At first glance, there’s not much about the ending of The Punisher: One Last Kill that needs explaining, because most of the Marvel TV special’s second half is one long and appropriately punishing action sequence where Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) must fight his way through an endless stream of assassins after Ma Gnucci (Judith Light) places a bounty on his head. But before (and, briefly, after) this onslaught of neck-stabs, head-shots, and other gory kills, we get a look at Frank’s mental state. Though he’s killed members of the Gnucci crime family who may have been connected to the death of his family (a minor/vague retcon, because they didn’t seem to be a major part of that conspiracy in his earlier appearances), Castle’s grief hasn’t been mollified by his vengeance.
In fact, he seems far less stable than he was during most of the second season of The Punisher. Hiding out in what appears to be public housing, in a mostly-empty apartment, with only his demons and his big bushy beard for company, Frank spends much of the first half of One Last Kill marinating in alcohol, guilt, grief, and anger. He also does some hallucinating, which leads to some of the most confusing business in the episode.
The Punisher: One Last Kill Ending Explained: Is Curtis Dead?
Now, technically, this isn’t part of the special’s ending, which features an unambiguous return of Frank in his full Punisher garb, ready to mete out vigilante justice to neighborhood psychos and avenge regular folks looking for justice. (Hey, it’s like he’s some kind of an Avenger!) But it does relate to the special’s more dreamlike passages.
Throughout the first half of One Last Kill, Castle is haunted by visions: Of his departed family, but also of other important people from his more recent life. Most prominently, he’s visited by Curtis Hoyle (Jason R. Moore), a key supporting player from the two-season Punisher TV series. On that show, Hoyle was an ex-military guy and loyal friend to Castle, attempting to help him re-enter society after being presumed dead following his family’s murder, and later drawn into a number of violent conflicts. Though he stood by Castle throughout the two seasons, he was also increasingly horrified by his friend’s violent extremes; last we saw him, at the end of the second season, he was parting ways with Castle, who we can presume went further into a rabbit hole of vengeance.
It’s entirely possible, then, that Curtis Hoyle died sometime between that show’s summer 2018 endpoint and the 2027 setting of the new special. After all, nearly a decade has elapsed (albeit five years during the Thanos “blip” where half the population was disappeared into dust). It would also fit with Castle’s running visions of his wife and children, which have popped up throughout the series and recur in One Last Kill, if he was seeing more dead people. However, there aren’t really any other signs that Curtis is dead, and in fact there’s a pretty good indicator that he’s not: One of Castle’s other visions is of Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), a Daredevil character who worked on Castle’s defense case in the first Daredevil run, and became close to him in the process.
Karen Page is not dead. While Curtis Hoyle might have conceivably died offscreen for story convenience, Karen is a notable enough character in Daredevil that her death definitely would have been addressed. So if Karen can appear in Frank Castle’s visions — smooching him, even! — than clearly there isn’t some kind of ghosts-only rule. He’s thinking about the people who matter to him and, we can infer, those who might be most concerned about his descent into a self-created hell of grief and bottomless need for vengeance. He’s not haunted by his friends’ deaths; he’s haunted, in a sense, by his own spiritual death at his own hands, which at one point in the special he nearly literalizes before a vision of his daughter stops him.
So while the ending of One Last Kill is pretty straightforward — the Punisher is back in action, baby! — it’s also a sign that even if he goes to violent ends in his pursuit of justice, Frank has escaped this purgatory where he’s haunted not just by his dead family, but by his perceived disappointment of his allies. It’s unclear as to the next time we might actually see Curtis Hoyle; he seems unlikely to make an appearance in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. And, sure, the MCU could ultimately reveal that Castle was specifically haunted by unresolved issues with a friend who died off-screen. But the point of One Last Kill is less whether Frank Castle’s friend is dead and more that the Punisher is alive.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
Stream The Punisher: One Last Kill on Disney+
