Karen Page Is the Real Star of ‘The Punisher’

The following contains light spoilers from the first season of The Punisher.

The latest Punisher incarnation hits Netflix this Friday, and I’ve been skeptical about it in the months leading up. I’m happy to report that The Punisher delivers, for the most part, and it mostly does so by sticking to what made Frank Castle the most compelling part of last season’s Daredevil. In short, the show hits its highest points when it’s less about Frank and more about the people around him. The standout supporting role here is another Daredevil carry-over: Karen Page.

Karen (played by True Blood’s Deborah Ann Woll) has been a major player in Daredevil, first introduced as a client of the blind lawyer, later becoming a secretary, and then leaving the law firm of Franklin and Murdock to work as a reporter. She became Frank’s main link to the real world when he went off the deep end, killing criminals to cope after his wife and kids were taken from him. The two quickly formed a bond while she helped build his defense.

That bond is already formed when she first appears in the second episode of The Punisher, but the series works to give the relationship much greater depth. Karen jokes in a later episode that she has “a tendency to get over-involved.” That’s true, in that Karen is an incredibly compassionate person who works tirelessly to right the wrongs of the world. But it’s clear there’s more to her investment in Frank. She seems to see herself in him, and that scares her.

Her propensity to fight injustice indirectly led to Karen and Frank’s paths crossing. She has been the victim of framings, murder attempts, and all kinds of attacks both to silence her and to use her relationships with Daredevil and Frank against them. Her past is murky, and a few hints have been dropped along the way to suggest that there’s pain and trauma there too. She has as much right as Frank to be angry at the world and to lash out, but she doesn’t, at least not the way Frank does. She works to affect change in more lasting, meaningful, and overall admirable ways (maybe I’m biased, but pushing for accountability through her journalism strikes me as more powerful than burying a few bad guys).

Still, she sees herself in Frank. She begs him to find a reason to “keep going.” Tells him he needs it. It’s pretty clear she’s projecting her own insecurities onto him, as right as she might be about him. Karen has had everything taken from her, but she clings to every reason she has to keep going. Realistically, she doesn’t seem the type to give up, but she’s clearly afraid to. And Frank is the kind of loose cannon that makes her doubt herself. If she can save Frank, she’ll know she has it in her to keep going.

Karen is also vitally important to Frank. She’s the first sign that Frank’s superhuman feats of vigilantism require a lot of support. The show is like a magician’s trick being revealed before us. Frank is like a spectre to those he takes out. He shows up when least expected, armed to the teeth, ready for any and all contingencies. But to us, watching the show at home, he’s only as good as the people he relies on.

Karen is vital to his eventual partnership with David Lieberman, AKA Micro (played with the right amount of eccentricity to balance out Frank’s gruff machismo by Girls alum Ebon Moss-Bachrach). A former NSA analyst presumed dead and living in hiding, Micro is looking to take out the same guys Frank seeks to punish, and he has the hacking chops to make Frank all but omniscient.

While Frank and Micro share the pain of missing their families, it’s Micro’s wife Sarah (Jaime Ray Newman) who, like Karen, can relate the most to Frank. While he develops an uncle-like friendship with the Liebermans as nice guy Pete, Frank grows close to Sarah who, as far as she knows, also lost her husband in an unexpected act of violence. She’s another example of someone who, like Frank, has had so much taken from her. Her determination to be a good mom is another alternative to giving into the pain and darkness like Frank. She calls into question the need the Punisher fills in Frank and makes him compellingly tragic.

The Punisher is still far from perfect. It avoids getting stale by constantly shaking things up. As a result, it doesn’t seem to know what it is. At times it’s a war drama, then it’s a police procedural, a political thriller, a heist film, sometimes a family melodrama, always with an undercurrent of dark “street-level” superheroics. It pulls off each one quite well, and deserves credit for the attempt, but it leaves the series feeling a little scattered.

Then there are moments when Punisher’s creative team fails spectacularly to read the room. It first gets a little tripped up in its attempt to tackle gun control, ploughing forward with an explicit discussion of gun legislation and lax background checks.

But The Punisher is probably a great place to unpack America’s gun problem. On the one hand, the film and TV industry has been unacceptably silent on the subject of gun rights and domestic terrorism, and The Punisher is overtly about white male anger and violent lashing out (yes, with tons of guns that should never be in circulation to begin with). On the other hand, the show’s attempt to address the issue head on is brief, crude, and ends in an absurd stalemate that implies the issue is too complex (and the opposing sides too equally valid) to definitively move forward with anything.

It’s a morally reprehensible move—a show that capitalizes on gun violence should either call out America’s deranged obsession with guns or have the decency to stay out of the conversation.

And there’s the treatment of Frank’s own psyche. I’m convinced the character works best when he’s at least a little inscrutable, but if you’re going to delve into Frank’s mindset, the writers’ choice to tackle PTSD and male aggression is a wise one. That being said, we never do see Frank’s demons unpacked. Instead we get artfully composed dream sequences and nightmares, including a scene that crosscuts images of brutal violence enacted on Frank with a sexual fantasy involving his late wife.

If you’re wondering how they pulled that off and what the symbolism means, they didn’t, and it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a deeply weird moment that connects sex and violence without comment. Is Frank escaping violence through a sexual fantasy? Can he not distinguish between the two? Should I close my laptop and go take a shower, pretending this never happened?

These missteps don’t spoil the show, but they certainly knock it down a few pegs. If The Punisher earns a second season (and it probably will), more screen time for Karen and the other members of Team Frank will be a welcome move towards what worked so well this time around.

I’d rather see Karen Page step into the foreground in her own show though. An investigative journalist who can call in favours from superheroes would make a nice addition to the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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