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Marvel’s Jessica Jones (Netflix, Season 1)
Down in the dark underbelly of the MCU, not everyone with superpowers is having the best time of things. Being super-strong certainly hasn’t done Jessica Jones any favors, what with her multiple layers of PTSD, alcoholism, poor life choices and general misanthropy.
This show is a delightful mix of terribly disturbing and adorable. Jessica is genuinely competent while still being totally broken. Kilgrave is established as being powerful, scary and totally disturbed even before he appears. Despite Jessica’s adamant refusal to connect to anyone, the show tries very hard to keep the audience emotionally connected to the other characters.
This Kilgrave has significant differences from the comic version (not least of which being that he isn’t purple); and many of them can be summed up by the fact that he’s really named Kevin Thompson, not Zebediah Kilgrave. The fact that he had an utterly mundane name and chose something “edgy” defines the kind of monster he is: An over-entitled manchild with too much power and no tolerance for disappointment or rejection.
The real tragedy of Kilgrave, of course, is the good he would be capable of if he wasn’t a fuckboy sociopath. Even with his limitations, he’s clever enough that he could improve the world at high levels—spend a year in Washington as a “lobbyist” and our government could be massively improved; canvass high-net-worth donors for a charity and you could funnel billions to the best causes; work with a diplomatic team and you could depose the world’s worst dictators. But he thinks small, greedy and trite, taking petty revenge and spending his time raping and stealing. It’s such a stupid waste.
The spikes of black comedy really work well to lighten the mood, because otherwise this would just be bleak. Jessica is a very capable detective even without using her powers (though the fact that no lock can stop her comes in very handy). And it’s pretty clear that even before Kilgrave got to her she was all sorts of damaged—her entire family died and she was taken in by her best friend’s abusive stage mom. She manages to fail a lot over the course of the series—half a dozen named characters die, plus lots of bystanders; and that’s not counting the bevy of wrecked survivors.
The show drags a bit—it didn’t really need 13 episodes to tell the story it has, so the pacing feels off in places and certain subplots get much more attention than they really need. (And repetition, for that matter—we don’t need half a dozen different scenes of Hogarth arguing with her soon-to-be-ex-wife over and over again.) Though I suppose I can’t fault them for coming up with a dozen excuses to bring back Luke Cage and have him take his shirt off. I feel like they could sell plenty of Netflix subscriptions if they offered “Shirtless Luke Cage Reads the Phone Book” as a new series.
For that matter, it seems like the plot could be resolved much faster if Jessica wasn’t so adamant that no one would believe them about Kilgrave and the police can do nothing against him. She spends the middle of the season coming up with elaborate plans to get him to confess or get his powers on video, when not only are there literally hundreds of people who can testify to his powers (including Simpson, given they seem so adamant they need a cop to testify), but there’s a support group full of them who very conveniently gather weekly and would very happily offer their stories. Even without Jessica’s relentless monofocus and refusal of help, you’d think it might occur to Trish, Hogarth or Simpson that they’re drowning in evidence of Kilgrave’s abilities even without a cockamamie plan.
I can see some of the plots they’ve set up for season 2: Simpson’s mysterious benefactors and their role in Jessica’s powers being the major one. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes.
Overall: This was dark, and though not relentlessly so, it took longer to watch than similar shows because we needed to break it up with lighter fare. Like The Dark Knight, I suspect it’ll be a while before I’m interest in rewatching it, even though I liked it.
This show is a delightful mix of terribly disturbing and adorable. Jessica is genuinely competent while still being totally broken. Kilgrave is established as being powerful, scary and totally disturbed even before he appears. Despite Jessica’s adamant refusal to connect to anyone, the show tries very hard to keep the audience emotionally connected to the other characters.
This Kilgrave has significant differences from the comic version (not least of which being that he isn’t purple); and many of them can be summed up by the fact that he’s really named Kevin Thompson, not Zebediah Kilgrave. The fact that he had an utterly mundane name and chose something “edgy” defines the kind of monster he is: An over-entitled manchild with too much power and no tolerance for disappointment or rejection.
The real tragedy of Kilgrave, of course, is the good he would be capable of if he wasn’t a fuckboy sociopath. Even with his limitations, he’s clever enough that he could improve the world at high levels—spend a year in Washington as a “lobbyist” and our government could be massively improved; canvass high-net-worth donors for a charity and you could funnel billions to the best causes; work with a diplomatic team and you could depose the world’s worst dictators. But he thinks small, greedy and trite, taking petty revenge and spending his time raping and stealing. It’s such a stupid waste.
The spikes of black comedy really work well to lighten the mood, because otherwise this would just be bleak. Jessica is a very capable detective even without using her powers (though the fact that no lock can stop her comes in very handy). And it’s pretty clear that even before Kilgrave got to her she was all sorts of damaged—her entire family died and she was taken in by her best friend’s abusive stage mom. She manages to fail a lot over the course of the series—half a dozen named characters die, plus lots of bystanders; and that’s not counting the bevy of wrecked survivors.
The show drags a bit—it didn’t really need 13 episodes to tell the story it has, so the pacing feels off in places and certain subplots get much more attention than they really need. (And repetition, for that matter—we don’t need half a dozen different scenes of Hogarth arguing with her soon-to-be-ex-wife over and over again.) Though I suppose I can’t fault them for coming up with a dozen excuses to bring back Luke Cage and have him take his shirt off. I feel like they could sell plenty of Netflix subscriptions if they offered “Shirtless Luke Cage Reads the Phone Book” as a new series.
For that matter, it seems like the plot could be resolved much faster if Jessica wasn’t so adamant that no one would believe them about Kilgrave and the police can do nothing against him. She spends the middle of the season coming up with elaborate plans to get him to confess or get his powers on video, when not only are there literally hundreds of people who can testify to his powers (including Simpson, given they seem so adamant they need a cop to testify), but there’s a support group full of them who very conveniently gather weekly and would very happily offer their stories. Even without Jessica’s relentless monofocus and refusal of help, you’d think it might occur to Trish, Hogarth or Simpson that they’re drowning in evidence of Kilgrave’s abilities even without a cockamamie plan.
I can see some of the plots they’ve set up for season 2: Simpson’s mysterious benefactors and their role in Jessica’s powers being the major one. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes.
Overall: This was dark, and though not relentlessly so, it took longer to watch than similar shows because we needed to break it up with lighter fare. Like The Dark Knight, I suspect it’ll be a while before I’m interest in rewatching it, even though I liked it.