REVIEW: Marvel's Jessica Jones
It’s been at least one week since the premiere of Jessica Jones, so it’s safer to say that a good number of people have seen the show. The other smaller group will just have to deal with spoilers. Needless to say, this article will also be filled with plenty of spoilers for the first season. All in all, as a Marvel Netflix series, the show was bound to be good. How it measures up to the rest of the universe is a different story. Rest assured, it’s still one of the finest Marvel works.
I’m not sure where to start with this, so I’ll try on how the show compares to Daredevil. Both are clearly darker Marvel stories (as they should be), and both have thirteen episodes of hero origin things. Honestly, I have to concede to Daredevil when it comes to the overall setup and its ending. Daredevil features a pretty continuous storyline following the rise of Daredevil and Kingpin although it had some bumps and lulls. Jessica Jones feels like a roller coaster of events with every step forward turning into something backfiring spectacularly. Capturing Kilgrave leads to Hogarth screwing it up. Even releasing Hope from jail leads to something worse. A twist like that was fine in the pilot, but after a few times it gets depressing. Likewise, the ending leaves a lot to be desired. With Daredevil, we see the emergence of a new hero for Hell’s Kitchen. With Jessica Jones, even after Kilgrave’s death, we see…pretty much the same as always. Plus, Jessica Jones is the only series where I can literally say Hope dies.
However, there is still a lot that’s good about Jessica Jones, some things that even Daredevil doesn’t have. There’s obviously the introduction of superpowers, but there’s also the story. With Jessica Jones, there’s a lot less reliance on long and boring exposition when even the pilot doesn’t waste time on explaining Jessica’s super-strength or history with Kilgrave. Of course, these things are obviously discussed later, but none of it feels tacked on for the sake of explaining to the audience. We know just enough to keep going to the next story, and, in the end, that’s enough. We don’t need to know how Luke got his strength or skin since there’s a whole series for him in the future, and we definitely don’t need to know about Kilgrave’s past until his parents come into play.
With all the characters in play, it’s actually pretty surprising that the exposition isn’t that heavy. However, not all of the plots really stick. At the end of the season, the whole divorce plot with Hogarth and her wife means nothing with her wife dead, and I still don’t care about Jessica’s upstairs neighbors, even if one of them did die. Fortunately, there are still a lot of decent storylines. Luke Cage is set to begin a new story after learning about the death of his wife. Trish is learning everything she can about IGH and obviously become Hellcat in the process. Malcolm becomes a viable part of Alias Investigation. Simpson…becomes a psycho and then goes missing, but I don’t think we were supposed to like him that much anyway. It really does show that even in the worst situations, there are decent people in the city who only want to do good by themselves and others.
None of that is better represented in Jessica’s character. Matt Murdock represents the conflict of a man between what’s right and what’s wrong, but Jessica Jones represents someone who just never wins but still keeps trying. Matt’s more accepting of himself as a hero in the end, but Jessica better represents it in what she’s willing to sacrifice of herself to protect other people whether it’s going to jail, being alone, or losing her life. She’s an asshole, don’t get me wrong. She was before her trauma. She was as a teenager, and she’s still one now. Yet, that just makes her story nobler.
In the end, all she wants to do is help people with her abilities. She wants to protect Trish from her mother as a kid as she wants to protect her now. She wants to protect Hope from going to jail even though the odds are against her. Hell, the only reason Kilgrave keeps escaping is because he knows Jessica has to stop people from killing themselves without killing them. She never says so, but that’s who she is. And that’s pretty heroic. She may have failed at being a hero at first, but that doesn’t change why she does it: to make a difference. At least it helps with the self-loathing.
I guess it also helps that the show does a good job at showing the “gifted” aspect of the show. It’s not nearly as fancy as Agents of SHIELD’s Inhumans, but less is more in this case. Jessica, Kilgrave, and Luke are already aware of what they can do, so every use of their abilities is smartly used to their advantage down to Jessica breaking door locks or Luke surviving a fire. I say “smartly” very loosely because Kilgrave is probably the worst villain to ever be associated with Marvel, and I am actually really glad that he ends the series dead. Don’t get me wrong, it does make me wonder where the series would go after that, but it does make the ending more satisfying.
One other thing that makes the show work is probably its own mythology. This doesn’t necessarily mean its connection to the MCU, but I’ll get to that later. This includes the various histories and developments of comic-book characters like Jessica Jones, Kilgrave, Trish Walker, Simpson, and even Jeri Hogarth. It makes me immediately interested in how their stories will turn out especially since the show takes these things seriously. Hogarth as a lawyer to someone like Jessica, Simpson taking red Hulk pills, and even Trish learning Krav Maga acknowledge the comic-book history which means a lot to comic fans. You don’t necessarily have to read Alias to care about the show, but it’s nice to know that the writers remember.
Then again, I have to take some points off for its limited connection to the MCU. Now it doesn’t have to bring up the Avengers or things like that every episode, but when the series is based around the fact that people apparently won’t believe that a man can control others in a world where a robot tries to drop a city on the planet, you have to question this aversion to the movies. It also doesn’t help that they actually do reference “the big green guy” and “the flag-waver” and the fact that there’s a whole episode centered on someone who wants to kill the gifted Jessica. On the bright side, Daredevil gets a larger shout out with the same settings (hospital, police station complete with Stan Lee photo) and a cameo by Claire Temple, the night nurse. It really was satisfying to see Claire discuss Matt’s conflicts with heroism compared to Jessica, though I would admit I don’t think it would have hurt to have Daredevil help with that final battle. It will definitely be fun to see them all together in The Defenders.
In conclusion, if you liked Daredevil, you will definitely like Jessica Jones. You may even like it more depending on your tastes. I think the more important thing is that we now have these shows that are really starting to deliver building up to The Defenders. I just wish we didn’t have to wait six months for a new one.
