After the last episode found Jessica Jones hitting rock bottom (or, at least I hope it’s rock bottom), the seventh episode of her increasingly gritty show seems to mercifully start our flawed lead on some sort of path to finding redemption. After all, the last time we saw her, she had been forced to come clean to Luke Cage about the fact that it was she who killed his wife and while this would be incredibly awkward at the best of times, it was made inexorably worse because the private eye had recently started sleeping with him. Declaring her a piece of shit and storming off before he did something rash, Luke left Jessica to wallow in her already sizable self loathing while Kilgrave continued to plot in the background.
With Jones spiralling worse than usual and Kilgrave’s plan finally taking shape, it’s finally time to bring these opposing forces together face to face. But with both of them trying to outwit the other, can Jessica’s attempt to sacrifice herself somehow manage to make things even worse. I guess there’s always lower to sink…
Dangerously drunk in the aftermath of Cage discovering her shameful secret, we find Jessica Jones literally sprawling in garbage as her self loathing consumes her. Unbelievably, an embittered Jones makes things worse when she decides this is a good time to do that job for Jeri Hogarth and intimidate her wife, Wendy, into signing divorce papers and inadvertently puts the woman’s life at risk when she accidently drops her onto the tracks of the subway. Of course, when it rains, it pours and when she finally stumbles back home to her office/apartment, both her and Malcolm get something of a horrific shock when they find that Kilgrave has left a grisly surprise in her bed – the dead body of downstairs neighbour, Ruben.
That proves to be the last straw for Jessica who puts a desperate plan in action that’ll either bring Kilgrave to justice, or see her rot in a Supermax prison for the rest of her days. However, not wanting to see Jessica punish herself for all these deaths that surround her, Malcolm goes running to Trish, who has actually got a counter-plan to capture Kilgrave and has already figured out how to locate him via the thugs he’s been hiring for protection. Jones’ plan is extreme to say the least, so after getting some affairs in order and visiting Trish’s mother to warn her to continue to stay away from her daughter, she mutilates Ruben’s corpse and brings his head with her to the nearest police station in order to convince the cops she’s a deranged killer and needs to be locked away in the deepest darkest hole imaginable.
However, while her eventual hope is that Kilgrave will be caught while attempting to free her from a Supermax, the villain shows up far earlier than expected, resulting in something of a standoff. But much to Jessica’s surprise, it seems that Kilgrave has changed and wants the object of his affections to come with him… willingly.
It’s always nice to know that no matter how low you think the showrunners can bring their leading lady, there’s always seems to be at least a couple of more notches for her to drop. After putting what little heroic tendencies left in her through the ringer with the revelations of last episode, we open with Jessica drunker than we’ve ever seen her who embarks on a disastrous mission to finally do that job for tyrannical lawyer, Jeri Hogarth. It’s little more than a muscle job to get her wife Wendy to belatedly sign those lingering divorce papers, but in her alcohol-addled digits, it nearly turns disastrous when things go horribly wrong and Wendy nearly ends up splattered by a subway train. However, it’s with the discovery of the slaughtered body of poor, simple Ruben that something finally snaps inside our heroine.
It’s the moment we’ve been waiting for. That last straw that finally galvanises the lead into action; but as per usual for Jessica Jones, no one in the writing room is the least bit interested about making things that easy. Yes, Jessica finally leaps into action, but her plan is so batshit crazy, it’s less a longshot to catch Kilgrave on camera if he chooses to spring her from a Supermax, and more a reckless attempt to punish herself even further for all the pain that’s been committed in her name. It’s a shit plan and everyone knows it, but while Jones is deadset on playing the martyr for her own, fracturing piece of mind, there’s an unlikely ally lurking in the wings.
It seems that Malcolm has bounced back from his drug-fueled ordeal to be some sort of Jiminy Cricket for his self-hating savior and watching him trying his best to save his neighbour is becoming more and more endearing with every episode. Watch him actually try to dispose of an actual fucking body in order to protect Jessica, or get held at gun point by Trish as he quickly tries to explain why he’s in Jones’ bedroom with a corpse with a slashed throat. The man is a damn saint and it’s made all the more adorable by the fact that he’s not actually that good at it.
Before we get to the fireworks of the final act, it’s also worth mentioning the debut of Rebecca De Mornay’s Dorothy Walker, Trish’s domineering and abusive mother. Cast as some version of a monstrous dance mom, watching the two trade vicious verbal barbs proves to be incredibly fun and hopefully we’ll get to see more of her rhe same way we get a nice little cameo from Daredevil’s Officer Brett Mahoney.
However, the big newsis that after decapitating Ruben and using his severed head as exhibit A for her own incarceration (which is incredibly strange considering how horrified she was at his death), she’s busted out by Kilgrave in chilling fashion. As she leaves the interrogation room, we see all the cops are standing motionless with all their guns pointing at each other in a way to keep both them busy and her compliant. It feels a little like a smaller scale version of the stand-off scene in the original X-Men where Magneto tried a similar trick with floating guns, but it’s equally as intimidating. We’ve spent time in Kilgrave’s company before and seeing him exercise his powers is nothing new either, but the confidence (or should that be arrogance) that David Tennant exudes is legitimately something else. However, the real twist is that Kilgrave has had something of a change of heart since Jessica left him for dead several months ago and it seems that after a lifetime of having everybody doing his bidding, he finally wants somebody (e.g her) to stay with him of their own free will. It’s a wonderful, existential problem for a supervillain to have, especially as his love and admiration for Jessica has grown to the point that he wants to “change”, and it’s fair to say that after experiencing Vincent D’Onofrio’s layered Kingpin on Daredevil, that “villain problem” that afflicts the MCU hasn’t stretched to the Netflix corner yet.
Two sterling episodes in a row and it seems that Jessica Jones is on something of a hot streak. The villain is fully in play, our hero is in incredibly dire straits and I have no idea where things are going to go next as we head into the latter half of the series. Can the show keep it up? Well, I’m thinking Krysten Ritter and David Tennant are betting that it can as their characters now are face to face.
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