Over the last couple of episodes, Jessica Jones has been spoiling us by devoting a vast amount of time to totally focus on the twisted relationship between Jessica and Kilgrave. As the balance of power between them shifted as they tried to counter each other in a battle of perspective, Kilgrave vowed not to use his powers of persuasion on Jones as his sick obsession for her had morphed into what he thinks is love. Alternatively, unwilling to become a murderer once more, Jessica tried to counter Kilgrave’s self obsessed entitlement by voluntarily moving in with him to lower the collateral damage and in turn try to get him to understand the difference between right and wrong. It was a hero/villain dynamic the likes of which we had never seen before and as it delved deeper into the relationship between a rape survivor and her abuser, we found depths in the Netflix end of the MCU we could never find elsewhere. However, as intriguing as it’s been, it’s time for the other aspects of the show to start creeping back in at the countdown to the finale begins. Can the show keep that streak alive, or will the increasing demands of a superhero show usurp the ground breaking work the last few episodes have brought us now Jessica calling the shots?
After enduring staying in his company for the past few days, Jessica Jones finally managed to get the upper hand on her superpowered abuser, drug him and spirit him away to the hermetically sealed room that had been set up to contain him. Jones’ mission is still the same: get video evidence and witness testimony that Kilgrave’s powers are real in order to exonerate Hope Shlottman from murdering her parents, bur after a spot of electro-torture doesn’t get the job done, she calls in some help. Obviously, the compulsively careful Horgath is horrified that Jessica would link her to a crime by inviting her to her little interrogation experiment, but soon they’re joined by Trish who is fresh from getting the recently blown-up Simpson to hospital. However, despite zapping him with voltage and playing back footage of him getting experimented on by his parents as a child on a loop, it seems that Kilgrave isn’t ready to break yet.
Taking a different approach, Jones starts looking into Kilgrave’s scientist parents and discovers that his mother actually is a member of Malcolm’s Kilgrave survivor group. From here she finds out that his folks weren’t the sadists the villain made them out to be as they were only trying to save him from a neurological disorder that was slowly killing him. Roping in detective Clemmons as a witness Jessica hopes that the shock of seeing his mother and father will galvanise Kilgrave into using his powers in front of an audience.
However, it seems that Jones is getting a little obsessive herself, and as a result her plan goes horribly awry which leaves Kilgrave free, someone violently stabbed by their own hand and Jessica potentially back to square one – with one potential seismic change…
It was inevitable that some MCU style seed sowing had to find a way back into the show at some point, after all, while Jessica Jones has some disturbingly timely things to say about sexual assault and the people who survive it, we’re still dealing with a world that’s based on a comic book and is related to a franchise that also encompasses Thunder Gods and green skinned rage monsters. Thankfully, the shift back to more superhero-y themes are gradual, so the trilogy of episodes that see Jessica gradually take her power back against the man that brought her so low is left relatively unscathed. The first part saw Jessica at her lowest ebb which ultimately ended up with a face to face with her foe at the police station where Kilgrave held all the cards. However, the following episode not only saw them living together, but had them on strangely equal footing as one tried to lure the other to their way of thinking. But with this final part in a mini, three episode stand-off in the middle of the season, we find that Jessica is now technically in control and has her holding life and death over her nemesis, but interestingly the episode starts to muddy the waters have her veer too far into her desperation to get Kilgrave (or should that be “Kevin”) to admit his crimes by force if necessary.
It’s fairly gripping stuff as Jones uses very unheroic methods to get her victim to crack, even going so far as to beat him to a pulp in order to get him to control her and make her stop, but this battle of wits will no be so easily won. However, there’s a sense that if the episode had maybe paired things back a bit, we could have gotten another fascinating installment that further evolved the relationship between the two as the power dramatically shifted – after all, we’ve never seen Kilgrave having to play defence before, so changing the rules of this ever-mutating game could have given us something truly great. Unfortunately, while the drama is decidedly on point, you can now feel the show having to work additionally hard in order to start building up other plot strands, hue slightly more to comic book continuity, or fast track elements of the plot to get things moving.
The most blatant of these us the shoehorning in of some sort of sub-supersoldier plot that suggests that Simpson’s time in the military was a bit more special than just special ops. But as we take time out to nudge him slightly toward possibly becoming the deranged villain known as Nuke (the red, white and blue pills are a nice touch), the show also tests our good faith by having Jessica stumble upon Kilgrave’s parents with virtually no effort whatsoever. Obviously, we’re dealing with superpowers here, so a bit of narrative corner cutting is acceptable, but it’s a shame that such an intriguing concept as the Kilgrave Survivor’s Group ultimately is revealed as a mere plot device to find a not-so doting mum and dad in record quick time. However, it’s all proved worth it thanks to a truly tense final act that sees mother Kilgrave flip the script and try to murder the monster she helped create with a pair of scissors. In retaliation, Kilgrave tells her to stab herself once for every year she abandoned him, but as she hits the zapping button we find that a short circuit has rendered the system inoperable. In the chaos, Kilgrave murders his mother and enslaves his father and Clemmons who liberates himself from a pair of handcuffs by breaking his thumb. On top of that, he orders Trish to shoot herself, with the only thing saving her is that she’d already emptied the gun while trying to kill him, but while Jessica’s plans seem to lay in ruins, we discover that the rules have changed significantly. For whatever reason, it turns out that Jones is now immune to Kilgrave’s powers which will not doubt throw an alcoholic cat among the purple pigeons.
As the season starts to move back into a more traditional pattern, the tension between Krysten Ritter and David Tennant still proves to be more than a match for Hogarth’s wheels turning, or whatever super soldier shenanigans are encompassing Simpson. I’m sure that the quality will remain high, but I’m also getting a feeling that the truly innovative parts of Jessica Jones may be over.
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