[Note: spoilers for The Punisher’s third episode, “Kandahar,” follow.]

Something strange happened to me while in my third hour of binge-watching The Punisher, Marvel’s latest Netflix series: instead of rooting for my action hero protagonist to kick a ton of ass, I was instead deeply saddened to watch him do so.

The Punisher has subverted all expectations as far as I’m concerned: the show about a madman on a vengeful murder spree isn’t a rollicking, shoot-’em-up action series, but instead a much quieter, thoughtful meditation on United States military veterans, PTSD, machismo, and the horrors of violence. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s a better show for it.

This weightier approach to Frank Castle brings something new to the table: the notion that it wasn’t the murder of Castle’s family that created the Punisher. The creative team behind the series want us to know that the Punisher was inside Frank beforehand — his family’s massacre didn’t birth this alter ego, but rather bring it to the forefront. Frank Castle died alongside his family; the Punisher took over.

Indeed, The Punisher’s third episode, “Kandahar,” takes this idea a step further, and flashes back to the exact moment the show seems to imply the Punisher was born. You can watch that scene below (fair warning, it contains some graphic violence):

The scene of Frank Castle, Marine, pinned down and surrounded by enemy combatants, should be the episode’s Big Action Hero Moment. Watching Castle fight and kill these guys should play like John Wick taking out tons of bodyguards, or, perhaps more appropriately, like Castle’s insanely awesome prison hallway fight in Daredevil season two.

It should play like that, but it doesn’t. Not at all. And that all comes down to the scene’s choice in music. Playing The White Buffalo’s “Wish It Was True” over Castle repeatedly smashing a man’s skull in with a rock is a bold move, but a pointed one. Without the song — and the rearrangement of lyrics from the song — I wouldn’t view this as the Punisher’s origin scene.

But it’s hard to ignore the way Country, I was a soldier for you, I did what you asked me to, it was wrong and you knew is sung over Castle screaming and killing these men. Harder still to ignore? Country, now I’m just a stranger to you, a number, a name, it’s true, throw me away when you’re through. One of The Punisher’s largest themes of the season is the way our military soldiers are asked to give so much at war and then how little they receive upon returning home. That disillusionment is at the heart of every scene this season involving a veterans’ support group featured prominently throughout the show.

It’s also a key component of Netflix’s version of the Punisher. Jon Bernthal’s portayal of Castle differs from the comics — he’s not an insane psychopath waging a war against all criminals. He is, instead, a man who was forced to become a killing machine on foreign soil, to embrace something animalistic, and then asked to return home and live normally. When he did return home, the same government that turned Frank into a man that enjoyed killing orchestrated an elaborate cover-up that ended with the death of his family, the only thing really tethering him to his humanity. In the comics, Frank Castle is a veteran who starts a war once his family dies. Here, Castle is a man who brings war home, caged inside him, and unleashes it when his family is slain.

Bernthal’s guttural roaring accompanying the line home of the brave and the free is pretty damning. But then, it ought to be, no? If a show like The Punisher is going to make the claim that our government’s disregard for our soldiers’ well-being played a major factor in creating a homicidal vigilante, it had better be as damning as it can.