Marvel Comics' Jessica Jones is back on Netflix with the recently released Season 2!
Jessica is running her private investigation agency and gets some information from her adoptive sister Trish Walker which is a lead to a link between the car accident that killed her family and her subsequent super powers. Meanwhile she is approached by a character called the ‘Whizzer’ who claims to have super speed but only when scared. Jones puts off the Whizzer as a fake but finds out that he does have his super speed moments before he is murdered which Jones links to the medical facility where she vaguely remembers being kept and experimented on and the ‘accidental’ death of the doctor running the facility.
At this point the story looks like a pretty routine hero-villain story as Jones is hunting down the super powered being that is hunting other super powered beings (including Jones) that were treated by a mysterious IGH corp. At least it was pretty routine until the murderer is found to be Jones’ own mother who has even more super strength than Jones but is hampered by an unstable mentality that leads to fits of violence to anything that upsets her or threatens her husband (IGH head experimenter Karl Mallus) who has taken care of her and mostly successfully moderates her bouts of rage.
The story then weaves Jones’ conflict between bringing her mother to justice and trying to understand her motivations as well as get her the help she needs with the other subplots that center around series regulars that want to use powered beings or gain super powers themselves. High powered attorney Jeri Hogarth discovers she has ALS and tries to find a rumored IGH experimentee that gained ‘healing’ powers to cure herself. Trish Walker gets addicted to a performance enhancing inhaler used by ‘Nuke’ in the first season. When the inhaler runs out and she can’t reproduce the contents, Walker kidnaps Mallus and tries to make him alter her DNA to give her powers. The experiment seems to fail but there is a hint at the end that Walker may have gained the super reflexes of her comic book ‘Hellcat’ persona.
The show was less a super hero series than a show about people with powers trying to deal with them. Once the murderer was revealed to be Jones’ mentally ill mother there wasn’t any villain although season one bad guy Killgrave did make a one-episode appearance in Jones’ visions when she become too much like her mother for comfort. The show was about a group of dysfunctional people with and without super powers whose actions oscillate from being helpful or incredibly destructive to each other to satisfy short-term goals.
The pace of the episodes was excellent. All the previous Netflix/Marvel shows have three or four episodes of downtime where the plot slows to a crawl while we explore some aspect of the main characters past in snail-paced flashbacks. Jessica Jones had one bottle episode which was an extended flashback to explain her mother’s motivations but the other 12 episodes all worked together to advance the plot. Except for cameos from the petty theif ‘Turk’ and lawyer Foggy Nelson from Daredevil there was no crossover to the rest of the Netflix series. I thought this helped the show keep a lively pace as too many characters from other shows tend to lead to extra character development and explanation that slow the plot. The lack of crossover left more time to delve into the motivations and actions of Hogarth, Walker, and Jones’ private investigator assistant Malcom.
Another aspect of the show that compared favorably with the recent Netflix/Marvel shows was the complete lack of the countless ninja fighters that infected Daredevil Season 2, Iron Fist, and the Defenders. All three of the shows would take the easy way out from any character conflict by conjuring up dozens or hundreds of ninjas for our heroes to battle to get some pointless action scenes (pointless because the supply of ninjas were inexhaustable) and then rush through the characters' individual situations. The ‘no-ninja’ policy forced Jessica Jones’ showrunners to deal with the messes they created for the characters instead of dissolving them into ninja-mania.
My favorite side piece was Hogarth’s revenge against the IGH nurse Inez and her ‘healer’ friend Shane. The pair con Hogarth into getting Shane out of prison and putting the pair up at her penthouse apartment while Shane is healing her. Hogarth feels like she is being cured only to discover the pair has stolen everything they could and split. Hogarth finds out where the pair live and convinces Inez that she has evidence of Shane conning multiple women and Inez is about to be left as a victim to take the fall for the theft of Hogarth’s possessions. She seems convincing to me and especially Inez, who accepts a gun from Hogarth and shoots Shane while Hogarth reports the gunshot to the police. I expect to see Hogarth cured from her ALS at some point and her conniving performance makes me think the character could carry her own series if needed.
The series ended with very few loose ends but enough lingering conflicts to set the stage for a third season. Jessica is left distanced from former assistant Malcom and friend/sister Trish but has a new love interest in building superintendent Oscar and an attachment to his young son Vido to set the stage for a possibly revenge filled third season. The only Netflix/Marvel series scheduled are Luke Cage season 2, Daredevil season 3, and Iron Fist season 2. If they can bring back the same showrunners for Jessica Jones I expect there will be a season 3 sooner rather than later given the high quality of this recent series.
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