplot(?), which just seems too exaggerated, even for a comic-book show. Give us a low-income law firm where no one's getting rich, sure, but a law form that works on a barter economy is little much. And it definitely doesn't connect well with the subsequent "night at Josie's; everyone buys a round" thing, PBR and moldy water or no.

I am glad to see Turk *and* Grotto, albeit not as bumbling partners in crime or even sharing scenes. And the cinematography and direction are still a notch above; even knowing the hype, it was quite effective to keep us from seeing Berenthal's face until the very end.
posted by kewb at 5:51 PM on March 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


Oh, and a continuity nugget I just got: the biker telling Foggy he;'s got :guts" is a reference to one of the more comedic stories in the Frank Miller era, in which Nelson tries to go undercover in the mob and calls himself "Guts" Nelson.
posted by kewb at 6:01 PM on March 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


I've been waiting all day ALL DAY to be able to sit down with no distractions and watch a couple episodes tonight. So far, so good. Adequate to fine first episode, laying the groundwork for S2. Guns a shootin' isn't my favorite action, but the rooftop hand-to-hand fight was decent if short.

Mr Good is a walking MU encyclopedia and he answered all my noob "is he a good guy or a bad guy" and other background canon-related questions patiently.

Two throwaway observations:

1) Karen needs to stop with the googly eyes at Matt.

2) Foggy needs a haircut.
posted by chaoticgood at 6:14 PM on March 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Given that both the first season of Daredevil and Jessica Jones both slow-played the "big bad", I figured that the Punisher & Daredevil wouldn't meet until later in the season, but they jumped right into the action. I'm not sure how I feel about Frank shooting up a hospital -- his comic persona at least is less likely to put innocents at risk. The sniper rifle on the roof was more his style, I would have thought.
posted by Jugwine at 6:16 PM on March 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm like 6 eps in after a binge so... everything has merged together. There is a definite arc over the first four.

So far, I am happy that Karen has more to do of her own agency.
Also, I am happy with he pacing so far. Last season was herky jerky. They know now not to blow their wad with a hallway fight and actually build up to stuff.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 6:29 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm glad you brought that up Jugwine. I haven't read the comics, but I thought the behavior in the hospital was out of character for the Punisher too.

Also that gun runner who taunts DD after his keys get thrown. I saw that as a bad idea a mile away. I was hoping for something a little more original.
posted by miss-lapin at 6:31 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Karen in the hospital is aces. I preferred her flirtation with Foggy last season though.

Oh, come on, we know if you shoot the hero in the face in episode one that he's going to be fine in episode two. I hate cliffhangers that go like that.

Those are some lovely murals on the walls in Hell's Kitchen now.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:18 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


One of the things the show captures that most of the comics do not is just how goddamn *awful* what Frank Castle does would be in reality.

Have you read Garth Ennis's Punisher Max run from the early 2000s? If you haven't you really should because it's widely considered the definitive Punisher run, and it repeatedly makes exactly this point: the Punisher isn't a hero or a vigilante, he's a psychotic killer who uses his crusade as an excuse to kill people because he likes killing. It's really, really well-written and the art is gorgeous, though it's unrelentingly grim and brutal, not a surprise given the protagonist.

This season seems like it's going to draw heavily from that run (the Irish mobsters, for example, are from a story arc in it). It also seems like it's going to draw from Ennis's much sillier "Welcome Back, Frank" run that preceded Max.

Also thirding the point about the Punisher in the hospital: Frank is pathological about killing people, but equally if not more pathological about never, ever even taking a chance of hurting an innocent person. It will be a weird character divergence if this show's Punisher doesn't care about collateral damage.

Even shooting Daredevil is something Frank wouldn't do since he doesn't kill heroes or law enforcement, though I guess maybe in this world Daredevil is so new and such an unknown that Frank doesn't know where Daredevil stands.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:28 PM on March 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


AV Club is doing a binge-a-thon recap (5 eps Friday, 4 eps each Saturday & Sunday), so, maybe people losing track of what's going on in which episode can check in there to refresh themselves before commenting to avoid spoilers? First one linked now.

I wasn't a huge fan of Daredevil S1 (liked Jessica Jones better), but, this seems like a decent start to the season. If Karen getting flirty with Matt is setting up for a love triangle, I say bah humbug though.
posted by oh yeah! at 8:34 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Backing up the concern about his actions in the hospital and the final shot against DD. Those specific moves aren't the Frank I know (and love) from the comics. The fact that he's so careful about not hurting innocents--and prioritizing rescues of innocents over punishing--is one of the things that makes him complicated and worthwhile as a character.

If he's reckless and doesn't care who gets in the way, then he really is just another loon. Frank Castle as a character is intended to ask more difficult questions than that.

Mostly, the hospital concern is the choice of hardware for me: shotguns aren't precise. That's not the kind of killer Frank is. Not in that sort of setting.

But I'm through ep. 8 right now, and holy shit I love this show. I love the writing, I love the acting and the characters, especially the recurring/supporting ones. I love the living hell out of Elektra, and yes, apart from that hardware issue & a few other quibbles, WOW do I love this Frank Castle.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 11:15 PM on March 18, 2016


Frank is pathological about killing people, but equally if not more pathological about never, ever even taking a chance of hurting an innocent person.

And that, given the sort of firepower that Frank brings to an urban fight, is just about as ridiculous, on its own scale, as the Fantastic Four fighting Dr. Doom in midtown and reducing several skyscrapers to rubble without any casualties. Guns, especially big caliber guns, and especially especially big caliber automatic weapons in a crowded city, just aren't that discriminating. The series has already signaled in the first season that it's going to minimize the suspension of disbelief in terms of having just one character with outright superpowers (two, counting Gao, who is out of the picture for now, and of course more with Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and so on); it was probably already stretching things with Frank opening fire in the hospital without starting a fire from all the oxygen that's around. I think that the overarching purpose of bringing Frank into the series, aside from his being an antagonist on Matt's scale, is both to interrogate the general idea of limited vigilantism and also to perform some of that interrogation on the Punisher himself. Even in the most ideal of circumstances and used by the most idealistic armies (and, of course, war is usually fought in less-than-ideal circumstances), military tactics seek to minimize civilian casualties, not eliminate them entirely.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:20 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Have to say, though (don't know if this has been mentioned before): the impact of Frank Castle killing people is rather blunted for me when basically all of the Avengers kill people left and right, too. I mean yeah, it's still killing for the sake of killing, so still bad and all, but he's just not the same monster in the MCU that he is in the comics. The contrast isn't nearly as...stark.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 11:56 PM on March 18, 2016


2) Foggy needs a haircut.

No. No, he does not.

I am watching ep by ep and coming here, so:

The tone is off from last year, but that's okay.
There seems to be more humour.
The scenes in the first bit, where you never see the devil: better than any Batman on screen (not animated).
The scene where the kitchen hands beat up the crim: I laughed so hard.
I winced in the meat packing district scene.

Frank shooting up the hospital. yeah, I have issues with, but otherwise... so far we are a solid follow up to series one. (Is that even on DVD yet? Marvel needs my money, honey, and if not now, and they are taking their sweet time, it'll be Christmas before I get around to buying it.)
posted by Mezentian at 1:18 AM on March 19, 2016


Have you read Garth Ennis's Punisher Max run from the early 2000s? If you haven't you really should because it's widely considered the definitive Punisher run, and it repeatedly makes exactly this point: the Punisher isn't a hero or a vigilante, he's a psychotic killer who uses his crusade as an excuse to kill people because he likes killing. It's really, really well-written and the art is gorgeous, though it's unrelentingly grim and brutal, not a surprise given the protagonist.

Oh, I've read all of Ennis's Punisher and even the Jason Aaron follow-up series. I recognized the name "Nesbitt" here, for example. However, I think Ennis does slide around a bit on the "Frank is a psychotic" thing, since he gives him some additional dimension as the run rolls along. (And, of course, there are the usual issues you get with Ennis, like the fondness for rape jokes and the use of homophobic tropes at a few points...and every single thing about Barracuda.)

I'd say the main issue is that throwing characters like DD into the mix and having Frank take potshots int he hospital and at Karen Page means we're getting a less infallible Frank Castle than any comics have given us. Even Ennis's Frank was somehow always right about the people he targeted, and here we've already seen the Punisher make what appear to be mistakes.

And there's an emphasis on what his actions would do to the larger society around him that Ennis never quite engages with, since we don't ever leave the world of the scum entirely. When Frank's major civilian, non-criminal encounters are either victims of violent crime or people helping him out against their better judgment. And towards the end we meet the sister of his dead intelligence agent love interest. Overall, though, Ennis's stories never really look very far beyond Frank's world of killers and scumbags. There's just no room in Ennis's Punisher for, say, the sort of people we see in the offices of Nelson and Murdock.
posted by kewb at 3:48 AM on March 19, 2016


"I'm a bit less enamored of the "we're broke" subplot(?), which just seems too exaggerated, even for a comic-book show. Give us a low-income law firm where no one's getting rich, sure, but a law form that works on a barter economy is little much. And it definitely doesn't connect well with the subsequent "night at Josie's; everyone buys a round" thing, PBR and moldy water or no."

Hear, hear, where is the beer money coming from? And yeah, who works on barter in 2016? This isn't the Chicken Ranch. I know everybody in Hell's Kitchen is poor, poor, poor, and that's probably something they did in the comics when they were written in 1950 or whatever (I would not know), but that seems just silly in the modern era.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:22 AM on March 19, 2016


The directing on this episode just didn't seem to be up to the standards of last season. Less, I dunno, brutalist, and more comic-bookish. Does that make sense? In any case, it seemed less well done. More stereotypical action drama on the beats.

I have to think the death count if the Punisher would have been lower if the reaction of the gangsters hadn't been to stand up in plain sight and shoot. Have these people ever heard of cover?

The Irish jig on the cell phone was Syu the kennel of MST3K Mitchell's "Imma Aytalian doncha know".

*taps foot* Ok, ninja ex girlfriend can show up any time now...
posted by happyroach at 1:37 PM on March 19, 2016


"I'm a bit less enamored of the "we're broke" subplot(?), which just seems too exaggerated, even for a comic-book show. Give us a low-income law firm where no one's getting rich, sure, but a law form that works on a barter economy is little much. And it definitely doesn't connect well with the subsequent "night at Josie's; everyone buys a round" thing, PBR and moldy water or no."

You have a point about the buying a round at Josie's, but I actually know a lawyer working out of New York's Chinatown that has the barter economy issue - her clientele are mostly immigrants working in restaurants, so she eats great Chinese food every day (and baked goods and fruit), but they can't always give her cash.
posted by dinty_moore at 2:03 PM on March 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


And I don't mean 'had that issue when she was starting out in the olden days', I mean she was complaining about what she was going to do with all these damn oranges on twitter, like, last week.
posted by dinty_moore at 2:05 PM on March 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


"I'm a bit less enamored of the "we're broke" subplot(?), which just seems too exaggerated, even for a comic-book show. Give us a low-income law firm where no one's getting rich, sure, but a law form that works on a barter economy is little much. And it definitely doesn't connect well with the subsequent "night at Josie's; everyone buys a round" thing, PBR and moldy water or no."

Hear, hear, where is the beer money coming from?


For small businesses (speaking as someone who runs one), there's a big difference between "the business is broke" and "we, personally, are broke". A business can be running at a loss and still managing to pay its staff (including the owners). It just can't go on doing that indefinitely, though depending on how much of their paychecks they're willing to take in the form of bartered food and how much savings they have to live off, it can go for a while. At least until they get evicted from their office space and their malpractice insurance gets cancelled...then again, most of their clients probably don't care if the firm has malpractice insurance.
posted by mstokes650 at 5:09 PM on March 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Given that both the first season of Daredevil and Jessica Jones both slow-played the "big bad", I figured that the Punisher & Daredevil wouldn't meet until later in the season, but they jumped right into the action.

I loved that they did this. It makes sense- someone shooting up a hospital is pretty much asking for Daredevil to show up. That's what he does.

Also, the opening scene was brilliant.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:59 PM on March 19, 2016


And it definitely doesn't connect well with the subsequent "night at Josie's; everyone buys a round" thing, PBR and moldy water or no.

After seeing what Josie puts in her martinis, I assume that every so often Matt gets the Health Department to cancel their revocation of her...anything license. So a round is maybe five cents per person. Josie still makes a profit.
posted by happyroach at 10:51 PM on March 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Ah, people on rooftops beating each other up, that's what this show is about.
posted by Catblack at 12:02 AM on March 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm a bit less enamored of the "we're broke" subplot(?), which just seems too exaggerated, even for a comic-book show. Give us a low-income law firm where no one's getting rich, sure, but a law form that works on a barter economy is little much.

Until proven otherwise, I'm choosing to handwave that away in my head by saying that in the break between last season and this season, Karen applied for and they received some small business grants and/or loans. She seems pretty resourceful, even if she does have to use a freeware accounting program and can't cobble something else out of open source software.

I'm also choosing to go into this with the mindset that while characters from the greater Marvel Universe are in here, they're only shades of their MU counterparts and thus shouldn't be hobbled or discounted because they're not exactly like the comics characters. That means that I'm looking forward to seeing how they handle Frank Castle and being introduced to him all over again.

(I'm also really looking forward to seeing this all unfold one episode at a time, and so I hope that any future spoilers for the rest of run are kept to a minimum in the ep-by-ep threads.)
posted by TrishaLynn at 8:06 PM on March 20, 2016


And it definitely doesn't connect well with the subsequent "night at Josie's; everyone buys a round" thing, PBR and moldy water or no.

I thought we got an implication/statement in season one that Matt & Foggy don't pay for drinks at Josie's? Getting the next round may be a joke/physical getting the round...
posted by phearlez at 8:36 AM on March 21, 2016


And yeah, who works on barter in 2016?

I can't speak for lawyers in Hell's Kitchen, but for freelancers and other non-salaried-office-drones in the midwest, you'd be hella surprised. Lots of people don't have money, but the owner of the bar can pay you with a bar tab. The farmer can pay you with food. Etc.

It didn't seem particularly implausible to me, though drinks at Josie's after that was established certainly did. Even if drinks are on the house there: if you can't afford to tip, you can't afford to go out!
posted by rocketman at 11:39 AM on March 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


I thought we got an implication/statement in season one that Matt & Foggy don't pay for drinks at Josie's?

There's a long-running tab they have going there. I won't get into spoilers, but it'll get clarified.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:03 PM on March 22, 2016


They pulled the same shit again in the opening episode of this season as they did in the last season - a woman being used as a weak victim needing to be saved. Yes, it was a throwaway scene that didn't really mean much to the overall story, but it was there. And if it didn't add anything to the story, why was it included?

I was disappointed when the same thing happened in season one, but the show focused on other things as it went on, so I looked past it. Seeing it again in the season two opener just pisses me off. Is it just pandering to known tropes to appease the fans? Why bother to include this garbage if it has no bearing on anything else?

Come on, show. I know you can do better.
posted by MsVader at 6:51 PM on April 17, 2016


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