The Punisher season 1 basically gave me Kastle fanfic, and The Punisher season 2 gave me crumbs.

The original draft of this article was actually started after the debut of Daredevil season 3, and was originally titled, “Daredevil season 3 was great, but where the hell was Frank Castle?”

Because as great as Daredevil season 3 was — and, honestly, it was truly a great season and it’s such a bitter shame that the show has been cancelled — the one thing that bothered me most about the season was the complete lack of Frank Castle.

It was hard for me to believe that the same Frank Castle who started having a complete emotional breakdown at the thought of Karen Page getting hurt, then took multiple bullets, dislocated his arm and literally got blown up in an effort to save Karen during The Punisher’s first season would suddenly just…not show up at all when her life was threatened by the most dangerous man in New York City.

But then life got in the way and I never ended up finishing that article, so it remained in my drafts section. And if I felt a little bit guilty at the way I’d shelved my Kastle stanning, I at least comforted myself with the fact that The Punisher season 2 was forthcoming, which meant there was still a chance that I’d get the Kastle content that I — and the characters — deserved.

Then The Punisher season 2 premiered.

Now, I know the show is called The Punisher, not The Kastle Show (though clearly I’d watch the shit out of that second show). And I know The Punisher is meant to be about Frank Castle as the popular anti-hero the Punisher, not Frank Castle as the broody rom-com leading man of my dreams.

But I also know this: Frank Castle and Karen Page’s characters are inextricably linked to one another, their stories are more interesting when one involves the other, and as strong as they are as individual stories and characters, they are that much more interesting and engaging when brought together.

Which is why, first, I’ll say that I’m glad we actually did get to see Karen Page pop up — however briefly — late in The Punisher’s second season.

It was already unbelievable enough to me that Frank Castle was neither present nor even mentioned throughout the entirety of Daredevil season 3, and after the many, MANY scenes in season 1 of The Punisher that seemed to be ripped straight from Kastle fanfic, it would have been completely unrealistic to have the same happen in the The Punisher’s second season.

Luckily, The Punisher’s showrunner, Steve Lightfoot, agreed with this assessment and made sure to include Karen in the second season’s 11th episode.

It doesn’t matter what you did. It doesn’t change the way I feel about you.

With Frank once again beaten and bloodied to within an inch of his life, in walks Karen, confidently and calmly, pushing her way past the cop stationed at the door. She enters the room to find Frank chained to the hospital bed, cuts and bruises on his face — a callback to their first meeting all those years ago in Daredevil season 2.

But where she was once shaky with fear and apprehension, now she’s shaky with worry, with sadness, and, yes, with fear — but of a different sort this time.

She sits by Frank’s bedside — looking at a man who seemingly can’t keep himself from the edge of death, who can’t keep himself from fighting war after war — and waits for him to wake up. She reaches over and holds his hand when he does, waking from a nightmare he can never escape, comforting him and listening as he bares his heart and shares his deepest fears.

We watch a familiar scene play out on the screen — Frank intent on protecting Karen from his life and who he is, Karen stubbornly refusing both. We see tenderness from a man so many consider a monster, the sharpened steel of a woman so many see only as a thing to protect.

In the course of that one episode, we were given tender hand holding, a self-assured confession, an interrupted almost-kiss.

And another final goodbye.

But that one episode is all we got for a combined two seasons of possibility.

Which is why, despite the fact we essentially got confirmation that Karen Page and Frank Castle love one another — in show and in multiple interviews with both Deborah Ann Woll and Jon Bernthal — I still finished up the second season of The Punisher feeling deeply unsatisfied with the Kastle content we got.

And, again, I understand that Karen probably wasn’t able to be in the entire season because Daredevil was filming at the same time. And I also want to stress that I understand that the show is meant to be about the adventures of Frank Castle and not solely about the love story of Frank Castle and Karen Page.

However, what season 1 of The Punisher proved was that the show could be — and, indeed, was at its best — when the story was about both.

In fact, on both a story and character level, it makes little to no sense that after the events of season 1 of the Punisher, Karen Page and Frank Castle wouldn’t continue to be a regular part of one another’s lives in some capacity.

Credit to where it’s due, again, because it seems as though season 2 of The Punisher recognized that, but the one episode we were given of Kastle content wasn’t nearly enough for two complex characters with a complicated history between them.

It felt so rushed and underdeveloped — two seasons worth of conversation and interaction so diluted into a handful of scenes that it rendered much of what we love so much about this couple nearly unrecognizable.

You could choose to love someone else instead of another war.

One of the things that initially drew me to shipping Kastle was the fact that each character was truly able to see and understand one another.

To Frank, Karen wasn’t just someone to put on a pedestal as a thing wholly pure and right. He recognized immediately that the darkness she was embroiled in wasn’t her first rodeo, that she had an darkened edge of her own that didn’t cause her to turn away from him.

And to Karen, Frank was more than just a tormented monster in the dark. He was a tragedy — an amalgamation of bad choices and bad luck and bad people. But he was someone who maybe didn’t need to be forever branded by that tragedy, who could still be a good person despite the bad things he had done.

The appeal of Frank Castle and Karen Page as a couple is that they were more than just an idea to each other, they were individuals — each with their own histories and their own tragedies; each with their own possibilities for redemption.

More than this, they were able to look clearly at one another and say: I choose this, and I choose you — all of you — no matter what.

And that is such a complex idea that one episode could never possibly have tackled it all.

Because while we got a confirmation of love from both characters, the baring of Karen’s raw emotion was rebuffed in a way that made me want to reach out and wrap her in the biggest hug while glaring at Frank.

And while I understand that Frank’s rejection of her offer to love someone rather than another war was a way for him to both protect Karen and an admission that he didn’t feel like he deserved a soft ending, the fact that we only got that one episode with the two of them means we didn’t get to go into that painful exchange with the depth both characters ought to have gotten.

After the events and revelations of Daredevil season 3, what I wanted and craved was for Karen to be recognized as a person, first, and especially as a person who has suffered her own traumas and who deserves to be heard, seen, and listened to.

But since we only had one episode with Frank and Karen, the story largely focused on Frank and who he is — which makes sense, given that this is his show. But the lack of Karen in this season forced The Punisher to oversimplify their relationship, taking away the depth and complexity that made it so interesting and so like Karen’s relationships with other love interests.

Of course, all this will be moot if we get a season 3 that includes Karen as a series regular (as she should’ve already been in season 2), and delves into their relationship in a deeper and more genuine way.

But while it’s what the fans want, and it’s certainly what Deborah Ann Woll and Jon Bernthal themselves want, it seems increasingly unlikely — given the slew of MCU Netflix cancellations — that we’ll get it.

Which is a damn shame, because Frank and Karen have one of the best — if not the best — dynamics in the MCU Netflix universe.

So while we wait on news about The Punisher’s future, I’ll be over here re-watching all their best scenes from Daredevil season 2 and The Punisher season 1, and hoping against hope that we get a third season, that Deborah Ann Woll gets announced as a series regular, and that the series ends with Frank Castle choosing to love Karen Page instead of another war this time around.