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| Image Courtesy www.screenrant.com |
“AKA Ladies Night,” the
series premiere of Jessica Jones, sets a very strong tone for the rest
of the season. In this episode we see
Jessica taking a couple different types of cases. We meet all of the main characters for the
season in one form or another. The key relationships
in the series are introduced. We get a
sense of Kilgrave’s power, though not quite the extent of his power. And we really get to know just about
everything we need to know about where Jessica is starting this series. All in all, I would consider this to be a
strong opening statement from a highly-anticipated series.
The episode begins by
giving us an idea of just how Jessica pays her bills: at this point it appears that most of
Jessica’s clients are suspicious spouses who want her to take pictures of their
spouses cheating on them. Sometimes they
accept it and get angry; other times they deny the evidence and get angry at her. In a scene completely ripped from the comics,
one of these latter clients gets angry in her office, and she winds up throwing
him through a window to subdue him! This
is the first indication we get of her considerable strength. One thing I’ve really appreciated about this
series—and which I also appreciated about Daredevil—is the slow reveal
of the protagonist’s abilities. Though
this series introduces them all to a certain extent in the first episode, it’s
not all at once, which helps with the believability factor.
Jessica is looking for
work and “arranges” a meeting with Jeri Hogarth, a high-profile attorney with
whom she works. Evidently Hogarth asked Jessica
to become the firm’s P.I. at one point, but Jessica turned the offer down
because she prefers to work solo.
However, Hogarth still finds a job for Jessica: serving a subpoena to a nightclub owner whose
establishments are unsafe for strippers.
Naturally Jessica takes the job and serves the subpoena after accosting
the man on the road the next night.
However, she doesn’t just serve a subpoena; she picks the back tires off
the ground so he can’t drive away! That’s
when he accuses her of being “one of them.”
What does he mean by “them?” It’s
unclear; he could be talking about the Avengers, but he could also be talking
about the alien/Inhuman “crisis” which is being explored on Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. For right now, I’m
going to assume that it’s a combination of the two. Oh, and as a result of that accusation she
also threatens him with her “laser eyes” which can incinerate his insides
without leaving a mark! Of course she
can do nothing of the sort, but it wouldn’t really be her if she didn’t embellish
a little! She actually did the same
thing on occasion in the comics, going so far at one point as to tell a man to
shoot her because the bullets would just bounce off (though she didn’t know if
they actually would). She is very good
at bluffing her way out of situations by embellishing her powers a little bit. One thing should be crystal clear from this
scene: Jessica Jones is not Kara
Danvers (Supergirl)!
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| Image Courtesy www.twitter.com/TheDefenders_TV |
Luke Cage also makes
his debut in this episode, but it is not until the end of the episode that
Jessica finally talks to him. At first,
she simply jumps up to a fire escape a few floors off the ground and observes
as he goes through closing the bar and then brings a woman up to his apartment. Though her voiceover seems to indicate that
her interest in Luke is based on a case, it sounds like it is an old case, one
which she should have dropped a while ago but can’t. Eventually we do learn part of the reason for
her interest in him, but not this episode.
For now, Luke doesn’t appear again until halfway through the episode,
when Jessica is loitering outside his bar and he invites her in. The two of them talk and flirt for a while
before he invites her up to his room and they have sex. The thing with these sex scenes is that
though they more than earn a “TV-MA” rating in my book, they do not do so by
showing a lot of skin. Instead, they
show Luke and Jessica in the act and obviously enjoying themselves, but with
everything covered in some way, shape, or form.
I’m not a huge fan of sexual content, but this is the way that I can
tolerate the most.
Of course, the main
focus of the episode is on introducing Kilgrave, but doing so in a very
roundabout way. A couple from Omaha
comes to Jessica’s office asking if she can help them find their daughter, Hope,
saying that they were sent to her by someone at the police station. Jessica agrees, reluctantly. Tracking down Hope is fairly straightforward;
between her credit card transactions and her roommate’s recollections, it’s
only a matter of time before Jessica ends up at the Chinese restaurant where
Hope and her new boyfriend ate. However,
this is when things start getting weird.
Jessica interviews the host, who explains all of the unusual things that
happened when Hope and her friend came:
the host chasing a couple away from the table that the “friend” wanted,
the restaurant comping an expensive bottle of champagne to them, and the chef
hunting down the recipe for a specific dish from the old Italian restaurant
that used to be in their building and making it for this man. And as he is describing all of this, Jessica
starts to have flashbacks to the last time she was in this restaurant, with
Kilgrave. She now realizes that Kilgrave
is back and that he took Hope. Jessica’s
initial reaction is to go to the parents’ hotel room and demand to know who
sent them to her—it was just some guy at the precinct (she suspects Kilgrave). She then tells them to pack their bags and
leave the city as quickly as possible before going back to her apartment/office
and attempting to do the same. However,
she does not have money herself for a ticket to Hong Kong, and Hope’s credit
card is declined (as if we needed more convincing that Jessica isn’t the most
moral hero out there!), so she first turns to Hogarth for money and then to her
best friend Trish.
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| Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com |
Trish Walker is one of
the characters I was most curious about going into the series. We already know more or less what will happen
with Jessica and Luke, so of course they are going to be pretty awesome and
become heroes by the end. However, the
same can’t necessarily be said for a minor comic book hero like Trish “Patsy”
Walker, a.k.a. Hellcat, a non-powered hero who eventually joins the
Defenders. Ever since she was announced
for the series I’ve been expecting that they will use her to eventually
introduce hardcore magical elements to the MNSU (Marvel Netflix Sub-Universe). However, it was just as likely that she would
be little more than a friend to Jessica, along the lines of Foggy in Daredevil.
At this point in the series, it is obvious that they have history together, but
that Jessica started cutting Trish out of her life shortly after she finally
broke away from Kilgrave’s control—it was about a year ago that Kilgrave
“died,” and 6 months ago that the two of them last spoke. However, their relationship is close enough
that Trish is not surprised to have Jessica jump up to the balcony of her
penthouse (Jessica does a lot of jumping) and ask for money. And though she thinks Jessica is making a
mistake by running away, Trish still gives her an envelope of cash to help her
do it. Jessica is on her way to the
airport, but still thinking about what Trish had said and the fact that she is
the only one who believes Kilgrave is out there and the only one with the
ability to stop him. Finally, Jessica
resigns herself to rescuing the girl and has the cab driver bring her to the
same hotel where Kilgrave took her.
Of course Jessica
finds the girl almost right away, and in the same room where Kilgrave took her
a year earlier. However, the girl refuses
to go with Jessica, who finally has to knock her unconscious to get her out of
the room. The parents meet them at
Jessica’s office, and she tells them that they all need to leave the city: time and distance are necessary to break
Kilgrave’s hold over Hope. However, once
in the elevator with her parents, Hope pulls out a revolver and starts pulling
the trigger, killing both of her parents—clearly she was still enough under
Kilgrave’s control for her to do that. As
soon as it happens, Jessica grabs her bag and runs out to meet a cab. However, before getting in she finally
recognizes that she has to stop Kilgrave: she is the only one who knows he’s
out there, and she is the only one who can stop him. She’s not quite a superhero, but she is going
to stop the bad guy because no one else can do it.
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| Image Courtesy www.heroichollywood.com |
There’s also a quick
throwaway scene with Hogarth and her secretary showing the two of them kissing,
setting up a side plot involving Hogarth and her wife getting a divorce. I’m not sure yet what purpose this plot is
supposed to serve in connection with the main narrative, but my kneejerk
reaction is to wonder if making Hogarth a woman was necessary for this; it
makes at least as much sense for a male lawyer to be having an affair with his
secretary as a female one. And my second
kneejerk reason is to ask if this is really the light they want to show
lesbians in: cheating on their wives!
However, I am willing to reserve judgment on this decision until I see
more, and specifically if this will tie somehow into Kilgrave’s plot.
Most of the humor in
this episode comes in the first half, particularly with the Schlottmans (Hope’s
parents)—which I suppose should have been the first clue that they wouldn’t
make it through the episode! When they
first entered Jessica’s apartment/office, Bob (the father) started commenting
about Jessica’s broken door and that it was not safe for a single woman in New
York to not have a working lock on her door or a way to keep it shut. While this would be a real concern for just
about anyone else, Jessica doesn’t seem overly bothered by it, though she
nearly attacked her druggie neighbor, Malcolm, early in the episode when she
found him in her kitchen eating her peanut butter. To be honest, any guy stupid enough to break
into Jessica Jones’ apartment is in far more danger than she is! However, these are really the only
lighthearted moments in the episode; after Kilgrave’s indirect introduction in
the restaurant scene the episode takes a very dark turn.
Overall this is a very
strong first episode for the series. All
of the main characters are introduced, including the main villain, and they all
receive enough screen time for us to understand where they are starting the
series. There isn’t really a ton of action
in this episode, but I wasn’t really expecting a lot, either. The one thing that stands out to me so far is
that where Daredevil earned its “TV-MA” rating based on graphic
violence, Jessica Jones is earning its own “TV-MA” rating for explicit
(though not graphic) sexual content as well as regular use of crude
language. This isn’t a bad thing; it’s
just one way that they are distinguishing the two series. This episode definitely does a good job of
roping me in: I want to see why
Jessica—who is so physically powerful—is so afraid of Kilgrave, and how she can
possibly defeat someone who can control people’s will. Her interactions with Luke Cage are also very
interesting; Mike Colter was reportedly cast specifically because of his
chemistry with Krysten Ritter, and that chemistry really shows in their scenes
together.
What did you think of
the first episode of Jessica Jones?
Did you binge-watch the whole thing, or are you spacing it out
more? Do you want to see Trish become
Hellcat in the Netflix shows? Let me
know in the comments!
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