After a season that’s so far delivered more questions than answers (like any good Noir should), it’s time for Jessica Jones to do a fair bit of back tracking to fill in some gaps. Thus, we find that “AKA I Want Your Cray Cray” takes the flashback route to fill in a whole range of holes in a single episode. The main focal point of episode 7 is, of course, explaining the origin story behind Alisa Jones’ transformation from Jessica’s frustrated mother to rage consumed, murderous super villain and discovering how she got from A to B.
However, that doesn’t mean that Jessica fails get a look-in, and we discover that while the unsuspecting “orphan” is trying to get on with her life, her mother has still been affecting her life directly. It’s time to press pause on the main story as we look back to see what events occurred to put both Jones women on their respective paths.
We already know that after the car crash that killed Brian Jones and his son, daughter Jessica was saved from her injuries by illegal experiments performed by IGH that gave her enhanced abilities, but while she grew up believing that she was an orphan, her mother was undergoing far more advanced treatments for far more severe wounds. In fact, it would be fair to say that “hamburger meat” would be a fair description of what the woman looked like at the begining of her treatment. But while Jessica is healed completely in around 20 days, Alisa’s condition is so severe, her treatments take years, completely altering her appearance and giving her the same super strength bestowed upon her daughter.
Jessica is subsequently adopted to be the sister/companion to Trish Walker and we witness her trying to help the starlet as her drug and alcohol intake goes through the roof at the launch of a particularly insipid pop career. Essentially done with the self destructive Trish and her scheming mother, Jessica meets something of a soul mate in barman, Stirling Adams, and the two move in together while he tries to get his business venture of a new club off the ground.
Meanwhile, Alisa is growing increasingly frustrated with being kept at IGH, and despite the attempts of the sympathetic Dr. Malus, her rage leads her to violently escaping in order to be with her daughter. Slaughtering one nurse and gravely injuring another (Inez Green), the maddened mother seeks out her daughter only to discover that Stirling is trying to appease a few angry investors by selling out Jessica for her super abilities. With her anger issues flaring up over her daughter being used, Alisa takes predictably brutal action, smashing the man’s brains in against the nearest brick wall. But in the present, Jessica’s own rage at her mother’s violent actions leads her to attack Alisa, only for Malus to intervene with some well placed sedatives…
Flashback episodes are a tricky bag. While they offer up vital information, exposition and revelations, if you place it in the wrong place in the season, there’s a massive danger that the flow of the season’s momentum could get irrevocably disrupted. However, in something of an impressive move for a Netflix/Marvel show, “AKA I Want Your Cray Cray” lands at the absolute perfect time to allow the season to shift gears. Previous shows in the Defenders cannon have sometimes derailed matters by misjudging it’s pacing, but allowing a moment to let the show breathe right slap bang in the middle of the season works a treat here. Up until now, season 2 has being keeping something of a deliberate speed, delivering plenty of detective stuff and neo-noir based plot at measured rate, but while the thread concerning Jessica seeing similarities between herself and the “monster” she’s been tracking has delivered prime, grumpy, angst, it was starting to feel high time that the show needed a change of direction before it plateaued.
Thus a flashback episode that gives us more insight into Alisa’s surprisingly tragic story while filling in more gaps in Jessica’s past, proves to be exactly what the doctor ordered. In fact, it’s rather fascinating to watch Jessica slowly become the embittered loner we all know and love in the years before her life was destroyed by Kilgrave. We see that despite her various issues about being a superpowered orphan who was adopted into the insanity of the Walker family, Jones has always been a rather decent human being despite already being fairly critical of humanity at the best of times. Realising she’s fighting a losing battle against Trish’s drug use, she’s tried to separate herself from the vapid showbiz world of “Patsy Walker”, and yet still can’t help herself from getting involved. Yes, Trish’s pop song is excruciatingly terrible, but watching Jones her spare her sister from offering up oral sex to a drug dealer might not be a world saving event, but as Jessica’s own destructive instincts start to bloom (misuse of her powers, theft), we see that the seed of being a good person is never too far away from blooming.
This proves to be a sobering counterpoint to Alisa who, due to her time being locked away at IGH, has had no choice but to simmer away while Malus tries to curb her violent mood swings. While we have no real idea yet if Malus truly has feelings for his patient, or if he’s merely adopted some elaborate form of control over her, but as the years tick away, we find that all the indignities that Alisa has suffered build to a rather sizable meltdown. It’s intriguing that the episode gives us so much opportunity to empathise with Jessica’s mother and all the tragedy she’s had to endure when we’ve spent the last six episodes witnessing the damage she can do. But when you look at it, digging into what makes a villain tick – even a tragic one – is that this show tends to do best. In fact, if we were to put ourselves in Alisa’s shoes, we’d find that we’d probably be incandescent with rage for a lot of the time too and it feels like the show is conjuring up timely metaphors for instances where women have been demonised by accusations of raging hormones and wild mood swings that could be caused by anything from pregnancy to the menopause. That’s not to say that Alisa is suddenly treated with sunshine and rainbows, but even though she’s guilty of truly heinous acts (splattering Stirling’s grey matter, popping the neck of a nurse), we also see that she’s a victim of circumstance, as she never asked for any of this to happen. Worse yet, her virtual isolation by IGH means that she’s missed years of not just her daughter’s life, but her own too. Inexcusable, but understandable.
Once again, we find Jessica Jones finding an emotional resonance with it’s antagonist in ways that often prove to be a rarity in the MCU as a whole. However, what’s more impressive is that we have a Marvel/Netflix show that’s actually managed to pull off a flashback episode that hasn’t managed to screw up the flow of the show. From here on in, the show has the opportunity to change things up, let’s hope it takes the initiative.
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