Sunday!

So we’ve watched 12 of the 13 Daredevil episodes. We’re going to finish the series off today.

When I had first heard that The Punisher was going to be part of the season, there were two Punisher scenes that I was looking forward to watching. The first was “Punisher finds himself in maximum security wing of prison, finds himself in riot, resolves riot” and the second was something like “Punisher finds himself in grocery store as it finds itself getting robbed, resolves robbery”.

This season gave me the first but not really the second (though there was a scene in a diner that came somewhat close). As I sat there watching The Punisher resolve the problem in the diner, I felt my heart leap a couple of times. Bad people having bad things happen to them at the agency of an even badder person. Of course, we, as a society, might have to use law enforcement to do some light cleanup and do some bagging and tagging afterwards… but that’s a small price to pay for the resolution of problems. Perhaps if law enforcement had demonstrated competence up unto this point, it might be different.

But this is a world where The Kingpin manages to capture many different institutions and prevent them from working for their original purpose (including law enforcement and the justice system). Ancient conspiracies with all kinds of resources (from ninjas to billions of dollars to cryptographers) are moving chess pieces around the board… if we didn’t have the whole “one man with a conscience” thing going on, how much worse off would we be?

And so we see such things as vigilantism as an appropriate response to the wrongdoing of bad actors in the face of sclerotic institutions.

The problem with that, however, is that we have a handful of sclerotic institutions in our everyday life in the real world.

And it’s hard to not think something like “man, I wish we had vigilantes” when one hears of something like a grocery store getting robbed.

Anyway, I can’t wait to watch the finale.

So… what are you reading and/or watching?

(Featured Image is “Edison’s Telephonoscope” by George du Maurier from Punch Almanack for 1879)