Get An Eyeful Of The Punisher In The Intense First Full Trailer For Daredevil’s Second Season

After first teasing his appearance at last year’s Comic Con, Netflix’s Daredevil has just officially unveiled The Punisher — the brutal vigilante who faces off against Daredevil in the show’s second season. Not shying away the already established themes of ultra-violence and unrelenting gore, the whole thing looks both great and gritty as hell.

As a former soldier who takes unrestrained vengeance on the city’s criminals after the murder of his family, The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) is an interesting character — one which inevitably explores the moral and emotional complexities of justice and the constraints of the justice system at large. He doesn’t have the self-imposed “no kill” restrictions of heroes like Batman, yet he’s not an outright villain. With three films to his name, he’s near-exclusively been portrayed as ‘the good guy’, for lack of a better phrase.

As US critics noted overnight, The Punisher is now instead being positioned as Daredevil’s (admittedly more virtuous) Joker. “We never stopped to think if Daredevil’s actions could open the door for things like this,” Karen says in the trailer. “You know you’re one bad day away from being me,” The Punisher tells Daredevil, as if in direct response.

This is going to make for a really interesting dynamic — no doubt fleshed out well by Netflix’s serialised binge-friendly form — and having played a similarly brutal and morally untethered character in The Walking Dead, Jon Bernthal is likely going to kill it. This could be The Dark Knight all over again.

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Daredevil‘s second season premieres on Netflix on March 18. The second part of its trailer featuring Elektra drops next week (ugh).