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The Punisher's confusing ending explained

Photo credit: Netflix
Photo credit: Netflix

From Digital Spy

Just to make this clear up front, we're about to go into more obsessive detail about the final episode of the new Punisher series than Frank Castle does when spray-painting a skull onto his body armour. Please don't read this unless you've seen all of Netflix's Punisher season one.

Still with us? Okay, so you've binged your way to the closing moments of episode 13 of The Punisher and you're a bit confused by the ending.

Why didn't Frank kill Billy Russo? Why did he mess up his face in that weird fairground mirror scene? WHAT'S GOING ON?

Don't worry, you're not missing anything – it's confusing because it's using a pretty significant change from the canon to try to crowbar in a major character from the books, bringing together two threads that don't really work, especially if you've never picked up a Punisher comic in your life.

Allow us to explain.

Photo credit: Netflix
Photo credit: Netflix

In the Netflix take on The Punisher, Billy Russo is a major part of Frank's backstory. They were best friends when they served together in the Special Forces. When we join them in the series, ex-soldier and ex-vigilante Frank (he retires from killing criminals early on in the series, under the false assumption he's killed everyone involved with his family's murder) is in hiding and Russo runs Anvil, a dodgy private military corporation.

We find out that Frank's family weren't gunned down by criminals, they were assassinated to protect a military conspiracy involving drugs being trafficked in dead soldiers' corpses, a conspiracy Russo's caught up in. Oh, and there's a handful of references to Russo being really good-looking, made mainly by a person Frank never meets. With us so far? Great.

Photo credit: Netflix
Photo credit: Netflix

This is MASSIVELY different to the comics, where Billy Russo is a mobster so handsome he's nicknamed 'Billy the Beaut'. Russo works as a hitman for New York's criminal gangs, and is hired to clean up the mess left behind by the botched assassination of NYPD cop Frank Castle and his family (including the assassin who failed to kill Castle, and a journalist investigating the Castle story).

When Castle survives Russo's car-bomb, The Punisher hunts him down and throws him through a plate-glass window, ruining his looks and letting him live as a) a warning to other gangsters and b) a semi-ironic punishment (pretty hitman is now ugly hitman!), with the logic being that a life of disfigurement is a fate worse than death for someone who was so celebrated for their looks.

Sure enough, the disfigurement drives Russo so crazy that he renames himself Jigsaw and embarks on a long mission of revenge against Castle, transforming himself into one of The Punisher's most iconic villains.

It's all a bit comic-book-silly, but it basically makes sense.

In the show, Frank is forced to confront his old best friend at the same place he saw his family gunned down, a traumatic event so significant that it turned him into a murderer of anyone involved in it.

Yet, for some reason, Castle randomly decides NOT to kill Russo, despite the fact that he probably deserves to die more than ANYONE ELSE FRANK HAS EVER MET, not least because he knew Frank's family (they hung out together at that very fairground, for goodness sake) and he still let them get killed.

Not only that, he just used two completely innocent people as (bleeding) bait. Oh, and Russo, as far as Frank's aware, just killed one of his new pals (Dinah Madani) in front of the vigilante.

Like, this is enough to get Batman to shoot someone, let alone The Punisher.

But Frank, in a forgiving mood, smashes Russo's face into a mirror and drags it up and down a couple of times, because we've got to create Jigsaw for season two somehow you guys, and this is the best way we could think of to do that.

So, when we get that shot of Russo in bandages, with a voiceover doctor saying he might never recover, and even if he does he might be so traumatised that he won't remember anything, you can bet your mortgage that he WILL remember everything and he'll basically turn into the Joker with more scars in season two.

The Punisher deciding to not kill Russo is sort of sold as being part of a redemption arc for Frank, especially as the series closes on Castle in a veteran's support group, admitting to being scared about his future as a citizen, but it isn't massively clear. It's a shame, it's a botched element of a comparatively strong first solo outing for Frank.

Still, now he's been created, we're intrigued to see how they'll make the utterly ridiculous Jigsaw character work next time out.


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