Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Just Made the MCU’s Oldest Avengers Plot Hole Impossible to Ignore — Thanks to the Punisher

Marvel finally folded Daredevil into the main MCU machine, which is great… until it runs into one of the MCU's longest-running headaches: characters vanishing during giant crises with zero explanation. And yeah, Daredevil: Born Again season 2 just ran smack into it with the Punisher.

The season 2 upgrade — and the missing piece

Season 2 massively scales up from the post-overhaul first season. The pre-retool threads are mostly gone, and the story locks in on Matt Murdock vs. Mayor Wilson Fisk. The city is under the thumb of Fisk and the AVTF (that would be the Anti-Vigilante Task Force), and the show brings in a bunch of familiar faces: Jessica Jones, Swordsman, White Tiger, and Bullseye all pop in.

But not Frank Castle. The Punisher is just… nowhere. Which is wild, because season 1 already had him in the mix, he broke out of Fisk's prison, and if anyone has a personal score to settle with Fisk, it's Frank. On top of that, Karen is back this season. Frank would never sit out Karen in danger unless he physically couldn't. Leaving him off the board without even a one-liner to explain it doesn't just feel like a plot hole — it undercuts what we know about Frank and Karen's bond.

The old MCU problem rears its head

"Where are the Avengers? "

That question has hovered over a lot of Marvel projects for years. The team forms in The Avengers to handle planet-level threats… and then somehow misses plenty of them. Eternals, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Thunderbolts* — stakes big enough to at least warrant a phone call, yet the bench stays empty more often than not.

Sometimes Marvel tosses in an in-story excuse, but we all know the real reasons: budgets, schedules, and the fact that movies and TV can't juggle a dozen headliners every time a city is on fire. Comics can do that. Live-action cannot. Still, when the universe pretends certain people don't exist in moments they absolutely would, it breaks the illusion. Born Again now has that same problem with the Punisher.

The real-world read vs. the in-story fix

The obvious off-camera explanation: Jon Bernthal was booked. He has been busy with other projects like The Odyssey, Spider- Man: No Way Home, and the Disney+ special The Punisher: One Last Kill. Totally understandable. But even if that kept him off the set, the show still needed to give us a clean in-universe reason.

Two upcoming projects have to patch this

Frank may be MIA in Born Again season 2, but he is on deck elsewhere: first in The Punisher: One Last Kill (a Disney+ special), and then teaming up with Spider-Man in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. When those land, they really need to answer the simple question: what was Frank doing while Mayor Fisk and the AVTF were turning New York into a no-heroes zone?

• One Last Kill could reveal he was targeting a crime outfit propping up Fisk's regime, meaning he was helping the fight from another angle.
• He could have been kidnapped, off the grid, or forced out of New York — any of which cleanly explains the no-show.
• If Brand New Day overlaps with Born Again on the timeline, Frank might have been tied up with Spider-Man (and even the Hulk ) on a different New York catastrophe, leaving Matt's ground war to Matt.

Bottom line: leaving Frank out without addressing it is a miss for both MCU continuity and Daredevil's story. The Punisher spun out of Daredevil in the first place, and unless these side missions feed back into Matt vs. Fisk in a meaningful way, sidelining Frank in season 2 feels like the wrong call. At the very least, give us the line that plugs the hole.