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After six episodes of set up, and a flashback installment to fill in some exposition, I guess it’s time to see if Jessica Jones’ second season is ready to sink or swim. With all (or most) of the story’s secrets revealed, and the connection between our lead and her antagonist fully established, it’s now up to the remaining six episodes to make good on those dramatic promises and hopefully deliver a hero/villain relationship every bit as complex and unpredictable as the one the first season gave us with David Tennant’s memorable Kilgrave.
If “AKA Ain’t We Got Fun” is any indication, the season is succeeding as episode 8 delves fully into a different kind of relationship between a Marvel hero and their opposite number. Eschewing obvious physical showdowns, we instead test the limits of Jessica’s moral compass in different ways as she tries to balance her values of right and wrong and processes what it means to have her mother back in her life.
After find tracking down the killer, Jessica Jones had virtually no time to process the extra information that the deranged, neck-snapping monster she’s been chasing is actually her mother, Alisa, before she caught a sedative in the neck from Dr. Malus. Waking chained to a bed, Jones demands answers from the IGH bigwig, who explains what his relationship to her mother actually is. But rather than the sinister manipulator that Jessica had him pegged as, Malus really does seem to care for the woman he’s been sheltering for the past twelve years. After talking her way out of her restraints and summoning the police, Alisa allows Malus to escape while Jessica ensures that they’re both trapped together in order to spend some twisted mommy/daughter time before the law arrives.
Meanwhile, Hogarth’s quest to find a cure for her ALS has led to her seeking out the imprisoned healer former IGH nurse Inez Green has sent her to. Taking his case and springing him from his prison sentence in no time flat, it seems to be the first time in ages that the icy lawyer has felt genuine hope, but while Jessica is off having a bizarre family catch up, Malcolm decides to end his sudden sexual relationship with Trish after he discovers that shes addicted to those performances enhancers. Striking out to pick up one of Jessica’s abandoned cases, he seeks to find dirt on Jeri Hogarth’s law firm partners in order to block her removal – but after discovering that one of the partners is secretly gay, Malcolm is injured while ending up on the receiving end of a hate crime.
But while Trish shows up to help his healing with the performances enhancer, Jessica has a change of heart and decides to escape with her mother. Jones thinks that despite her rage induced atrocities, there’s still a chance to build some sort of relationship with her flesh and blood – but a stray bullet through her office window puts an end to that idea pretty quickly…
There’s three other plot threads that are jostling for space throughout “AKA Ain’t We Got Fun” and while they’re wise to get the hell out of the way of the main draw of Jessica being face to face with a mother she cannot recognise, they still progress enough to warrant a little mention. It’s not hard to see disaster on the horizon for the storylines of Horgath, Malcolm and Trish – especially now that Trish has seemingly gotten ex-addict Malcolm hooked on her super power inhalant – but aside from some mounting dread and the occasional witty reference (a powered-up Trish raking the face of a homophobic thug with her nails is definitely another nod to her comic book identity of Hellcat), it’s probably better off if I talk more about these stories once they hit their respective payoffs, because when it comes to the scenes between Jessica and Alisa, it deserves the lion’s share of the review.
More than any other series in the Netflix/Marvel catalogue, Jessica Jones has tried to find new, or alternative ways to avoid doing the same old super hero schtick that everyone else is doing. While the likes of Daredevil, Luke Cage and Iron Fist have the luxury of arch villains they can merely punch when all else fails, but Jones has always found herself toe to toe with antagonists who simply can’t be stopped with a mere bop on the nose. In the first season, we saw Jessica famously square up to Kilgrave, a mind controlling abuser who had an emotional hold over the short-tempered P.I. due to the horrible experiences he put her through. The metaphors and subtext were plain to see as a superpowered woman struggled to take her actual power back against a man who had the terrifying talent to render all before him powerless with merely a word. In an effort to keep it’s rather different approach to villains intact, we now have the big face to face between Jones and this season’s big bad, and once again, we find that there are even less easy answers to be found.
This time, Jessica’s opposite is now her own mother, who has been cursed with super strength and a terrible, uncontrollable temper and once again, we find our heroine facing someone who isn’t just a simple punching bag. While Jessica is usually pretty black and white when it comes to murder, her original hardline soon starts to waver after spending some time in the company of her long lost mother. Yes, Alisa looks different due to her DNA rewriting treatment, but the longer Jones spends with her, little aspects of her mother’s personality that she remembers soon start breaking through, making things a lot more grey. It’s an interesting counterpoint to Kilgrave, because it’s still seeing a moral conundrum figuratively tie Jessica’s hands, much like her needing to keep Kilgrave alive for various other means. But while she once sided with the maniac in order to show him right from wrong, the reasons she decides to side with Alisa prove to be way more personal. This is the only link to her family that Jessica has had in over twelve years, and while she’s always been defiantly against murder ever since being forced to kill by Kilgrave years earlier, she just can’t quite bring herself to turn her mother in despite the blood on her hands. Thus we find the beleaguered P.I. desperately questioning her own motives while trying to lay low, with a mother in tow who could explode into a limb-popping rage at any moment. At times, it also seems like the show is dipping into a rich metaphor that likens the situation to caring for a loved one with some sort of difficult personality disorder, as Janet McTeer’s Alisa seems to be constantly in a state of coiled spring with every perfectly ambiguous line reading carrying a whiff of menace. In fact, both McTeer and Krysten Ritter are exemplary, and the only thing stopping the episode from being a perfect offering is that we’re going to have to wait until the next episode to see how Jessica handles her mother when things aren’t quite so calm.
A character based episode that’s so strong, it could have ditched Hogarth, Malcolm and Trish entirely and still been almost the total dramatic package. While an alternate view of Alisa’s temperament could have been nice, the fact that this season hasn’t been willing to rush anything is only testament to how truly solid it is – and besides, we’ll be getting an inopportune rage fit soon enough. While some may complain of the lack of overt super heroics, it’s exactly this sort of moral miasma that make Jessica stand out from the crowd.
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Where to watch Jessica Jones – Season 2, Episode 8: AKA Ain’t We Got Fun: