Frank Castle has a longer on-screen legacy than some of his peers, but there’s little question that this is the definitive screen version of the character. Castle is virtually catatonic in the earliest episodes, and we see him come alive as he gets a new purpose and another reason to fight. As a result, Jon Bernthal is allowed to bring more range to the character than we saw in Daredevil, tempering Frank’s traumatised intensity with surprising warmth and humour as the show progresses, without ever losing sight of the character’s explosive temper or the demons that haunt him. It’s a remarkable performance, and Bernthal ranks with some of Marvel’s very best casting decisions.

While Daredevil Season 2 saw Castle primarily defined via his philosophical opposition to Daredevil, and much of his characterisation came via his sometimes excessive dialogue with Matt Murdock, here he gets some more non-costumed folks to play off. Ebon Moss-Bacharach is here as the mysterious “Micro,” another man pursued by his past, and there’s a real chemistry and tension when he shares the screen with Bernthal. Their rapport might be the best buddy/partnership we’ve seen in any of these shows, and it’s not always the easiest relationship.

The Punisher is the first of the second wave of Marvel’s Netflix shows and the first to be completely removed from the constraints of building up to The Defenders. In that respect, it’s mercifully free of some of these shows’ less endearing tics (there’s not one reference to “the incident” for example). It would function as a complete standalone from the rest of the Marvel Universe if it weren’t for the fact that in its earliest episodes it doesn’t do enough to explain Frank’s recent history. If you haven’t seen Daredevil Season 2, you might not know why the world has assumed Frank Castle is dead, for one thing.

On the other hand, you’d think that by now Marvel would have figured out a way to avoid some of the other problems that have plagued all of these shows from the start. While it’s nice that not every episode needs a hefty body count, there’s one instalment that may set the world record for consecutive scenes of two characters talking to each other in a room. As usual, you may start to suspect that they’re stretching 10 episodes of story into 13, particularly during an episode that resorts to multiple POV shifts to go over the same five minutes of story.

Waiting for some of the B-plot threads to come together, including a pair of Homeland Security agents (Amber Rose Reva and Michael Nathanson) on the trail of folks related to Frank’s past (including Westworld‘s Ben Barnes offering up a similar kind of hate-yourself-for-loving-him charm as he did on HBO), is a real slog early on, although it picks up considerably at around the halfway mark. There’s no obvious main villain in the show’s first half, and instead it chooses to introduce us to a range of corrupt officials and military officers, all of whom are worthy of suspicion, but none as menacing as the title character. Sometimes it makes for an appropriate sense of paranoia and other times it can be tiresome.