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How DAREDEVIL’s Best Punisher Scene Did the Comics Proud

[Warning: this story contains spoilers from Daredevil season two episode nine, “Seven Minutes In Heaven.” Read at your own risk!]

With just one scene, Daredevil managed to pose, argue, and win the case (by a landslide) for why iconic Marvel character The Punisher deserves his own Netflix spinoff series.

You know the scene I’m talking about. Season two, episode nine. “Seven Minutes In Heaven.” Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) stuck in a prison hallway with a dozen dangerous inmates gunning for him. With only a shiv to protect himself, knowing that season one villain Wilson “Kingpin” Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) set him up, Frank took on all the inmates on his own… and won.

It was hands down the most brutal and violent scene that Marvel has ever given us, both in the TV and Cinematic Universe. It was bloody, it was ruthless, it was no-holds-barred… and it was taken shot-for-shot right out of the comic books. You have to hand it to the fight coordinator Phil Silvera; not only did he completely elevate the already high quality fight scenes from season one, but he took it one step further by remaining 100 percent loyal to the source material.

Don’t believe me? Check out what one eagle-eyed fan posted on Tumblr:

http://frankcastles.tumblr.com/post/141395090208

That prison fight scene matched, frame-for-frame, a fight scene in The Punisher Volume 2: Border Crossing, the second comic book in a trilogy published from 2014-2015. Written by Nathan Edmondson, Kevin Maurer, and Mitchell Gerads and illustrated by Carmen Carnero and Phil Noto, the comic book scene transpires when American soldiers are being held by a South American drug lord. Frank Castle arrives to break them out from the inside, but all is not as it seems on either side of the bars. A wounded Frank and a Special Forces medic must hazard dangerous terrain and merciless mercenaries to escape, all before he teams up with Black Widow.

On Daredevil, from the moment Frank enters the cell block that’s run by a criminal named Dutton (William Forsythe) who pays off all the guards in the prison, to the point when he questions Dutton about being involved in the drug deal-turned-massacre that cost him his wife and children in Central Park, to when he violently and ruthlessly kills all the inmates trying to take him out, to when the prison guards drag him out bloodied and bruised, it’s all straight from the pages of the comic book. And damn if it isn’t the coolest shot of the entire season, if not the entire series.

“We didn’t necessarily want to repeat what we did last season or feel like we have to do anything bigger or better in any way. It was just about dynamic,” executive producer Marco Ramirez tells Nerdist of that fight scene. “Some fight scenes stand out as beautiful choreography, like the Frank Castle in the hallway of the prison scene. It was one of the great challenges of being a showrunner, where you have to assume that some people just watched season one for the first time yesterday as they’re rolling into this season. So how do you build it where it doesn’t feel like one-upping? How do you evolve it?”

Daredevil

Executive producer Doug Petrie agrees, adding, “Those fights were all very much organic to the characters.”

And this fight scene in particular is more than enough reason to convince Marvel and Netflix to go forward with their proposed Punisher spinoff series. The potential spinoff, which is very, very early in development, would star Bernthal as his Daredevil character and it be Netflix’s sixth Marvel series in addition to Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and the Avengers-style team up series The Defenders.

What do you think of the proposed Punisher spinoff series? Is that something that, like me, you’re dying to see after binge-watching Daredevil season two and being blown away by Bernthal’s performance as Frank Castle? Tweet me your thoughts at @SydneyBucksbaum!

Image/video: Netflix/Marvel

Daredevil season two is now streaming on Netflix.

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