I walked away from The Punisher: One Last Kill with a weird feeling. I liked it, I thought. I like most things when I walk away from them. I’m not a terribly picky consumer in the moment, and don’t really form an opinion until I’ve had time to mull over what I watched and discuss with others.

Did I hate this? No, I definitely didn’t hate this. I’ve had a mixed relationship with the MCU’s presentation of Frank Castle, though. It’s not Jon Bernthal’s fault. He is, as always, excellent in the role. Unfortunately, I feel like One Last Kill commits the same original sin that both seasons of the MCU series did and just retreads old ground, leaving us with a character who seems perpetually stuck in place, but not for any particular narrative reason.

Anyways, there are spoilers after this. So if you haven’t watched this, it’s on Disney+ now. You can go watch it and come back here after. I’ll wait.

OK, you back? Good. Full spoilers ahead.

Allegedly, The Punisher: One Last Kill is set in the same time frame as the end of Daredevil: Born Again Season 1 and 2, but hell if you can tell that. We last saw Frank escaping from The Kingpin’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force in the Born Again Season 1 finale, but that’s not addressed here. We don’t know how he got out, or what happened to him between then and the start of the special. The AVTF, who have literally co-opted Frank’s Punisher imagery for their own ends, are not addressed. The one thing I had genuinely hoped for from this special — the long overdue death of the smarmy asshole Agent Powell — is not here, and nothing that happened in Born Again is brought up at all.

Instead, we find Frank where we saw him at the beginning of The Punisher Season 1. And Season 2. And Daredevil: Born Again Season 1. One Last Kill devotes much of its runtime to Frank as a broken man, wallowing alone in misery and struggling to find purpose, haunted by images of his former marines and eager to join his family in the afterlife. When the episode opened with Frank surrounded by a city that hadn’t been changed by his actions and preparing to take his life on his daughter’s grave, I had hopes that we would finally explore and put to rest some of the character’s trauma that kept him in place.

Boy, was I wrong.

Instead, One Last Kill opens with Frank back in hiding as he’s wanted for a big murder spree. He took out the Gnucci crime family, who we’re told via newscast exposition was the last family involved in the mob hit on his family. I find myself asking how many mobsters were in the park that day, since the opening of The Punisher Season 1 was Frank killing the last mobster involved in the hit that killed his family, but okay.

I’m having a hard time getting to the point because there’s not really one, so let’s just barrel through. As you probably guessed, because it was the Gnucci family, there’s one straggler: Ma Gnucci. I don’t know why they felt the need to tie her to the murder of Frank’s family, a plot thread so dealt with that the sharpest seam ripper couldn’t have undone it. It’s not like Ma Gnucci is so beloved because her character is narratively rich and complex. She’s just an unkillable pain in the ass that exists for Frank to make a mockery of in The Punisher MAX. They could have just done that for this special. But no, she’s now the sole remaining matriarch of a crime family not brought up or mentioned before this special, but now tied inexplicably to Frank’s quest for vengeance.

Ma Gnucci (played by Judith Light! I guess she’s the boss after all.) shows up about halfway through the episode to instigate the action. To get revenge for her family’s murders, she’s pinged Frank’s location — a somewhat rundown apartment filled with tenants — with a bounty, and said killers are going to kill anyone they have to to get to him. Yeah, they’re just doing The Raid. And honestly…it’s fine! The action is a lot of fun. It’s brutal, the stunts are excellent, and it’s all very straightforward and to the point. This is honestly a great action set piece for the MCU. It’s not reinventing the wheel or anything, but it’s shot good and keeps you guessing.

I think, in theory, a special like this is exactly what I’m looking for in an MCU Punisher solo story. I do like it when Punisher gets to be a brutal killing machine, but I found the 13-episode affairs of the Netflix series to be a hell of a drag. There’s just a point where the gunplay got to be too much, where the violence and the despair are so relentlessly over the top that I can’t really focus on anything else. Maybe it’s because I was binging them, I don’t know. I generally liked the shows, the performances, the plot, but they just got to be so heavy.

One Last Kill mostly avoids that thanks to its short runtime and brisk pace. About half the episode is devoted to a bloodbath fight from Frank’s apartment building to the ground level. Unfortunately, it ends without much of a resolution, which bugs me. As of this writing, we don’t know what’s next for Bernthal’s Punisher. Will Ma Gnucci return so Frank can finally finish his revenge (oh god, please let him move on). Is she going to be perpetually in the wind so Frank always has someone to “need” to kill in the periphery? Is that guy named Barry because he’s Barracuda, or is that just a name they picked for a cheap pop like Born Again did with Cole North? Will Frank’s appearance in Spider-Man: Brand New Day ignore this special entirely and set up a more family-friendly iteration of the character that renders all of this moot?

That’s the biggest problem: this is all stuff we’ve seen before, and all of that was rendered pointless by retreaded plot points. So why should I get invested this time? The next time I see Frank, will he again have stopped wearing his skull vest and begun hiding in the sewers in shame? Will he and Daredevil have the same prolonged debate about killing? I just need there to be some kind of forward momentum to give a shit about The Punisher at this point. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that from One Last Kill. Instead, we got the same ending as in The Punisher Season 2: Frank dealt with the immediate problem, decided being The Punisher was worth continuing, and ended the episode dealing with some street crime.

I tried my damndest to love this effusively, but I feel it keeps resetting to square one. It’s the same problem I have with Daredevil, which seems to be absolutely embarrassed by its main character wearing their proper costume (Born Again Season 2 only fixed this by painting the suit black). I wish this finale had been about killing Frank Castle so The Punisher could persist unshackled by his past. I wish this had been about finally putting the baggage to bed, no matter how uncomfortable that made the character. I wish this show had the room and the courage to finally evolve Frank into the cold-blooded bastard Punisher that the MCU keeps trying its damndest not to let him become. Instead, we again get a Punisher who comes across as toothless and stuck in place, driven again by the same traumas with no progress and no deeper exploration.

I’m going to keep holding out hope for something more. Again, you cannot deny that Bernthal loves this character, and I do believe he gets Frank. I worry that most of what’s holding these stories back from breaking out of their mold is less to do with him and The Punisher, but more to do with the MCU’s apprehension about using a character like this. And honestly, I get that, too. There’s plenty of great Punisher stories to adapt that break the mold (imagine building up to Punisher as The Fist of the Beast vs. King Daredevil!), but until they get to them, the best we can hope for is that we’ll skip the debate about whether he needs a mission or not and get a fully-realized Punisher the next time we see him.

The Punisher: One Last Kill, as well as both seasons of The Punisher and a slew of other tie-in media, are all available on Disney+ right now. The Punisher next shows up in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, in theaters July 31. No, the Gary one-shot on Hulu is not related to this (but you should still watch it).