"Complex female character" is kind of what "strong female character" means, though. When people complain about there not being enough of them they aren't talking about biceps or moral fiber or something - the strength isn't a feature of the character, it's that the character isn't defined by one or two simple traits…

If that's true there would be way too many people who qualified for it for the Chaste to really do anything about it, though.

I think that's where they were getting the mystical stash box of resurrection or something. I'm not sure why it would be buried deep underneath Manhattan, or how it could get that far down without them having to use massive amounts of dynamite on the bedrock*, but I guess ninja powers?

That part kind of baffled me: for all that Karen can be annoying she is supposed to be fairly resourceful and better under pressure than she seems like she'd be. And yet in that situation she didn't do the pretty obvious thing that would have both saved her from (at least immediate) danger and still worked fine in…

The source of the problems this season seems to me to be that they ended up falling prey to superhero-movie-sequel syndrome: the first one was a combination of an origin story and a dangerous villain that needed to be defeated.

Then the Punisher's contribution to final scene on the rooftop could have been this!
https://www.youtube.com/wat…

That tease was one of the meanest things I've ever seen a show do.

The problem with portraying actual ninjas is that they weren't really that interesting in practice. They weren't really impressive badasses, or part of (secret) ninja societies or anything. They were basically just what we would think of as spies.* So if you put them in a story no one would see them as any…

I think this is the key point: with a bunch of the Asian villains what we don't get, and what sets them apart from a lot of other characters, is any kind of access to their inner lives. I mean, we know more about that detective that Foggy and Matt know than we do about Nobu or Gao (let alone about one of the people…

When there are two (genuinely) distinct groups of Asian characters and both of them are complex and cosmic with hidden motives and we don't get any (narrative) access to them as individual characters (compare Fisk to Nobu or Gao), that does sort of raise some awkward questions.

And both were more interesting than half the other characters!

I'm not sure how inscrutable the Asian characters are - we don't necessarily know their full motivations, but that's true for an awful lot of characters on the show, and especially the villainous crimey ones.

Not anymore, but that did absolutely used to be true. (That's what the 'yellow peril' stuff was.) I'm not sure if it's recent enough that it's a relevant stereotype to pull on though.

On Earth 2 all news is delivered purely by podcasts?

It would have been especially hard to fight with against someone armed with a (light/agile) sword. There's not enough space to stay at a long enough distance, and the sword is fast enough to make it hard to close to a distance where it's less dangerous without getting stuck.

This makes me wonder if it would have done better if it had been released, say, later this year, after a revival of the idea that R-rated action movies are actually better than PG-13 ones.

This is right: and they could both easily be copies of the last third or so of Punisher: War Zone, as far as that goes.

The first time I watched it I wondered if I'd just had one.

I have been informed by women I know that while they do technically get older women do not ever appear to have aged.

My guess on that one is that he's in his later 20s/early 30s. He's probably over twenty before the jump (at least), and it looked like a fairly substantial one.