Daredevil: Born Again has always been very open about the Punisher’s return to the screen, promising it in every trailer and teasing it early with a bunch of skull-tattooed cops.
Now, Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle showed up in episode four as Matt brings a cop-used skull-engraved shell casing to him, which he doesn’t particularly care about, and it was never really a question of whether that was actually him who executed White Tiger, as that would have made no sense.
What we got instead was probably one of the best MCU show dialogue sequences ever. Maybe one of the best in most of the MCU, frankly, as Frank berates a crumbling Matt about how he’s in denial about not wanting revenge for Foggy, whose name he can’t even say (and he never does) even bringing Matt to the point of tears, which is not exactly something you’d expect from the Man Without Fear.
Frank has been living in his little batcave and apparently assassinating targets here and there, but we know that soon he’ll be back on the streets helping Daredevil in earnest, and we know Matt is just about ready to get back into the suit himself, which will likely happen next week, as we’re then going to be more than halfway through the season, and we’ve only seen him in costume once.
Bernthal has already confirmed that he will be doing a Punisher “special” as the character, rather than bringing back his series. In the wake of this episode, he also commented on how he turned down returning to Daredevil as Frank in the first, eventually scrapped draft of the show because he didn’t like where they were taking the character. That quote:
“Ultimately, I didn’t see it. I didn’t see the version of Frank, and what they wanted from Frank [didn’t] really make sense to me and I thought would not appeal to the fans and wouldn’t be congruent,” Bernthal said. “It was not something I was really interested in doing. So we had to walk away.”
Reportedly he returned once he knew Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen would be back (and she is coming back to season 1 soon), among other reasons like a proper direction for his character. I do wonder what the original plan was. I have a suspicion they may have done something crazy like make him a murderous cop or something, rather than what he is now, where he’ll be directly opposing them and taking his symbol back.
It’s amazing to see Bernthal back as Castle, now a hugely in-demand actor in projects from The Bear to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which is about as high-profile as you get. I imagine he’s excited to be The Punisher again, but I’m guessing his packed schedule is why he had to commit to a D+ special rather than a full series again. Too bad.
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