I'm the Bad Guy

Jessica Jones

Netflix (39 episodes + 8 episodes of The Defenders)

created by Melissa Rosenberg

starring Krysten Ritter, Rachael Taylor, Carrie-Anne Moss, Eka Darville, Rebecca De Mornay, David Tennant (season 1, then recurring), Wil Traval (season 1 and a tiny bit of season 2), Janet McTeer (season 2), Jeremy Bobb (season 3), lots of other people up to and including sometimes Mike Colter (see Luke Cage)

---

Look, the whole thing comes out at once, so if you want to know EVERYTHING that happens you can go watch it RIGHT NOW. I'll wait...

...OK, I'm going to assume you're done and we can talk about things without worrying about giving shit away. Ready? Yeah, me too.

---


Is it responsible to talk at any length in any public forum about yet another filmed and scripted live-action Marvel property in the same week when the our skinned-knee of a president a) told a crowd full of old white people (and one black guy) that Democrats were out to destroy them specifically and America as a whole, and b) we're like maybe all of a sudden going to war with Iran?

Well, first of all, you can't be depressed and terrified all day, every day. And if you are, time still has to pass. So you might as well spend it staring vaguely in the direction of the screen of your choice during the Golden Age of Television, the strategy being that in the odd moments when the shivering and crying and intrusive thoughts of self-harm should happen to abate, you might accidentally take in something worth mentally and emotionally ingesting in this time of otherwise full-time nausea. If you're going to be crippled by psychological and emotional paralysis, might as well do it with some high-production prestige TV is what I'm saying.

Second, do you know what the underlying themes of this show are? Patriarchy, domination, sexual violence, survivor's guilt, murder, manipulation, alcoholism, justified paranoia, loneliness, emotional disconnection and the ultimate inability at last to be able to rely on anyone other than yourself because friends and family in the end will all DEFINITELY either betray or disappoint you, probably in the form of attempted (or successful!) murder (of you or possibly someone else). Find a better fit for the times we live in, reader, I dare you. The only thing it's missing is a melting polar ice cap.

It's a Marvel show, so yes, the titular character, Jessica Jones, does have super powers. If you don't know, she's immensely strong, so she can lift stuff and throw stuff real far and punch guys real good. Also she can super-jump, which is kind of like flying, which sounds awesome but is never really properly shown. Apparently all the effects budget for these Netflix Marvel shows were allocated to one of Finn Jones' hands and enough red-tinted corn syrup all over Jon Bernthal and the rest of the cast of The Punisher to re-drown most of Boston. The most we get to see is a low shot of Jessica's boots leaving the ground, then a cut to her hands dragging herself over a ledge or a fire escape railing at an indeterminate place higher up from where she started.

It's slightly annoying, but if you watch any of the show (and I would recommend that you do. Try episode 1 of season 1 and see if you're not immediately locked in), it becomes very clear that the Very Strong Magic Person is at the center of the show, but is not, as a concept, the center of the show in the same way that, say, a Tony Stark suit of armor is what makes and Iron Man movie an Iron Man movie and not just a thing about a quippy rich guy being kind of an emotionally abusive dick to his paid staff.

The center of the show, from the very beginning, is a story of one woman's attempt to live past and through a prolonged recent period of (magical!) manipulation, abuse, domination and sexual exploitation that in the end results in the murder of an innocent woman. An orphan with no family but what she chooses, and she often chooses none. Usually for their safety.

This is a decidedly noir show, and not subtly so. There's a detective agency with a door that has a glass window on it. The door gets many ominous knocks. Looming silhouettes of unknown provenance cast themselves across said window. The rooms beyond, where our hero waits, tense and unknowing, is almost never properly lit for, say, reading or knitting or anything else a human might do for comfort. Mostly everything is long shadows at angles, inside which lurk threats in both literal, physical form and (more often) of the type that fester in the hearts of men. Not humans, but men specifically. Phones ring from unknown numbers to reveal threatening messages from people who leave no name. It's a dark 1940s John Huston picture if the Bogart part was played by a broad in a leather coat.

Questions are asked. Police are there to be lied to or manipulated into giving up intel. Ruses and subterfuge are employed in search of elusive but very tasty Clues. The femmes fatales are gender swapped for dudes with crunchy abs, but I think you're starting to get the idea. Aside from these extraordinary cases she finds herself involved as the A-plots of three seasons, this is a character who spends her days (or OK, slightly damp and moody-foggy nights) on fire escapes alone taking pictures of bosses boning their secretaries. It's marinating in human foibles at the shallow end, positively drowning in man's capability of inhumanity to his fellow man at the other. The violence and danger transcend those that pop up in other Marvel shows of this ilk as they are almost always rooted in something beyond the physical harm visited by one person upon another (to be fair, we can't give a backstory to every ninja Daredevil flip-kicks in the face), but with stakes that usually approach the integrity of at least one human soul, morally or as an anchor of personal identity. The beauty of the groundwork laid by Melissa Rosenberg is that it permeates the DNA of the show through three seasons: 1) violence costs. And 2) no cost short of death has to be the death of you. The Jessica Jones story is the story of what happens after.

It's a survivor's show. And as such it's a feminist show. Sure, that means Krysten Ritter butching it up (to the extent that she can) in dark clunky clothes and calling a lot of people "asshole" in an almost-parody of feminist stereotypes, but it's about self-reliance without the convenience of any denial of the pain inflicted. It lands. There are no victims in this show and in this show, every woman's rescuer is herself. Sometimes with disastrous consequence, but honest and earned ones. And in that way probably above all others I think this show succeeds.

The main critique of the Netflix Marvel shows across the board has to do with pacing and the number of episodes. There are filler shows, yes. There is some wheel-spinning that can be frustrating, a meta intrusion that breaks the immersion of the world, the most egregious of which is a late season 3 stinker that is essentially a Diff'rent Strokes-style clip show about episodes from early in the season that almost derails the whole thing.

The strength of this show is in the casting. Ritter seems a bit slight at first, but it only ends up adding to the illusion of her super human-ness when she lifts a car or throws a bad guy through a ceiling. I know it's not possible, but it sort of looks like Mike Colter could lift a car if he had to, as Luke Cage or otherwise. Her choices with voice and posture do a lot of the work to sell the discomfort and aloofness in the main role. Every dilemma in every episode is some kind of agony for our poor Jess, all of which is portrayed with the weariness required of the noir setting, but not sparing any of the actual human pathos, which is no small trick.

The rest of the cast is consistently great, but special mentions to David Tennant as arch-nemesis Kilgrave, the best villain in all the Marvel Netflix shows, and maybe all Marvel filmed entertainment full-stop. The marriage of writing, performance and actor are perfect and unforgettable. And to Carrie-Anne Moss, the more subtle sometimes-antagonist Jeri Hogarth, a white-shoe anti-hero of sorts redefining the art of scorched-earth self-interest episode to episode, consistently and beautifully maddeningly over almost 40 of them. She lives a fully realized arc over the course of the show, including contracting ALS in season 2. The way the mortal threat both transforms her and cruelly confirms who she always will be is deliciously horrifying and deeply satisfying to watch.

And what can we say about Rachael Taylor's Patricia Trish/Patsy Walker. Through season 2, she was the worst. I watched this all with my youngest son, through all of it I would unashamedly mutter and/or shout "fucking Patsy..." every time Trish did something else egregious, short-sighted or plot-breaking. That's why it was so pleasing to watch season 3 play that storyline all the way out to its darkest-timeline ending, one that is inevitable in retrospect if we understand the characters and the whole fucking point of the story being told from the first episode: nobody escapes who they are. Not really. Jessica Jones is a good person who just wants to be left alone, but compulsively can't be. As a result, she is messily, sometimes horribly, sometimes bloodily, a hero. Kilgrave is an abused child. Will Simpson is a gung-ho douche-bro. And fucking Patsy, she was always an obsessive/impulsive weapon of self-destruction and, in the end, was always going to be the villain. I love that it strung me along. I love that it made me pay that price of annoyance and exasperation through two seasons in order to fully cash out that reward of a completed parabola of a character arc.

In terms of overall consistent quality and ambition of achievement, I'd say Daredevil is probably the best overall Netflix Marvel show. But for me, season 1 of Jessica Jones is definitely one of my favorite seasons of anything, Netflix Marvel or otherwise. I've watched the whole thing through I think three times, and bits of it out of sequence here and there. It's not perfect, but I'm buying everything it's selling.

The abrupt cancellation of the entire Netflix Marvel pantheon was sudden and due certainly to the gross realities of corporate consolidation and the handling of brand management and intellectual property rights. It's likely we've seen the last of these characters as played by these actors in this particular pocket universe. Who knows, maybe Disney does surprise us in two years and we see them on Disney+ or Hulu or whatever. Even if we don't, this story was enough for me. It could've been a few episodes shorter, OK, but sometimes it's not about the journey, it really is about the destination. And the fact that the destination for ole Patsy was a dark cell on the Raft will never not be hilarious. Now if we could only get all those assholes from the fucking maddening Lost finale, that would make that one tolerable too.