Jessica Jones, season 2 review: as much intrigue as ever – but missing the most complex villain Marvel ever created
Jessica Jones is at a court-ordered anger management class, clutching a ball that’s supposed to help channel rage. Everyone’s spoken about the source of their anger, and it’s her turn to do the same. “My whole family was killed in a car accident,” she begins impassively, thudding the ball against a wall. “Someone did horrific experiments on me. I was abducted, raped and forced to kill someone. And now some maniac is out killing people, and I’m in here bouncing a god damn ball.” Jessica Jones has good reason to be angry.
Netflix’s Marvel Comics adaptation, which stars Krysten Ritter as a misanthropic anti-hero with vaguely defined superpowers, was lauded in its first season for treating weighty subject matters such as rape and PTSD with the nuance and care they deserved. Its charming, chilling villain – David Tennant’s besuited mind controller Kilgrave – used his power to manipulate and abuse women. That it was written and filmed pre-Weinstein allegations, and that the show’s largely female creative team examined toxic masculinity before the current cultural moment forced everyone to do so, is just one of the markers of its brilliance. This behaviour never begins and ends with one bad man – and since killing Kilgrave at the end of season one, Jessica is figuring that out too.
Season two meets Jessica grappling with both the decision to bump off her nemesis, and the ease with which she made that decision. With typical pugnacity, she all but punches anyone who calls her a hero or a vigilante (though some use worse words – so-called "powered people" have become as stigmatised as they are revered), and is instead busying herself with the kind of low-stakes private investigation that doesn’t risk emotions. “Take the case, take the clues, takes the cash,” she growls at her neighbour / assistant Malcolm (Eka Darville). For Jessica, caring is an inconvenience she could do without.
But care she does – and for no one more than her childhood best friend Trish (played with steely resolve by Rachael Taylor), who’s rubbing Jessica up the wrong way by rifling through her traumatic past with a shady organisation called IGH. It’s ostensibly to help Jessica, but she hopes it’ll further her own broadcast career too. In this show, a character’s moral compass never points just one way.
50 best TV shows on Netflix UK
All this unfolds with as much intrigue and dramatic subtlety (clunky voice-overs aside) as we’ve come to expect from Jessica Jones. With its blend of dark, pointed humour – “I never take no for an answer,” says one character who’s trying to recruit Jessica, “How rapey of you,” she shoots back – and noir-style emotional clout, the show does what every good comic book story should: uses a fake world to shine a light on real human problems. But how does it move forward when it’s killed one of the most interesting, complex villains Marvel has ever created? In the first five episodes that were made available for preview, it never quite answers that question. Like the Penrose stairs, each episode builds to a climax that never quite materialises. Still, it’s so well made that just climbing those stairs is satisfying enough.
