Cartoonish violence suffused the first season, and continues to define the second. If Netflix has a single problem with its dramas, it’s that they pad out 30 minutes of television into 50-minute episodes; on Daredevil, this means that fight scenes become feats of endurance, forcing the audience to watch a vulnerable human hero being pulverized over and over again. Season two doubles down by introducing the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), the series’s most compelling character to date, but also one who kills and maims with alacrity, and who amplifies the ferocity exponentially. When Irish gangsters are shot, blood explodes out of their bullet wounds in slow-motion spurts. One stabs another in the eye with a screwdriver, and twists it as you hear his skull crack open. The camera pans out slowly to reveal that we’ve been watching a scene unfold through a gaping bullet hole in a corpse. Matt, as Daredevil, finds a freezer full of Mexican cartel members slung up on meat hooks, their intestines spilling out of their bodies.

By the time a character’s tortured with an electric drill, which penetrates his foot as his bones and muscle tissue spill out, it’s clear that this is torture porn of an unmistakably Catholic variety. The holes forced into hands and feet. The way the camera lingers on a crucifix above Matt’s bed in a flashback to his childhood illness. The obsessive focus on his physical scars, and on the ritual maiming of the show’s heroes. But it’s also violence that’s sexually charged, and riddled with fears about emasculation (in one scene, Punisher chains Matt to a wall and repeatedly refers to him as “Red,” as if he were Joan Holloway offering coffee). By contrast, the show is skittish to the point of awkward about its hero’s sex life, or complete lack thereof.

JJ was open and unapologetic about its character’s sexual encounters; Daredevil is painfully chaste—a kiss in a rainstorm is visualized as an adolescent, hearts-and-flowers fantasy, while a flashback scene of Matt making love to his college girlfriend, Elektra (Elodie Yung) consists almost entirely of shots of Elektra shaking her hair in circles. (This isn’t sex so much as a shampoo ad.) Part of the problem is Matt’s lack of chemistry with his ostensible love interest, Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), but it’s also the fact that the only kind of lust the show is compelled to explore or act upon involves blood.

In many ways, Daredevil seems to represent the paradox of modern entertainment, where sex is taboo but violence is cheap, and readily acceptable even on network television, let alone via Netflix. (It’s telling that Marvel mandated that Jessica Jones not feature nudity, or the word “fuck.”) But the problem also seems to point to a lack of clear vision for what the show is, or could be. Daredevil was conceived by Drew Goddard, who wrote the first two episodes of season one, but stepped down a year before it premiered, and was replaced as showrunner by Steven S. DeKnight. For season two, the writers Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez replaced DeKnight, with Goddard continuing in an advisory role. (All 14 directors credited for the show on IMDB are male; all but one of the show’s 21 writers (Ruth Fletcher) are too, which may be why all of the eight episodes I’ve seen of season two so far fail the Bechdel Test.)