Image Courtesy www.screenrant.com |
Here it is:
the Jessica Jones season 1 finale. After the way the previous episode ended,
this one was bound to be a doozy, as Jess still needs to defeat Kilgrave and
protect everyone she cares about. Oh,
and there’s also that small issue of just what happened to Luke at the end of
the previous episode! On the bright
side, that little cliffhanger ending paves the way for an awesome guest
appearance!
The episode opens with Jess
rushing Luke into the hospital, desperate for him to be okay after she had to
shoot him—oh yeah, she shot him at the end of the last episode! Evidently he is not in trouble because the
shot broke skin—it can’t—but because of the blunt-force trauma to his
brain. Another nurse comes over to help
them and tries to start an IV in his arm but is unable to. Then someone who should be familiar to all of
us tries to start an IV in his arm—Claire!—but she also can’t break his skin. The doctor tries to use a drill on him, but
it still doesn’t work. That’s when the
doctor realizes that “He’s… one of them” and goes to call the police. Jess and Claire are alone with the
unconscious Luke, and Jess starts begging Claire to help her save Luke, which
is a really great scene. Jess is afraid
that Claire is scared of people like them, but Claire simply responds with “You
don’t scare me. And you’re not my
first.” The two of them get Luke out of
the room and into a wheelchair, and Claire grabs some supplies from a cart
before the two of them bring Luke to Jess’s apartment. However, the nurse tells Jess that she has a
phone call, so Jess stays at the hospital while Claire brings Luke home.
Image Courtesy www.comicbookmovie.com |
Naturally the call is from
Kilgrave trying to convince Jess that he isn’t a bad person. She realizes he’s in the hospital security
center and goes to confront him, but he’s already left. Kilgrave then uses the intercom and CCTV
systems to place everyone in the hospital under his control and send them after
Jess. Jess manages to elude the roving
squads trying to kill her by putting on hospital scrubs and a mask, but she
still gets unmasked and has to fight her way out. Fortunately all she suffers is a slash to her
leg. The whole hospital scene was really
important for building the world of Hell’s Kitchen: of course the heroes would all have to go to
the same hospital, where Claire works, and of course the other hospital staff
wouldn’t be too thrilled with treating a guy with unbreakable skin.
Watching Claire treat Luke was
also really cool—and I think that was the whole point of bringing him to the
hospital in the first place! Claire
needs to relieve the pressure on his brain, but she can’t put a needle through
his skin to do it. Instead, Claire
maneuvers the needle through his eye socket.
Because of course a Night Nurse wouldn’t be phased by treating a
guy with unbreakable skin and would figure out that the way to do it is by
bypassing the skin! She also gets the
opportunity to treat Jess’s leg slash when she returns to the apartment. This interaction is really interesting for
how it furthers both their characters—and the definite allusions to
Daredevil. Jess tells Claire about
Kilgrave and his powers, and then Claire tells her about Daredevil and that he
also questions every move he makes. She
also offers to give Matt a call and see if he can help against Kilgrave, but
Jess rejects the offer, fearing the Kilgrave would just put Matt under his
control—she’s already done the “hero vs. hero” thing once!
Speaking of Kilgrave, he’s pretty
much going nuts: he is absolutely
desperate to be able to control Jess, so he is willing to take the concoction
that his father created in the hopes that it will make him strong enough. I loved him laying out his plans for Jessica: make her desperately want him and then reject
her over and over. That’s basically what
he did to her in the comics: in the
comics he made her watch him rape coeds and beg him to take her, but he never
did. Albert injects the fluid (which is
purple) into Kilgrave’s spinal cord, and the last thing we see of him before
the climax is the purplish hue start to work its way up his body from the
injection site. Am I the only one who
really wanted him to actually be purple for the climax?
Image Courtesy www.comicbook.com |
Meanwhile, Jess figures out where
Kilgrave is and calls Trish to give her a ride to the penthouse, where she goes
in and leaves Trish behind. However,
before going to investigate, the two of them agree on a safe-word to prove that
Jess isn’t being controlled, something she would never say under normal
circumstances: “I love you.” I think this sums up their relationship as
well as anything: they are sisters and
absolutely love each other, but it’s not the kind of thing that Jess would
express in words.
Jess finds Albert all-but dead
while one of the penthouse residents is busy “removing dad from the face of the
earth.” Albert has only enough time to
warn Jess that Kilgrave is now much more powerful and could control her simply
by her looking at him or hearing his voice.
Jess has to go after Kilgrave, and realizes that he is going to use the
penthouse owners’ yacht to leave the country.
She and Trish put together a plan to take Kilgrave by surprise and
defeat him. Trish walks into the boat
terminal wearing Jess’s hoodie with the hood up and her iPod blaring. Kilgrave (who is not purple) comes out and
brings in his trump card: a squad of
NYPD officers. Trish simply ignores
Kilgrave and his officers, and comes to a stop in the middle of the room. Suddenly, an alarm goes off, Trish takes off
the hoodie, and Kilgrave realizes that he’s been duped and Jess is on the
second level. Trish takes cover while
the NYPD officers start shooting at Jess, who waits until they run out of
ammunition, leaps from the balcony, lands on the ground level, and barricades
the officers into the terminal. Trish
and Jess both run out to find Kilgrave along with a large number of
mind-controlled people. Kilgrave orders
all the people to kill each other, so Trish and Jess have to work together to
break them up and keep them from killing each other. However, Trish gets knocked out and loses her
iPod, so Kilgrave can control her. Jess
goes after Kilgrave, but he orders everyone to “stop,” and Jess stops as well. At this point he thinks she might be faking
it, so he tests her by ordering Trish over and starting to caress her. He orders Trish to kiss him with meaning. At this point, watching Jess’s reaction,
Kilgrave finally believes that he has control of her. That’s when he walks over to her and says
that he will bring her with him and force her to love him. He orders her to smile. And then he orders her to tell him that she
loves him. Jess looks over at Trish and
says, “I love you,” before picking him up by the neck and squeezing until his
neck snaps. I kind of figured that Jess
would win in the end, but I really liked the twist of tricking Kilgrave into
thinking he could control her before snapping his neck. Essentially, this climax showed Jess
outsmarting Kilgrave: she knew that he
didn’t care about hurting Trish, so Trish could act as bait, giving Jess a
small advantage; she also knew that in the end his ultimate goal was Jess
herself, so Kilgrave wouldn’t take Trish when Jess was available.
There are a couple of other small
elements to mention in this episode, particularly the meeting between Claire
and Malcolm in Jess’s apartment. I
really liked seeing the two of them interact, as they both have a similar role
of being the “normal” friend/supporter of a superhero. Malcolm believes that Jess has the capability
to become a hero—just like Trish does—and realizes that she needs people like
him and Claire to help push her in the right direction. At the end of the episode, when Jess returns
to her office and finds that she has become known as a “hero,” Malcolm sort of
becomes her “secretary” and starts answering her phone to help her become the
hero that he and Trish both think she can be.
Image Courtesy www.twitter.com/TheDefenders_TV |
Jess also has a touching moment
with Luke before leaving to confront Kilgrave, in which she tells Luke that
he’s the first person she ever pictured having a future with. However, at this point she does not expect to
survive the confrontation. I think this
is the closest that Jess ever comes to telling Luke that she really cares for
him—and it takes him lying unconscious after she shot him for her to finally do
it. After Jess defeats Kilgrave, Luke
finally wakes up from his coma and sees Claire in the room. He is nervous that the police will be looking
for him, but Claire assures him that they are too busy with what happened at
the docks to worry about him and promises to keep his secret for him. She then leaves the room to get him a glass
of water, but he disappears before she can return. This definitely serves as a lead-in for Luke
Cage, with Luke still on the run and trying to start over again in Harlem
after fleeing from Hell’s Kitchen.
The episode ends with Hogarth
using her skills to get Jess released from police custody—using the “didn’t
have a choice” defense—and Trish picking her up from the precinct. Trish has a box of files on IGH that she
received from her mom and which she and Jess can use to track down both what
happened to Simpson and what happened to Jess herself to give her these
superpowers. In the end, Jess and
Malcolm start answering the phone as Jess monologues about how she can “fool”
herself into thinking that she’s a hero.
I really liked this season finale
for how well it set up everyone’s future arcs, especially Jess and Luke. The payoff of the “I love you” safe word was
also really good. Ultimately, this
season finale didn’t have as much action as one would expect from a comic book
series, but it worked very well for this particular series. While I wish they could have kept Kilgrave
around for future stories, I did think that his death was a fitting conclusion for
this season. I can’t wait to see how
these plot threads get resolved in Luke Cage, Jessica Jones
season 2, and The Defenders!
What was your favorite part of
this season? Did you want them to keep
Kilgrave around? Let me know in the
comments!
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