Frank Castle and the Goat
In the sixth episode of the first season of The Punisher (Netflix, 2017) "The Judas Goat," Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) is seriously injured after fighting agents sent by William Rawlins (Paul Schulze) to kill Gunner Henderson (Jeb Kreager), a veteran who served with Frank in Afghanistan, on a covert military operation called "Cerberus."
In that mission, the bodies of fallen U.S. soldiers were used to transport drugs to American soil; Henderson discovered this and recorded a video where the Cerberus team is torturing an Afghan policeman who is being interrogated as a terrorist (without the soldiers' knowledge) to finally kill him.
This gave rise to a series of events that would lead to the massacre of Frank Castle's family in Central Park, the birth of The Punisher, and finally to the agonizing state of our protagonist in this episode.
Curtis Hoyle (Jason R. Moore), a veteran war medic and Frank's close friend, heals his wounds and then reflects on Castle's condition at his meeting with other veterans. He tells the story of a goat he called Cassius (as "G.O.A.T." stands for Greatest of All Time) that he was given in the army. They blew it up, cut it, and tortured it so that the doctors could do their job under extreme conditions: they had to save the goat over and over again.
"What sort of life is that?" Curtis says, "You go through all that just to get patched and then do it all over again. Stay in the game long enough and you're going to die. How are we any different from that goat?" The goat becomes a clear allegory to Frank Castle and his constant struggle, in which he has often found himself on the brink of death, to rise again and follow his path of revenge.
Frank Castle is a ghost fighting ghosts. His only motivation, murdering all the people involved in the massacre of his family, is the engine that drives him despite the blows and fatal injuries. Frank's fear is not to die but to continue living as long as people who deserve punishment continue to walk the streets.
Frank's demons are manifested through recurring dreams in which soldiers dressed as the Cerberus team kill his loved ones and he is unable to protect them. They are also present in his memories and remorse: when he severely disciplined his youngest son, or when he admits that he would rather be in a war than with his family when they were alive. Frank's war is also with himself.
Although Curtis introduces us to Frank as his goat Cassius through a metaphor, he is not the only goat to whom the chapter title refers. The Judas goats are the ones who lead the cattle to the slaughterhouse, leading them to their certain death, while this goat is left alive.
This is the role of Billy Russo, Frank's best friend, who meets him in this episode and offers him help, assuring him that he wants to get him out of the country, give him a new identity and a new job. Frank thinks about it, but finally rejects it.
At the end of the episode, Billy is waiting for him and tells William Rawlins that Frank will not show up. The traitor is exposed to us, the real Judas goat who would take his "brother" to the slaughterhouse.