https://youtu.be/cIKecSNhRv8

Can't wait. The Purple Man storyline is gonna piss off a certain group of people.

As will her hooking up with Luke Cage.

I can't wait for this to come out.

http://www.themarysue.com/jessica-jones-and-the-purple-man/

Even thought the article itself points out that it's essentially a feminist story, they still want to make this non-issue an issue.

I mean true villains are complete scumbags. So with that the darker "problematic" themes the storyline tackles, sadly happens often in everyday life. To me that what makes Purple Man a great villain. It's because I wanna see his comeuppance at the hands of Jessica, Luke, Iron Fist & Daredevil. I have a feeling he's gonna be the "Big Bad" of The Defenders.

The Governor on Walking Dead. Still made him a "bad guy" but left out all the rape stuff from the comics.

nm

nm

...in the comic I feel he's on literally the same scum level as Purple Man.

We'll see.

this show will get in that regard since Daredevil was pretty violent like you alluded to and Netflix doesn't have to appease advertisers. Then again, this country has it's hang-ups with sex in general and treats it as taboo, so Netflix may pull back compared to have gung-ho the show was for violence in Daredevil.

they never explicitly showed anything in the Alias comics. she talks about what happened to her in great detail but they never actually showed it. there's a scene when she first meets Purple Man that he commands her to take her clothes off and she starts too, but they never show it. then she goes on to describe how he'd sleep with these college girls and make her watch and beg him to have sex with her instead, but again, they never showed that happening. it was pretty much just her talking about it. actually Jessica says that Purple Man actually never did anything to her. that was part of her torture.

so I'd be shocked if they explicitly showed any kind of rape. I do expect them to show her sex scene with Cage (which again they didn't show anything but her face in the comic). that wasn't so much explicit as it was incredibly depressing.

the most explicit thing about Alias was the language and that I expect to be toned down a bit. the language on Daredevil was barely above PG-13 level.

they have a mandate to include it in their female superhero show?

if that's how it goes, it's kinda depressingly typical for the genre.

but it's not like I'm sitting here reading the books

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

That's not...

You know what forgot it.

I haven't heard of very many people having problems with it.

the ending was anti-climactic, but all in all they did a solid job of telling the story.

>As will her hooking up with Luke Cage.

...cause, didn't that actually happen in the comics?

>>As will her hooking up with Luke Cage.
>
>...cause, didn't that actually happen in the comics?

It'll be interesting where they, um, go with it, considering what was depicted in the comics.

I know they had a baby, and they mention JJ every once and awhile...but I haven't kept up....

And who knows with the latest Marvel re-org.

I don't regularly read anything with Cage in it.

I highly doubt anyone will care much about in interracial relationship.

>I highly doubt anyone will care much about in interracial
>relationship.

HELL YEAH you gonna hear some noise, even if its just twitter trolls.

Link: http://www.polygon.com/2015/9/17/9345313/jessica-jones-netflix-pictures

Marvel's Jessica Jones - Good Morning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ3s178GW0Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw7lAFlCSlY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gax3tMYU4I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi2hbejO75s

http://www.vulture.com/2015/10/jessica-jones-sexuality.html

its gonna be hard for me to get past how weird krysten looks.

This outta the park.

Not the deadface ritter, but depressed and down on her luck, but still real resourceful.

I'm actually looking forward to this a lot more than I was before.

There is a huge Halloween sale coming at my comics store. Should I get it? I've never read past the first issue of Alias.


>https://youtu.be/cIKecSNhRv8
>
>Can't wait. The Purple Man storyline is gonna piss off a
>certain group of people.
>
>As will her hooking up with Luke Cage.

I was at a shop this weekend for a buy one get one sale, and they only had volumes 2 and 3 in the used section b/c apparently Alias trades are out of print. I'm assuming they'll release a new one when the show drops, but I would definitely nab any that you see out and about.

https://amp.twimg.com/v/06ede69b-a85c-425c-9292-7ae3ed21a27b

Full official trailer comes out tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&;v=X7NMA6lC-Ag

Definitely gonna be some dark shit with Purple Man.

Marvel's Jessica Jones - Official Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWHUjuJ8zxE

Been a Ritter fan since She's Out of My League (npi)

Netflix has done a hell of a job promoting this.

Or, at least, they've done a hell of a job roping me in.

A character I love, but season one's expositions were lazy and put me to sleep.

Hopefully they can tell this story in like 43-37 minutes an ep.

The purpleman story was only like 3 books long. No way we can drag 13 hour long eps outta that.

Is that blonde chick supposed to be carol danvers?

but I'm all in. I don't think the blonde is Danvers, there's too much talk floating around about adding Ms. Marvel to the MCU that I wouldn't think they would place that character in a series.

She's Hellcat (Patsy Walker)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3UYWK2jeX0

...since this shit drops next week, can we just stop posting trailers and posters and stills?

I love promo material, but for this shit it's kinda out of hand.

Again, I'm not coming at anyone specifically just sayin.

ijs

Jesus...

When the post is updated I'm interested to see what people are sayin instead of seeing another promo piece.

would you prefer some links to some early reviews?

It's cool seeing people speculate about Hellcat, Luke and Purple Man and the genuine excitement for the show.

Just because it's not out yet doesn't mean there's not anything to talk about.

I wonder how many episodes I'll be able to knock out Friday night! Maybe I'll finish the series by Sunday... hmmm!

about to start in on the first episode.

Noir is back!!!

MAKES ME WISH I'D READ ALIAS THOUGH. I THOUGHT CAGE WOULD BE ALREADY A THING, BUT IM OK WITH THE INTRO.

PURPLE MAN IS A SCARYILY WICKED BEAST.

Alias is one of the reason Bendis became a made man at Marvel.

or just do it here?

that ending messed me up. wasn't expecting a totally happy ending, but wasn't expecting THAT though. goodness. Killgrave is truly messed up.

What type of ex superhero runs out of toilet paper? BRB as I finish watching the episode.

https://twitter.com/rulerofmyself/status/667936214285086720

Written by the screenwriter of the Twilight series doesn't surprise me. There's some painful dialogue in this episode. I also don't think that it's shot particularly well.

So far, I think it's on par with Daredevil, which I found underwhelming, but most people seemed to enjoy.

I guess Loki's mind control over multiple people including an Avenger was swept under the rug because people seem unconvinced that mind control could be a thing.

Is there a reason why she couldn't wear earplugs or jack up the volume on her head phones and just go and kill the dude?

It's just not drawing me in. I guess I'm just a bad person because I would have no problem with just killing The Purple Man or letting the cop die if it meant killing the bad guy. Not sure what the plan is with the sedative; just break his neck.

Tapping out for now. Might try back later. Might not.

i think it's obviously known there was an alien invasion but i'm not sure if the general public knows who was behind it or what the circumstances where.

as far as why she wouldn't just wear earplugs is basically because of her PTSD and paranoia. she wouldn't know where when he's coming for her, so she'd have to wear earplugs at all times which would be rather impractical. also i'm not sure she knows exactly how his powers work. like she knows what he does, but not exactly how he does it (could be wrong about that though).

the plan with the sedative is to put him under far enough to break his control. she mentioned that he does sleep so it's not just putting him to sleep it's putting him under deep enough to break his control. also since she can't prove that he can control people she's trying to capture him and get him to confess or make him display his powers to prove what he can do.

>as far as why she wouldn't just wear earplugs is basically
>because of her PTSD and paranoia. she wouldn't know where
>when he's coming for her, so she'd have to wear earplugs at
>all times which would be rather impractical. also i'm not
>sure she knows exactly how his powers work. like she knows
>what he does, but not exactly how he does it (could be wrong
>about that though).

Not all the time, but Jessica had her earbuds in her ears and could have gotten the drop on him. Why not try it? It's not like he couldn't just sneak up on her whenever he wants. It's not like he's ruining people's lives just to fuck with her.

She seems to know enough to have confidence in a sound proof room and how long the power lasts and not to be nervous about his voice over a phone.

>the plan with the sedative is to put him under far enough to
>break his control. she mentioned that he does sleep so it's
>not just putting him to sleep it's putting him under deep
>enough to break his control. also since she can't prove that
>he can control people she's trying to capture him and get him
>to confess or make him display his powers to prove what he can
>do.

The control only lasts 10 - 12 hours so it's not like they need to put him under to break the control.

If not for one lucky bus accident, Jessica has consistently failed to do anything to stop this guy. The idea that she can get him to confess or that it matters seems like a pipe dream. All the while more people get hurt.

I don't know, the show just isn't working for me. I got to episode 5 and am tapping out.

>Not all the time, but Jessica had her earbuds in her ears and
>could have gotten the drop on him. Why not try it? It's not
>like he couldn't just sneak up on her whenever he wants. It's
>not like he's ruining people's lives just to fuck with her.
>
>She seems to know enough to have confidence in a sound proof
>room and how long the power lasts and not to be nervous about
>his voice over a phone.

at this point in the show what she knows or what Killgrave even knows or thinks isn't really known. Killgrave was purposely messing with her and she wasn't 100% sure he was still alive until she saw him. it's not like he was making it that easy to be found. he's rather cautious. it's alluded to later that Killgrave doesn't think his powers work on her anymore and that she's got a weakness for helping others so he uses that to his advantage. at the time, i don't think she was aware that his powers didn't work on her anymore. the thought of him terrified her and she was barely able to function. so even if she thought the earplug idea would have worked, it's not like she was in a proper state of mind to try that. she thought he had no weakness until she found out about the ambulance and the drug that he didn't want used on him. that gave her a bit of confidence that she could and least trap him.

>The control only lasts 10 - 12 hours so it's not like they
>need to put him under to break the control.

putting him under would break his control sooner than the 12 hours.


>If not for one lucky bus accident, Jessica has consistently
>failed to do anything to stop this guy. The idea that she can
>get him to confess or that it matters seems like a pipe dream.
>All the while more people get hurt.

yeah, i'm not really sure what the complaint is here. everyone under his control is helpless so i'm not sure what you mean about "failed to stop him". how do you stop someone who can control anyone he comes in contact with is kinda the whole point of the series.

>I don't know, the show just isn't working for me. I got to
>episode 5 and am tapping out.

sorry it wasn't your cup of tea.

>at this point in the show what she knows or what Killgrave
>even knows or thinks isn't really known. Killgrave was
>purposely messing with her and she wasn't 100% sure he was
>still alive until she saw him. it's not like he was making it
>that easy to be found. he's rather cautious.

I'm not sure the timeline of the show but she finds him a couple of times. She says he'll always have his back to a wall even though the two times previously, he didn't. The only thing that difficult is taking him alive, which I'm not sure she even needs to since she has enough people who have been under his control to testify to get the girl off of the charges.

>she thought he had no weakness until she found out
>about the ambulance and the drug that he didn't want used on
>him. that gave her a bit of confidence that she could and
>least trap him.

Has he ever shown any reason he doesn't have the weaknesses of any human?

>putting him under would break his control sooner than the 12
>hours.

But the breaking control doesn't even matter here. They are just trying to knock him out long enough to get him to the soundproof room.

Also, if they knew that the drug broke control, why did they think that the Blackwater guys/bodyguards were under his control? It takes almost torturing dude for Jessica to believe that he's not under his control when the control is supposedly already broken?

>yeah, i'm not really sure what the complaint is here.
>everyone under his control is helpless so i'm not sure what
>you mean about "failed to stop him". how do you stop someone
>who can control anyone he comes in contact with is kinda the
>whole point of the series.

The complaint is that she's completely overmatched from the outset yet seems to act like she's the one protecting people and that she's the only one that can stop this.

How do you stop someone who can control anyone? You shoot them. Shit, they almost got him except she decided to not pat him down until right when they get to the hideout.

As soon as I heard that everything was right in the world.

I don't get the complaints about the show. It's good noir, damn good noir.


I need my PTP crew to come in and lay it down.

It's like any detective show shot mostly at night with narration and a grumpy protagonist who has sex is somehow noir. Really, Jessica Jones is closer to James Bond than film noir.

Visually, the show is unimpressive. The only thing in connection with noir is that it's often dark outside.
After the inciting incident with the girl, Jessica is basically like any other superhero, just not good with people. Even before then, she didn't have a problem with the world, she was suffering from PTSD. Honestly, Jessica Jones is barely an anti-hero. She's rude. That's the extent of it.
The attitudes and motivations of the film have little in common with film noir. The city and society barely play a role in the show.
The sex is just sex. You could cut the sex out of the show and not change it.

This is a superhero stalker film.

>It's like any detective show shot mostly at night with
>narration and a grumpy protagonist who has sex is somehow
>noir. Really, Jessica Jones is closer to James Bond than film
>noir.
>
>Visually, the show is unimpressive. The only thing in
>connection with noir is that it's often dark outside.
>After the inciting incident with the girl, Jessica is
>basically like any other superhero, just not good with people.
>Even before then, she didn't have a problem with the world,
>she was suffering from PTSD. Honestly, Jessica Jones is barely
>an anti-hero. She's rude. That's the extent of it.
>The attitudes and motivations of the film have little in
>common with film noir. The city and society barely play a role
>in the show.
>The sex is just sex. You could cut the sex out of the show and
>not change it.
>
>This is a superhero stalker film.

excuse my opinion. I still feel this show is getting underserved hate, but what do I know.

is very fantastical (so the writing has to be super tight) and our detective is incompetent as hell. sure there is the alcohol and back history with Killgrave that clouds Jessica's judgement, but overall it's a lot of death for the sake of their being death scenes. i mean Lesbian lawyers wife getting murked by the new lover was SO UNNECESSARY. the abortion story line, forced, having the neighbor blow herself up... why?
dawg, also why does Luke Cage's dead wife have that info on Killgrave's parents, and why would he kill her?

y'all are being fan boys

this is not as tight as Daredevil and it sucks cause Ritter is doing a hell of an acting job and should be super bad ass, but she comes off looking like a fool 70% of the time

i ain't gonna contest everything but ...

>i mean Lesbian lawyers wife getting
>murked by the new lover was SO UNNECESSARY.

how else was that supposed to go? she was literally going to cut her 1000 times.

to stop Killgrave's mind control?

L-Lover should've hit her on the head and she knocked out to the side. when she wake up and Lawyer wifey can get her for assault and boom divorce settled. i mean that whole plot line seemed whatever, but still that would've been much better angle then, she, she dead

and let's not even talk about the completely unnecessary murderdeathkill of Lester Freeman. smdh

and why were Jessica's powers so damn inconsistent. One minute she kicking the shit out of people, the next she can hardly handle Killgrave's bodyguards. One scene she can't take a bullet, the next she's destroying an ice cream truck that hits her on the street even after she's hella injured. She can jump really high, but rarely does she think to use it. whatevs.

also in the comic its Jean Grey who plants her mind with the power to not fall prey to Killgrave, but since Marvel and X-men, did I miss what they explained it was.

and in the comic world, who the hell was the annoying special-ops cop? his face was so damn punchable

I will say overall, it was good, just think it would've been tighter around 8-10 episodes

The support group?
They took great care to plan out the sin bin only to leave all the evidence behind.
The pacing was terrible until they crammed everything into ep 9, 10.
You don't care about any of the characters save for Luke Cage.
By the end you just want JJ and Kilgrave to kill each other because the show is exhausting and inconsistent.

Daredevil (Karen) and Jessica Jones taught me that plucky, white girl ideals will get everyone killed.

Just a few hodge podge observations, but this show is mediocre.

>to stop Killgrave's mind control?
>
>L-Lover should've hit her on the head and she knocked out to
>the side. when she wake up and Lawyer wifey can get her for
>assault and boom divorce settled. i mean that whole plot line
>seemed whatever, but still that would've been much better
>angle then, she, she dead

what makes you think she knows anything about knocking her out to get her to stop? what makes you think that she even knew that she was being mind controlled? all she knows is that she walked in the door and ole girl was stabbing her lover. also what makes you think that it was her intent to kill her? she picked something up and hit her with it to get her to stop. her dying from the hit/table was just a side effect.

>and let's not even talk about the completely unnecessary
>murderdeathkill of Lester Freeman. smdh

Simpson was clearly crazy and had his own agenda. again, not sure what your beef is.

>and why were Jessica's powers so damn inconsistent. One minute
>she kicking the shit out of people, the next she can hardly
>handle Killgrave's bodyguards. One scene she can't take a
>bullet, the next she's destroying an ice cream truck that hits
>her on the street even after she's hella injured. She can jump
>really high, but rarely does she think to use it. whatevs.

i stand by my idea that you are just nitpicking this to death. lol. you clearly didn't like anything about this.

>also in the comic its Jean Grey who plants her mind with the
>power to not fall prey to Killgrave, but since Marvel and
>X-men, did I miss what they explained it was.

i don't think they explictly said what it was that broke his control over her.

>and in the comic world, who the hell was the annoying
>special-ops cop? his face was so damn punchable

he's a character called Nuke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuke_(Marvel_Comics)

Luke was dope, Jessica's back story and complex decision choices were awesome, as was Ritter's acting. Her homegril Trish's story line was hella intriguing to, plus she's nice to look at.

Killgrave the villain was awesome: so arrogant, such an asshole, perfectly acting in ways that are supported by his past

all the neighbors added a lot of light and complexity to the story line and again were well acted.

and again, I was making those points above more related to WRITING CHOICES, the writers should've made better choices in both regards

but love it all you want. All I'm saying this could've been told in 8 episodes and Jessica should've been more badass and decided to kill Killgrave earlier in the plot arc

the end. I'll speak no more

You could have Jessica want to kill him and just have Kilgrave get the upperhand. Like, if he was behind the bar pacing behind the four people with the nooses around their necks and Jessica can't get a good shot. It would be a more visually interesting scene and make it more of a battle of wits than Jessica having no plan whatsoever and him just sitting at a table next to Hope.

Or instead of having Hope in jail, make her on a crime spree under his control. Jessica wants to stop her but can't hurt her. Hope could have delivered the "Give him your father, he'll let me go" speech, which would have been more effective IMO. (and you avoid the whole trying to convince people mind control exists problem.)

You probably have to lose the "What if we can harness his powers for good?!" episode but that sounds like it was no big loss.

But it seems like it works for most critics and people on this board so I guess you can get away with lazy storytelling if you offer something deeper.

i like all the cast and how things are moving but there just aint enough to justify the run time.

that nigga tennant look creepy af as killgrave tho.

the circumstances that are driving the characters are very much compromised in many ways. Also how Killgrave keeps getting away and when Jessica beats people up easily and when she doesn't is MAD inconsistent

when they are having the meeting about the dart gun at Trish's apartment (in Episode 4, which I'm watching as I write this) Jessica has some very pointed dialogue reminding viewers that her primary goal is to get Hope off her murder charges, as well as anyone else who's committed crimes in his name (including herself).

Luke Cage doesn't believe he exists, the law doesn't believe he exists. She needs him alive to prove he exists and can do what she and his other victims claim he can do. She also doesn't want anyone else to die because of his powers, hence saving Sergeant Simpson over crushing Kilgrave's throat. Neither of her goals are accomplished by doing that, and THEN this series is a waste of time.

kind of confusing how this whole thread of dialogue below strung out without any mention of this.

~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

It's not that I don't understand her given rationale, it's that I think it's stupid and endangers more people than it helps.

>when they are having the meeting about the dart gun at
>Trish's apartment (in Episode 4, which I'm watching as I write
>this) Jessica has some very pointed dialogue reminding viewers
>that her primary goal is to get Hope off her murder charges,
>as well as anyone else who's committed crimes in his name
>(including herself).

1. Jessica isn't under investigation for her crime nor does she seem particularly interested in anyone else who may be in jail for what he did. (In fact, she's pretty much a jerk to the other victims.) It's all about Hope. And it's about Hope because Jessica feels guilty about it.
That, to me, is a weak and selfish reason to not kill a powerful psychopath who she obviously can't control. And that is the crux of most of the series.

2. How exactly is she going to prove that Kilgrave is using mind control? She's going to trick him into confessing? (After drugging and kidnapping him? That'll stand up in court.) And he's not going to use his mind control to escape?

>Luke Cage doesn't believe he exists, the law doesn't believe
>he exists. She needs him alive to prove he exists and can do
>what she and his other victims claim he can do.

Again, is he just going to confess? Just going to show them that he can do what she claims he can? Saying, "Hey, here's Kilgrave!" proves nothing.

And, yeah, I have an issue with people who live in the current film/TV Marvel Universe just not believing in mind control out of hand, especially the guy with unbreakable skin and superstrength.

> She also
>doesn't want anyone else to die because of his powers, hence
>saving Sergeant Simpson over crushing Kilgrave's throat.

I don't see her being able to have it both ways. She can free Hope or she can just kill Kilgrave. Risking lives so she can somehow capture him, keep him contained, prove to authorities that he has the mind control that she claims while also having him not use the mind control on anyone to let him out seems highly unlikely.
And every second she doesn't have him locked up/dead, he's messing with other people's lives.

I'm up to episode 7 and I'm already a little bored.

I just don't like this chick as Jessica Jones. And everybody just seems so dumb. Yes, it's a comic book movie but got damn.

The only thing that's perfect about it is the casting of Luke Cage.

.

- Jessica's paranoia on full blast
- the people coming forward had some interesting moments. showed just how petty Killgrave is. he could literally use his powers to take over the White House, but he uses it just to get clothes, dinners and attention.
- also interesting to see Hogarth start thinking of finding a way to use his powers. she's quite foul.
- that little girl. creepy.
- "how many more are there like you?". seems to be setting up Civil War a little bit showing that not everyone has warm and fuzzy feelings about people with powers.
- for all her flaws, Jessica is actually a pretty good detective.

- Jessica is a bad employee. LOL
- Jewel costume
- Killgrave has thought of everything with the security detail
- how Killgrave met Jessica (and how Jessica met Malcolm ... somewhat)

>

he could just make people give him money but he'd rather do it in the manner that he does just to mess with them. he wants them to know that he did it knowing that there's no way they'll be able to explain to anyone what happened.

then making everyone be quiet in the coffee shop. he's so petty.

And in fact all the shows of strength so far have been ass. I like the story and pace if everything, but if I'm thinking, yeah I could fuck Luke Cage up, we got a problem. It feels like Adam West Batman fight scenes without the visual sound effects to distract you from how fake shit looks.

█▆▇▅▇█▇▆▄▁▃
Big PEMFin H & z's
"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1 thing, a musician." � Miles

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

it's not like they've been training. they have powers but Luke has been trying to stay low key for a while as far as we know. Jessica clearly has a ton of problems and learning how to best use her powers is probably pretty low on her list of priorities. she also is reluctant to be a true hero so her fighting skills are lacking.

NUKE! I'm calling it right now

I just started reading synopses to see what happened but I was wondering about his power: Was it established that if he dies, his power still remains with the people he compelled? Was the idea that the drug would break his power wrong? Did he tell a bunch of people, "Take poison unless I visit you in 10 hours?" or something?

him dying would break his control all together. so him going way under with the drug would/should have the same effect, but we never really got to see if that worked or not. he seemed to be scared that it would though. kinda interesting that even he isn't 100% sure how everything works. he definitely threatened that people would die if anything happened to him, but it's not clear if that was a bluff on his part or not.

everyone did what was convenient for the story, but it didn't make sense for their character.

the lawyer could have just told her mistress exactly what happened "he asked for a doctor I trusted and I took him there"

and it would've been totally explained.

mistress could've been slightly more savvy about picking a time to realize who she was fucking with

and it continued into the following episodes. there's stuff like that all the time, but it got REALLY BAD at this point

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

this was the episode where i kinda said out loud "this shit is stupid." what really put it over the top was how kilgrave is saved and jessica gets knocked out by neighbor girl and the band of victims. that was ridiculous.

>everyone did what was convenient for the story, but it didn't
>make sense for their character.
>
>the lawyer could have just told her mistress exactly what
>happened "he asked for a doctor I trusted and I took him
>there"
>
>and it would've been totally explained.
>
>mistress could've been slightly more savvy about picking a
>time to realize who she was fucking with
>
>and it continued into the following episodes. there's stuff
>like that all the time, but it got REALLY BAD at this point
>
>www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

i really wish right at the beginning of the ep jessica would have said to neighbor girl "hey, i had his ass when you stormed into my apartment. this shit is your fault, this on you bitch!"

but i was (real) good with Claire. it actually made more sense.

I honestly would've taken anyone.

In so many ways. It would have been completely unnecessary and I'm glad they didn't.

.

I mean, if she can't even save the day in her own series, what's the point?

Also, not sure how Daredevil (as established in the MCU) is going to stop Kilgrave in a way that Jessica couldn't. Having enhanced hearing wouldn't be an advantage.

It's more a detective show than a super hero show...Which I like. People who were expecting an all out Daredevil type show will be disappointed. I think Ritter becomes better from episode to episode.The first 4 episodes , it feels like she's overacting but to me it seems like she eases into it without hamming it up too much after that.

stop trying to make excuses for this being good, at best

But Jessica Jones emphasize more on the detective stuff than the supernatural stuff and there is no weekly fight scenes which was the main appeal on DD.

Top 5 marvel product for me. I generally don't like David Tennant but he's perfectly cast as is everyone. Really good story well told but yeesh hell of a body count

Son, I cannot wait for Luke Cage.

...the best thing about this show was him.... I didn't hate it like many did, it IS noir, but it kinda dragged at certain points in their attempt to fill the season....6 episodes would have been a tighter, better story overall

Tennant was creepy as hell, like you said everyone was cast perfectly. My gripe with Daredevil was the guy they cast as Foggy and the last episode not really fitting in with the rest.

Luke Cage should be dope as well, I still don't know how they are going to do Iron Fist. It's Marvel so they have my full trust at this point.

...the characters make a lot of dumb decisions, and the plot is stretched really thin at points until it becomes comical in ridiculousness ...... I liked all the casting (forgot how much I missed looking at DeMornay), but Tennant and Colter steal the show....

the whole time I was watching I kept wondering if viewers are even supposed to like Jessica, cause if she wasn't literally helping someone, I wasn't rooting for her..... I never got the impression she was such a miserable person to be around in the comics, but I've only read parts of her involvement with New Avengers

peace & blessings,

x.

www.twitter.com/poetx

=========================================
I'm an advocate for working smarter, not harder. If you just
focus on working hard you end up making someone else rich and
not having much to show for it. (c) mad

Recently got Netflix, which one should I watch first?

But don't sleep on JJ.

No idea how anyone is saying it's clearly worse than Daredevil, though. If anything, JJ was the stronger show, even if the action sequences didn't have anything as good as the hallway fight.

While I don't agree that J.J. is better than Daredevil, it does bother me that cats who love noir hate her character as that's a typical male noir protagonist.

http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/11/23/jessica-jones-review-aka-pretty-much-perfect

The new Netflix Marvel show is, start to finish, incredible.

By Devin Faraci Nov. 23, 2015

This review contains complete spoilers for season one of Jessica Jones.

If I had been behind Netflix’s Jessica Jones series I would have had main villain Killgrave, a mind-controller, bend to his will a C-level Marvel bruiser, a villain who could go toe-to-toe with the series’ heroine, who has super strength. This is why it’s probably for the best that I wasn’t running the show, as Jessica Jones actually found a better, more elegant and more thematically resonant way to give its lead some competition when it came to throwing punches. And that decision, to me, encapsulates why this show works so well as a cohesive, complete story.

To say that Jessica Jones is better than Daredevil is to truly undersell how good Jessica Jones is; what Melissa Rosenberg and her team have done here is nothing short of miraculous - they have created a series whose tone is perfect, whose characters are great and, most importantly, they have masterfully interwoven the show’s themes and real world metaphors with its genre trappings, making a series that operates on both literal and metaphorical levels at once and in total harmony. What’s more, they have created a binge-watching show that is actually paced correctly, that keeps you flowing from episode to episode while making each episode a coherent and satisfying experience on its own.

Some preface here: I am not a fan of the Jessica Jones character in the comics. I thought that her series, Alias, was try-hard bullshit with a 15 year olds’ sensibility of adultness. What’s more, I found the character as written tiresome, a rote drunk PI whose adventures felt like Crime Fiction 101. When Alias was canceled I found Jessica Jones even harder to deal with - Marvel retired her from being a PI, knocked her up and moved her into Avengers Mansion to hang out with her baby all the time (with a couple of detours back into her costumed identity, none sticking).

That’s why this is the highest compliment I can pay to the Jessica Jones TV show: it makes me want to go back and give Alias another shot. The series, and the performance of Krysten Ritter in the lead, have recontextualized the character for me in a major way, allowing me to understand and appreciate her as I never could before. Ritter’s performance - equal parts comedically irritated, effortlessly badass and deeply broken - gives Jessica Jones a richness rarely seen on TV, placing her in the company of television’s famed Bad Men like Tony Soprano and Walter White and Don Draper. Jessica Jones is as likely to do something terrible and mean as she is to do something heroic and awesome, and the relationship between those two sides of herself are in constant, unending flux. What makes Jones different from those Bad Men, though, is that they are motivated by deep selfishness while she is motivated by deep self-destruction.

Her self-destructive tendencies are the result of trauma - more than one of them. Trauma is the theme of Jessica Jones, and each of the characters suffer from it in their own ways, and each of them react to it in their own ways. For some trauma brings healing and helps them become better people, while for other trauma fractures them in unfixable ways, leading them to become desperate villains - even if they never see themselves as such. Much of the tension in the show is watching Jessica navigate these two paths and wondering which way she will go - will she use her pain to find the strength to be better, like next-door neighbor Malcolm, or will she give in to it all and go dark, like killer cop Will Simpson? It’s to the credit of the writing and performances that although you know the answer - this is a Marvel superhero show destined to lead into the Defenders crossover - the tension feels palpable nonetheless.

There are a lot of strengths to Jessica Jones, but one of the greatest is the structure of the series. Where Daredevil’s structure frustrated - we knew from the beginning that Wilson Fisk was the Kingpin and a bad guy, and Daredevil knew the same very early, and yet we still had to suffer through investigations into the truth of him - Jessica Jones’ structure is more like a tightly-plotted novel. There is little wheel-spinning (although the final two episodes do hit a lull; all of these Netflix shows are two episodes too long) and all of the strands of the story, all of the subplots and character moments, feed into the larger themes in a way that is satisfying and engaging, that lends depth to the main story as opposed to being a way of padding out the main story. Each character has a role in the show, and each character’s journey - whether as a victim of trauma or a perpetrator of it - reflects back on Jessica’s story, illuminating it in different ways.

Jessica herself stomps through it all, both trauma survivor and trauma inflicter. On a larger scale, all of the characters are caught up in the fallout of her continuing battle with Killgrave, the Purple Man, but on a more personal scale she has fucked up the lives of people like Luke Cage and Jeri Hogarth (it’s almost comical how much trouble Jessica causes Hogarth. Hogarth’s life would be so much better off if Jessica Jones had never come into it). That dichotomy is important, thematically, because it shows the way that trauma flows like a river - we get it and we deal it, passing on the hurt someone gave us because of the hurt that someone else gave them and back and back, forever into distant pre-history. That’s why the presence of Killgrave’s parents and Trish Walker’s mom are so important, as they highlight the generational way in which we pass down pain.

Man, all of that sounds high-falutin’ and serious, like Jessica Jones is a meditation on the nature of trauma (and I haven’t even gotten into the rape and consent stuff yet)... which it is. But it’s also an incredibly fun show with truly likeable characters; this series isn’t bleak or grim, even though bleak and grim things do happen. This series has a sense of fun to it, a sense of humor, and you want to spend time in the world it has created. Jessica Jones may poke at the edges of our ability to withstand misery, but in general it doesn’t rub our faces in it, and the way that characters laugh and joke and interact cuts the bitterness of the cruelty and horror they face (and inflict upon one another). The balance is ideal; every time things gets heavy the show brings in a laugh, or it unleashes an episode full of ‘Holy shit!’ moments that get your heart racing. That tone is vital and apparently all but impossible to achieve most of the time, judging by how rarely I see it. Jessica Jones is important and smart but it’s also a blast, with good action interspersed throughout.

In fact I would say it has the most interesting superhero action I have ever seen. Jessica and Luke are super strong, but neither are trained experts like Daredevil. What’s more, they’re going up against mostly goons, thugs and people brainwashed by the Purple Man; as a result the show is very adept at letting us see that their fighting style is more brawler-based but also that they’re going easy on the guys they’re hitting. More than once Jessica seems to just swat away an assailant, a move that makes sense - she doesn’t want to be shattering jaws. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a superhero show or movie so careful with this - watching The Avengers or Spider-Man or even Batman (who isn’t technically super powered) you get the sense that A LOT of low level bad guys end up being huge strains on the health care system. But again, that a show as interested in consequences and trauma should be so careful about violence makes sense.

The action is kind of a microcosm of how the tone of Jessica Jones works. It’s realistic but at the same time full of superheroics - Jessica is careful when hitting guys, but she still sends them through walls and over cars. This series is far more comfortable with the superheroics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe than Daredevil was; where Daredevil seemed to play down his powers to fit into a Zatoichi/blind guy has slightly enhanced senses thing, Jessica Jones goes all in. Every episode she’s displaying feats of strength, Luke Cage very early on shows off his powers by running a power saw on his abs, and the Purple Man is constantly doing mindfuckery. From very early on in the series it’s clear: this is fantasy, working in a heightened reality, and nobody is apologizing for it. By the time Sergeant Wilson starts popping super soldier pills you almost feel let down - he could definitely be jacking something into his veins and turning into a monster! We would accept that in this show!

There’s another side to that, though. One of the more intriguing throughlines of the series is that Jessica can’t just walk up to and kill the Purple Man because she wants to haul him into court and try him, as he has forced an innocent girl to kill her parents, and Jessica wants to get that girl out of prison. It’s an intriguing dilemma, one that allows the powerful Jones to be at the same level as the physically weak Killgrave, and it’s also one that speaks to a larger question of heroism that Daredevil swatted at - is it okay to kill, even if the guy is a total scumbag? Can he be rehabilitated? Is he too dangerous to live? But within the world of the MCU there’s something slightly off here; everybody in New York watched a rage monster and a god fight aliens, so why would a mind controller be so totally hard to believe? Even Luke Cage, a guy with unbreakable skin, scoffs at the idea at first (which plays into thematic stuff, by the way - it’s all about the way rape victims are often disbelieved, even by their loved ones). It’s been nine or so years, in universe, since Iron Man showed up - why aren’t the people, especially those with powers, more open to weirdness? Why hasn’t the justice system/police department reacted in some way to the appearance of superhumans? The answer is because the story needs Jessica Jones to not just grab Killgrave at the first opportunity, but I do think there’s room to give a sense of an expanded world of heroes and villains -when Jessica tells a guy that no one will believe she picked up his car with her bare hands I want to ask if she’s at all aware of what happened in Sokovia earlier this year.

But these are nits I’m picking. If we’re going to talk about the superheroics of it all, I’m more than satisfied. Luke Cage is great… if a little level-headed going into his own show. The Luke in Jessica Jones is definitely late period Luke, not early, boisterous Heroes For Hire Luke, and while I like the more mature version of the character I must admit I want to see somebody with a little bit of reckless swagger as well. Mike Colter plays the role, and he’s got such a sense of grounded decency that he could give Captain America a pep talk. He also has killer chemistry with Krysten Ritter, making Luke and Jessica feel like a legitimate couple. In the course of the show Luke is very much the damsel in distress more than once - The Purple Man tries to fridge him, even - but nobody brings this up. There’s a lot going on in this show when it comes to gender roles, consent issues, stuff like that, but what makes it all so refreshing is that no one stops and shines a light on it. It’s just there. Luke Cage is just a pretty cool dude who treats Jessica like an equal and who needs his ass saved once or twice.

The non-super supporting cast is just as strong. Carrie-Ann Moss is perfectly sleazy as Jeri Hogarth, a lawyer for whom Jessica occasionally works. Hogarth is in the middle of a divorce (from her wife, one of the many unremarked-upon pieces of progressivism in the show) and while that divorce at first seems disconnected from the main story it becomes apparent how vital it is to everything going on, thematically if not entirely plotwise. But even though the divorce is essentially tangential the show smartly wraps it into the body of the story, making it feel less like a subplot and more like a set-up for one of the most fucked up episodes of the season.

Rachael Stott is Trish ‘Patsy’ Walker, a character who in the comics is also a superheroine known as Hellcat. Trish is Jessica’s best friend, and she has her life together in ways that Jessica could never fathom. But even still, Trish envies her friend’s powers, and in flashbacks we learn that she tried to get Jessica to embark on a superhero career, going so far as to create costume for her. Trish wanted to live through Jessica, and this adds a layer of complication and reality to their relationship. Stott is glorious in the role, and while she left me cold in the first episode by the end of the series I wanted Trish to don tights and take to the rooftops herself. And that’s not just because it would be cool (and because Hellcat is my favorite fourth string Marvel character), it’s because Stott is able to convincingly give Trish a life beyond the edge of the frame - you believe that there’s more to explore with this character, and that the actress has the chops to bring us there.

Perhaps the greatest example of how rich the supporting characters are in Jessica Jones is Malcolm, Jessica’s junkie neighbor played by Eka Darville. Malcolm is, on paper, a terrible character - he’s the sweetly naive smack addict down the hall, a guy who clearly exists only to be killed late in the season for cheap pathos. Except that isn’t the arc of the character at all! He’s been planted by Killgrave, who made him become a junkie, to spy on Jessica. That reveal comes halfway through the season and then Malcolm’s arc only gets better; as he goes along he kicks his habit, gets out of Killgrave’s control and finds himself turning into a de facto social worker, hosting weekly get togethers of Killgrave’s victims. Jessica helps Malcolm kick smack, but beyond that his destiny is in his own hands, and he charts a positive, healing course away from trauma, one that encompasses helping others. If there’s a real, honest to god hero on this show, it’s Malcolm, and Darville plays him craftily. At first he makes Malcolm almost irritatingly goofy, but when the shit goes down Darville brings a lot of depth and doubt to this guy. He’s not just a social worker saint - he’s a man with a storm still within, a guy still wrestling with his doubts about himself.

Malcolm reacts to trauma by helping others. Trish reacts by gaining complete control over her life and her safety. Jessica reacts by becoming self-destructive. Luke reacts by finding a quiet place where he can feel safe (his bar). Killgrave reacts… well, we’ll talk about Killgrave extensively below. But perhaps one of the most interesting characters, in terms of how they react to their trauma, is Will Simpson, played by Wil Traval. Simpson is violated by Killgrave and his response is to slowly sink into a morass of vengeance, fueled by drugs. This review is already way, way too long, but it’s interesting to note that the show is just as much about substance abuse as it is about rape or emotional trauma - Jessica, Simpson and Malcolm all deal with their own substance abuse issues, in their own ways, with varying degrees of success.

Simpson is better known to comic fans as Nuke, a pill-gobbling super soldier from long before Jeremy Renner was taking his chems in the Bourne spin-off. For some reason his character’s first name has been changed - to preserve the reveal of where he ends up? - but the basics remain close enough to the character created by Frank Miller. Ex-military, Simpson was part of a program that used performance enhacing, color-coded pills. Now out of the service and in the NYPD, Simpson is briefly mind-controlled by Killgrave and basically snaps. What’s interesting is that he seems okay at first, even starting a romance with Trish, but the weight of his experience is too much for him, and he becomes obsessed with killing Killgrave and anyone who stands in his way - including Jessica, who wants to bring the Purple Man to justice. Traval plays Simpson first like a boy scout before descending into twitchy nastiness, and he essays the arc nicely. I didn’t see it coming.

Substance abuse, rape, trauma - these are some of the topics Jessica Jones touches on in its thirteen episode, but another is the way men and women interact. It’s fascinating to see Simpson as the boyfriend gone wrong, and to see that the relationship between he and Trish is pretty common - minus the performance-enhancing combat pills, of course. This is part of why Jessica Jones is incredible, because the metaphors are solid under the genre trappings. This is how genre is supposed to work, to speak to us about the real world using heightened metaphors. And that’s why Killgrave is absolutely, completely, totally incredible. Not just as a villain, mind you, but as a character.

The Killgrave we see on TV is very different from his Purple Man comic book origins. He’s not purple, for one thing. He had a different first name in the comics, and he was a Russian spy. That means every element of his TV backstory, and the way he fits into the show’s larger themes of trauma, were invented for the series. More than invented, they were perfected; the Purple Man was the kind of Silver Age villain whose powers weren’t thought through by creators, and who was ripe for reimagining as a result. Brian Michael Bendis reimagined him for Alias, but Melissa Rosenberg truly redefined him for Jessica Jones.

Killgrave works both as villain and metaphor - he’s the mind-controlling freak but also the controlling ex-boyfriend who crosses the consent line through manipulation and emotional abuse. Killgrave is a stalker, first and foremost, and his goal is one that he believes is noble: he wants Jessica Jones back. He believes that her ability to withstand his control means she’s his perfect match, and he turns all of his considerable abilities towards ‘winning’ her. But he tries to win her in the way that an obsessed ex does, by infiltrating her life, by sidling up to her invisibly through intermediaries, by keeping tabs and professing his undying love in ways that he thinks are romantic but are, in fact, deeply creepy.

What’s great about Killgrave is that he’s a villain whose motivation is totally understandable for many men and is absolutely familiar to most women. I watched Killgrave and recognized myself in some of his nuttiness - in the past I have used ‘grand romantic gestures’ to try to win back exes, and with the clarity of hindsight I now understand these moments were kind of creepy at best. Killgrave thinks he’s being romantic, but he mentions that everything he knows of love he learned from TV, something very familiar to a generation raised on unrealistic displays of romance in the media. Growing up on Say Anything can really, really leave you warped.

But there’s more horror to Killgrave than that. He also personifies the ugly reality of date rape; Jessica’s quest to get Killgrave into court reflects the difficult efforts to get he said/she said date rape cases prosecuted. There is no evidence, there are only competing stories being presented, and Killgrave - standing in for smirking date rapists everywhere - is polished and able to present the more believable story. The system cannot handle Killgrave just as, in many ways, the system cannot properly handle date rape.

Jessica Jones takes the exact opposite approach to Killgrave as Daredevil took to Kingpin. While Daredevil presented us a human Wilson Fisk very early on, Jessica Jones spends a lot of time with Killgrave in the shadows or popping up to leer from a distance. He feels evil. And then the show humanizes him. We learn his backstory. We discover that, just like everyone else in the show, he is processing his own pain. And we come to understand his point of view; he’s presented the opposite of Nuke - as opposed to a guy turning into a villain, Killgrave is a villain who slowly becomes sadly human and even, at one point, seemingly redeemable. Every new reveal of Killgrave reduces the grand sweep of his villainy… until the end of the series when he lets loose and really gets absolutely nasty. This structure plays with us; first it undercuts our expectations, and then it reduces our tension before slamming us in the face with extreme violence and cruelty. It’s fantastic storytelling.

That storytelling is aided by the casting of David Tennant, who is suave and handsome while being menacing and yet sort of weasely all at once. I’m no Whovian, so my Tennant exposure has been limited, but in Jessica Jones he proves himself to be adept at a truly high level of creepiness. Tennant’s good looks go a long way, but what he really nails is the self-pitying at the heart of the Purple Man. There’s a speech Killgrave gives about how hard it is to be him, to never know if someone is doing something because they want it or because he ordered it, that could be high camp but that, from his mouth, has a true tinge of pathos. Self-pity is hard to pull off without becoming self-parody, but Tennant does it. That he has such a twinkle in his eye and a slightly charming grin on his face only helps sell it all.

Just as Colter has great chemistry with Ritter, so does Tennant. That’s also key to making this whole thing work - Jessica and Killgrave are engaged in a very deadly dance, and they need to be believable partners in it. The scenes they share when Killgrave recreates her childhood home are perhaps among the best in the series, and they lay the groundwork that makes the neck-snapping finale so satisfying… even as the rest of the show lays the groundwork to leave us questioning if that was the only solution.

That’s maybe what I loved most about Jessica Jones, the way the show is very willing to walk through the grey areas of morality. It makes the show feel exceptionally unique in the MCU; while Daredevil tried to do something similar that show’s writing never made the questions of morality feel as alive and important as they do in Jessica Jones. Perhaps it’s because Daredevil approached those issues melodramatically, while Jessica Jones saves the melodrama for the superheroics. Watching the show unfold I was impressed by the refusal to give easy answers, and the brilliance of having many characters refracting the same themes in their own ways, giving a multitude of approaches to the central questions of the series. Obviously some - Nuke and Killgrave - are dealing with their pain in the wrong ways, but the show presents them as points on a spectrum.

It’s so rare to find any work that hits not just on the surface, fun level but also on deeper and deeper levels, and it’s even rarer to find it in the superhero genre. Sure, many of our favorite superhero movies and TV shows make an effort at this, but they’re rarely successful at balancing the two halves of the equation. Jessica Jones does it with ease, which I suspect is why so many people are claiming it’s barely a superhero show at all. I disagree - everybody has powers all over the place, and they use them all the time - but I get the cognitive dissonance these people are expressing. They didn’t believe that superhero stories were also supposed to have thematic depth that explores real, honest and modern issues. But that’s exactly what superhero stories should be doing, which makes Jessica Jones kind of the Platonic ideal of the superhero story. This may be the very best example of the genre yet.

Really don't see how she comes off as "unlikeable."

but if you don't see why she's unlikeable, then you may be blind and def

she is a conviving asshole who slept with the husband of a woman she "murdered". she's an alcoholic who can't come to terms with her past. she makes terrible decisions trying to play hero that only end up with more people dead or hurt. the people who continue to ride with her she treats like shit (junkie dude and Luke), and tosses to the side. everyday folk like the sister who's brother was murdered she lies to and the other killgrave subjects she treats with disdain. and even though she's so far the only one who can't be under killgrave's control, she can't kill him, while he kills a small village, because JUSTICE. ohh but when he finally went after her main numero uno homegirl, neck snap. lofl

He's killed so many people and desperately wanted to do the right thing. She only killed him cause she had no other choice and the whole letting him take Trish at the end was a diversion so he would close enough to her so she could kill him.

It's also the key to the show.

But if you buy that heroes should worry about their own heroism over people getting injured and murdered and raped, Jessica Jones is the hero for you.

If you can't accept that, it's like watching a Bond villain be a superhero.

You say she has no choice in the end but I'm not sure why she ever thought she had a choice.
Kilgrave was incredibly powerful, she was incredibly incompetent.
Kilgrave had her kill somebody. She's terrified of what would happen if he got control of her again. For most of the show, she thinks she's powerless against his power. (We'll ignore the part where then she just isn't, since it's unimportant to this discussion.)
Yet the show becomes: Bad Guy harms people, catch bad guy, don't kill bad guy for justice or heroism, Oops! bad guy escapes, bad guy kills more people and repeat.
It takes Hope killing herself (nevermind the four other people trying to kill themselves) to free Jessica from her idiotic notion.
Which also hurts the "no choice" argument; when Hope kills herself, Jessica promises Hope that she'll kill him. So it's not that she has no choice, it's that the main reason she hadn't killed him yet was dead. To a certain extent, it's the first time in her head that she had a choice.

(Oh, and there's also one part where she won't kill Kilgrave because he says people will poison themselves if he's dead, which doesn't make a ton of sense given what we know about his powers. And then he says Hope's papers have to go through even though this whole time Jessica was trying to find a way to prove mind control to the DA and Kilgrave went and MIND CONTROLLED THE DA so you'd think the paperwork wouldn't really be a stumbling block.)

But, you know, apparently logic is a nit not to be picked.

why doesn't Superman just kill Lex Luthor?
why doesn't Thor just kill Loki?
etc
etc
etc

you could do this all day and it'd be just as silly. they all have their reasons. it's ok, you don't have to like or agree with it.

Your argument might stand a chance if, in the end, Jessica didn't just kill Kilgrave because there was no other way for her to stop him. Which was obvious from the beginning of the show.

It's not like Jessica Jones was trying to thwart an evil plan; Kilgrave is simply raping and killing all the live long day. And she can't stop him. He's too powerful to give to any authorities, she's not equipped to lock him up, and hell, half of the time, she thinks he could easily take her over again.

She is standing in her apartment with him and agrees to do a trade: have your father and I get the girl I want back... and I guess you'll continue controlling and raping people. Sweet. Deal. Heroism.

And, again, in the end, she does in fact kill him because she had no choice. Which, I agree, she didn't. I just think it's laughable how long it took her (and sad how many people had to die) for her to realize that. She let scores of people die as she tried to figure out a way to 1) save one girl because Jessica felt guilty about her being in jail and 2) not be a bad person (although she doesn't think she's a bad person when she eventually kills him. Because the girl she was getting justice for offed herself so Jessica would finally do the obvious.)

I don't recall a superhero movie that makes this same decision. Jessica Jones is more like the utter silliness and stupidity that is The Vampire Diaries, where they constantly choose helping a friend over saving the world from certain doom.
--

In The Dark Knight, when Batman and Joker are face-to-face, Joker has someone he wants and rigged a scenario that forced Batman to go. But even then, The Joker was still in custody and was just a regular human. Batman thought it was covered.
Batman believes he killed Ra's in Batman Begins. He actually does let Ra's die in the end. He embarrasses himself to protect people at the party from Ra's.

Superman is stopping Lex Luthor's plans and has him locked up. Eventually, yeah, you'd think they'd give him the death penalty but it's not like Supes is letting him roam the streets while hurting people like Jessica was with Kilgrave.

If Loki appears free again on Earth, I'd have serious issues if the Avengers didn't say, "Thor, I get he's your brother but we really need to put him down now." (And he's already seemed to be killed a couple of times now.)

And bottom line, never in those films did I think, "Why don't they just kill this guy?" There weren't ample opportunities with only the weakest of rationales for not. Shit, Superman DID kill Zod, which made total sense to me. Literally the only argument against it was the fanboy SUPERMAN DOESN'T KILL PEOPLE.

...they catch him/corner him, he escapes... this happens like 4-5 times during the show...

again, I liked it, but they would have been better with a shorter sason or getting rid of Killgrave and moving the story forward

.

That's why Hope offed herself...she knew she was the only thing standing in the way of Jessica killing him.

>though she's so far the only one who can't be under
>killgrave's control, she can't kill him, while he kills a
>small village, because JUSTICE. ohh but when he finally went
>after her main numero uno homegirl, neck snap. lofl

and was otherwise borderline unwatchable.

I've only watched one ep of JJ though

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

Hilarious to your surprised.

say they didn't like it as much as it went on.

me and rob were just talking about this on Twitter

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

>and was otherwise borderline unwatchable.
>
>I've only watched one ep of JJ though
>
>www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

as it went on.

where are y'all hearing this?

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

But was still a very entertaining show.

I don't see how anyone could claim it's better than Jessica Jones though. This show is more thematically rich, tomalley consistent and visually stimulating. It's also very notable for all the smart ways it subverts tropes of both its genre and it's form.

~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
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Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

Yes, my wife and I watched it, and totally read the season as sort of a really close look at abusive relationships.

Almost all of the central characters were in one, in some form. The laywer, Jessica, Trish.

Tennant was perfect as the abusive ex-boyfriend. Charismatic, vicious, but even right after getting people to do terrible things he flips it so fast that he almost seems likable.

Yes there's the themes of rape and trauma and alcoholism, but I thought at the very center of it was a story of three women overcoming abusive relationships.

In that respect alone, for saying so much more, I'd say it was better than Daredevil.

But Daredevil was definitely the more "enjoyable" ride.

excuse my ignance', but who where the three women? jessica, the young lady in jail, and who is the third?? i didn't consider the laywer an abused party or anyone she was involved with...

It was almost blurry seeing as she carried herself as also being kind of manipulative.

But her ex was running her. Even broken up, the ex was out to ruin or control her whole life with the legal battle, refusing to sign the divorce papers...and on top of that was still gunning for them to get back together.

I think it all gets clearer with Killgrave meets the ex and actually identifies with her instead of the lawyer, then is just like "G'head, take your 5000 cuts."

I considered her problem being a lack of control, which she had with the assistant, but was losing once she tried to get divorced.... I didn't think of her as abused at all, just helpless and desperate to be back in control

She is initially "raped" by him in the sense that she learns all her self-defense training still isn't enough to save her from a bigger, stronger man possessed by a singular idea.

Then she gets to know the "real" him, falls into a sort of co-dependence with him (though I feel this should've been explored further, rather than the severe highs and lows shown on screen) and eventually realizes that although it wasn't "him" who attacked her, he does have some very real flaws that would make him a better friend/associate than a companion.

He then becomes psychotically attached to her in the same way that Kilgrave was attached to Jessica, willing to kill her just to prove how much he cares about her. He reaches the point where he would kill her just to get her away from Jessica Jones, who he believes needs to die because she is constantly thwarting his attempts to be the hero in this story.

Really, I was frequently oscillating within my feelings towards Nuke Simpson, but his final arc made all those tide changes feel worth it. I felt like my annoyances with the character were intentional rather than a fault of the writing or the actors, and it gave Trish a good mirror to Jessica's experiences by having her in many ways experience what Jessica had experienced with Kilgrave on a much smaller, less "super" scale.

The meth'd out version of that character was also just supremely captivating. Loved him in the Sin Bin room with Clemmons, loved every vocal tic he developed like the doubled last words. They did a really good job of making a flakey character earn that flakiness IMO.

~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

...trish was definitely an abused party throughout the season, going back to her relationship with her mom, which she reluctantly rekindles.... Simpson definitely was "her" Killgrave

This review is basically like singing a gospel song at the Apollo. No matter how bad your singing is, you at least won't get booed off the stage.

I'm on Ep. 8 so far so maybe I'm missing some payoffs, but naw yo. This review is trying to prop this show up like its intention was to escalate the dialogue of abuse, trauma, rape, etc when it's really just surface level character tropes.

Is showing a woman have an affair in an office with a younger woman really as progressive as the article states when Hogarth's sexual preference was setup and shot to be perceived as taboo during her introduction?

If we wanna talk about abuse, Pennsatucky's episode on OITNB did more in that half an episode than this show did.

It's a step above Arrow. But I think Arrow is barely watchable because it's so fucking corny.

I went into it expecting noir, but after the first 2 episodes I'm trying to let it be what it is. But it's hard because the material is there. The execution isn't though.

Ani in True Detective is what I imagined JJ to be. But JJ is just a dick and when she doesn't get her way she whines about it.

Ani is hardened and defensive because of her trauma. Ani doesn't keep people around because she doesn't trust them. JJ does show flashes of that, but it usually manifests into the standard, "stay away from me because people will hurt you to get to me" shit that you get in every other story. She was even a dick before Killgrave.

I'm only on Ep. 8, but Team JJ doesn't really add anything to the story. I kinda don't give a fuck about Hogarth's marriage. I don't give a fuck about Trish's mom. The cop just showed up like a house guest that doesn't want to go home. Some of the dialogue is bad. JJ's powers consist of throwing people into shit and breaking locks.

But Hogarth inquiring about Hope's fetus is intriguing. I hope there's a payoff and it's as big as it's been taking them to setup.

Killgrave is awesome in almost every scene he's in. Luke Cage's character is the closest to noir you're gonna get.

>>JJ's powers consist of throwing people into
>shit and breaking locks.


Yea, well...that kind of is what her powers consist of.


That said, there's that gimmick from games and movies called "Time to X" where you pick a formulaic conceit and wait how long it takes for it to appear in a given episode. I'd love for there to be a "Time to Lock Pick" for this show; for at least the first 9 episodes, she yanks at least one lock off one door per episode.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

I think I prefer Daredevil, but this was phenomenal television.

They've pretty much nailed Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Purple Man, and I can't wait to see what they have in store for Luke Cage's show and Daredevil Season 2.

http://www.robertjacksonbennett.com/blog/jessica-jones-and-the-problem-of-forward-momentum-or-marvel-needs-a-goddamn-editor

Jessica Jones and the problem of forward momentum – or, Marvel needs a goddamn editor

When I sat down to watch the new Marvel show Jessica Jones, I was incredibly excited. It had everything I wanted in a television show.

A cynical superhero working as a PI? Awesome. I love mystery formats in my genre. That’s my thang.

The promise of exploring such heady social topics as PTSD, surviving abuse, and misogyny? Great. I love when superhero stories examine human failings, especially ones as important as this.

And also it had terrific actors. Krysten Ritter was a god damned genius on the canceled-before-its-time Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23. And Mike Colter was basically charm incarnate on The Good Wife, playing the nicest and most charismatic drug dealer ever. And David Tennant as a monstrous psychopath with mind control powers? Wow. Fucking sold. Just give it to me already!

My excitement grew even more acute as the radiant reviews came out. The best thing Marvel’s ever done on television? An instant classic? Holy shit, I was going to love this.

So when I sat down to watch it with my (pregnant, ill-feeling) wife, I had the highest of hopes. I turned on the pilot, and sat back, waiting to be wowed.

And then I started… frowning a bit. I had the urge to look at my phone once or twice.

Then my wife said, “This show isn’t that compelling.”

“It’s the first episode,” I said, defensively. First episodes are usually pretty rocky. It takes a while for shows to find their feet.

So then we watched the next episode. And then the next episode. And then, finally, the first half of the season.

And that was when I realized this show has absolutely no idea what in the hell it’s doing.

THE ISSUE OF QUESTIONS

When I describe the novel writing process to budding writers – something I’ve only done once or twice, mind – I usually frame the discussion around a series of questions.

Books set out to explore the unknown. The unknown could be something literal – “Who killed this person?” Or, it can be something circumstantial – “Can this character go to war and return unscathed?” Or it can be something incredibly abstract – “Is true connection even possible in the modern American marriage?”

But in general, most novels and most stories explore something that is not immediately known. The story is a vehicle for the process of discovery.

And this is usually framed around a series of questions. You start with one unknown, and in trying to understand it, it raises more questions, hinting at larger unknowns.

Let’s look at the murder mystery plot structure:

The duchess has been killed. The detective sets off to find the killer.

About a fifth of the way into the book, the detective suspects the butler.

About a third of the way into the book, the detective confirms it was the butler - but, the butler gets murdered, and the detective finds evidence of some kind of death cult in the butler’s room.

Reports start coming in of the duchess making payments to a sinister man who would meet her at her estate gates on moonlit nights.

The detective tracks down a witness to the butler’s murder – and the killer they describe has a birthmark just like the duchess’s long-passed half-brother, who died under strange circumstances years ago in a fire at an abbey.

The detective goes to the ruins of the abbey and finds a secret underground chamber – and on the wall of the chamber is the symbol of the death cult…

And so on, and so on, and so on. This is all quite rote, but you get the idea – one question (“Who killed the duchess?”) has now lead to a series of larger questions, setting off a chain reaction of sorts.

That raising and answering of questions creates a feeling of plot progress - there is a goal (“We must find out who killed the duchess!”), and by exploring these unknowns, were are getting closer to reaching that goal.

Or (UPDATE) let’s try a literary approach to how plotting is about the placement and exploration of unknowns. Let’s say it’s a book about the failing marriage.

You could stage it so that the book alternates between a week in the life of this advanced middle aged couple in the present and the early years of their marriage well in the past.

So in the present, you see the couple fighting and reacting to seemingly innocuous things: the way the husband masks his face with cloth when mowing the lawn, the way the wife refuses to cook anymore but is adamant about driving the book mobile for the local library. You’re not sure why they’re having these issues, until the book flashes back to the past and you see that the couple had a son, who liked mowing the grass with the dad, but died of leukemia. In their grief, they realized their marriage was based on roleplaying more than emotional reliance, and they were unable to cope with it.

So that’s one unknown that’s explored. But you can tell there’s more out there – the cooking, the book mobile. There are more and more questions. It makes you keep reading.

You find out then that the dad had an affair after the death of their son, and fathered a child out of wedlock, and on the day the wife found out, she found the husband and his mistress were sharing leftover of a dish she spent the whole day making. Since then, she can’t bring herself to cook for him anymore.

But you then find out that the wife has been having contact with the illegitimate child, bringing the little girl books on the book mobile – and of course they’re the books her dead son read when he was little. And so the story ends with the wife sharing an emotional connection with this child who doesn’t know or even wonder why this woman is so involved with her – and you realize that this emotional connection, this honesty, is deeper than anything the husband can offer the wife anymore.

Again, this is pretty contrived, but you get the idea.

You can see how the progress of exploring unknowns not only forms a tension that makes you keep reading, but it also challenges the status quo of the story’s central conflict. What you first thought was just a simple murder, or a spat over a meal, turns out to have really been so much more. This is because each scene and each discovery adds something new to the story’s experience. We learn more about the characters, and this informs their past actions and their future actions.

The problem with Jessica Jones is that it doesn’t do any of that, at least for the first half of the show – which is a severe failing. Maybe there’s something phenomenal in the second half of the show – but at this point, I don’t really have any desire to find out. The show is not sure how to progress its plot or how to change its status quo.

Spoilers follow.

WHEN WILL THINGS START HAPPENING?

The pilot of Jessica Jones establishes the show’s status quo quite well. I pretty much knew what the show was about, and the pilot confirmed all of those expectations, but it did a good job in building the central conceit.

The show’s status quo is:

Jessica Jones is a cynical, traumatized superhero being harassed and threatened by the incredibly powerful mind-controller Kilgrave, who can strike at her at any moment.

The show made it clear from the get-go that Kilgrave has been and still is a very dangerous person: tricking a girl into murdering her parents is goddamn intense, especially since he did it more or less to screw with Jessica. And while I knew that Kilgrave had abused Jessica as well going into the show, the pilot did a good enough job establishing that in its own right.

And then… not much happens in the next episode. Jessica convinces her attorney friend Hogarth (expertly played by Carrie-Anne Moss) to take on the girl who killed her parents as a client. Jessica finds out that Kilgrave can’t use his mind control powers while under anesthesia – but she doesn’t make any decisions to something with that yet.

However, does any of this change the status quo of the show at all? Which was:

Jessica Jones is a cynical, traumatized superhero being harassed and threatened by the incredibly powerful mind-controller Kilgrave, who can strike at her at any moment.

No. Jessica is still traumatized, she’s still being threatened by Kilgrave. The state is the same.

In the third episode, Jessica’s friend Trish makes the incredibly bad decision of publicly slandering Kilgrave on the radio. Kilgrave predictably reacts, Jessica saves her friend and confirms that Kilgrave is alive, still obsessed with her, and is still incredibly dangerous.

But – we knew that already. The first episode did that for us! He made a girl kill her parents just to fuck with Jessica! We know it’s him, we know he’s alive, we know he’s bad news, and we know he’s obsessed with Jessica! Does any of this change the status quo of the show? Let’s check:

Jessica Jones is a cynical, traumatized superhero being harassed and threatened by the incredibly powerful mind-controller Kilgrave, who can strike at her at any moment.

No. Jessica is still the cynical, traumatized superhero. We know why she’s traumatized now – she was coerced into killing Luke Cage’s girlfriend, and is now sleeping with the man himself, unbeknownst to the fact that he’s sleeping with his girlfriend’s murderer – but has anything changed in the central conflict between Jessica and Kilgrave? Not really. It’s all still the same.

Then in the fourth episode… not much happens. Jessica takes a case that winds up being wholly unrelated and inconsequential to the central Jessica/Kilgrave dynamic. Trish bonds with her coerced assassin, Simpson, a standard cop character. Hogarth cheats on her wife.

It was around this point in the show that I started getting worried. This was around the end of the first act, by normal story standards. But the show hadn’t made any movements to start looking at the next thing. At the end of this episode, my wife turned to me and said, “Can you name one thing that happened in that episode that actually mattered?” And I really couldn’t.

Then in the fifth episode, Jessica and her motley gang finally, finally do something about Kilgrave – who, despite being more or less all powerful, has yet to actually do, uh, anything. Except respond to some slander and monitor Jessica, that is.

The gang gets a dart gun, follows Kilgrave, tranquilizes him, and tries to take him back to their safehouse. This plan is underwhelming to say the least, but hey, at least it’s a plan – it’s action, which is something that hasn’t happened much on the show yet.

But is it a plan? What they intend to do after capturing him isn’t clear. Jessica intends to use him to clear the name of the girl who killed her parents. But how do you coerce a confession out of a guy whose every word could rewrite your brain? How, exactly, does she intend to make a coerced confession legal? Why not just cut his throat or smash his skull or, I dunno, perform a lobotomy on him or something? The show doesn’t do a terrific job of making the “next steps” very clear.

But it turns out, it doesn’t matter. Kilgrave’s got a tracking device on him, and about 20 seconds after taking Kilgrave, some goons show up, use cattle prods on Jessica and the gang, and take Kilgrave back to safety.

And then we’re back to square one again. No one has lost or gained much ground. The goons intentionally didn’t hurt any of them. No one suffered too much – we really didn’t have too many consequences at all, and we really didn’t learn anything new about Jessica and Kilgrave’s conflict. Sure, Jessica is now trying to save her junkie friend that Kilgrave was using to spy on her, but there hasn’t been much change to the status quo yet, which is, let’s remember:

Jessica Jones is a cynical, traumatized superhero being harassed and threatened by the incredibly powerful mind-controller Kilgrave, who can strike at her at any moment.

Yeah this all checks out. This is still basically what’s going on in the show, and we’re very close to the halfway mark now. The state of show still has yet to change.

That’s bad. By the end of the first third, a story should be examining something beyond what was established at the beginning. And Jessica Jones is not doing that.

JUST SHIT OR GET OFF THE POT ALREADY

The problem with Jessica Jones is one of potential.

Jessica is a superpowered person. She can do lots of things that we can’t. And though she is traumatized, and is now spiritually and mentally weakened, it’s clear she’s a strong character who can still take action.

Except, it takes five episodes for her to do that – four whole goddamn hours from the pilot, where the stakes are made clear. And then all that work gets flushed down the toilet.

Worse, the progress she makes – tracking down Kilgrave, attempting to kidnap him – doesn’t happen because of her own persistent efforts. Rather, she kind of falls backassward into them. Her attorney makes a bunch of noise about mind control alibis on the radio, a bunch of people show up claiming to have been coerced by him, Jessica reluctantly forms a support group, and one of them mentions offhandedly that, hey, I was Kilgrave’s driver for a while, and he made me keep driving back to meet this one dude, who turns out to be Jessica’s neighbor.

That’s not quite the fruits of Jessica’s labor. That’s a circumstantial gift. One that she didn’t totally work for, one that the show immediately squanders by having a bunch of random goons with cattle prods take Kilgrave back the second Jessica kidnaps him. So it’s a somewhat unsatisfying, passive turning point that the show then immediately renders inconsequential. “Hey, you thought we were going to do something? Well, here are some guys to make sure we actually can’t do something, so let’s start all over again.”

Then there’s Kilgrave himself. We’re halfway through the show and the entirety of the action has taken place within this character’s shadow – but we still don’t know anything about him. I know he’s mean and he makes kids pee on the floor and shopkeeps throw hot coffee in their own faces – I get that he’s bad, he makes a girl kill her parents in the first goddamn episode! But I don’t really know who he is. The show is almost halfway over and he’s remained an enigma throughout.

As Kilgrave is the guy generating almost 100% of the show’s conflict, that’s bad. It’s bad if the engine of all the show’s drama is an absent non-entity.

Also, Kilgrave is super-powerful, but besides the action in the pilot, he hasn’t really done much that we can see. He’s just kind of hanging around, controlling people, getting photos of Jessica, but not much else. The one time he does something it’s because he’s (very, very stupidly) provoked.

I mean, this guy can make a whole roomful of people kill themselves, right? He can do anything, right? But he’s done jack shit since the pilot. He hasn’t surprised us or made us think differently about him.

So basically this show is about two superpowered people who don’t really do much with those powers. That’s frustrating to watch.

Some other issues with the characters:

The show takes its sweet time on Jessica and Luke’s relationship. They have sex once, she sees the photo of Luke’s girlfriend (whom she killed), and she wigs out a bit. By this point we, The Audience, have gotten it. But then they figure out each other superpowers, they have sex again, and we’re again reminded that Jessica killed his girlfriend. We get it! Move on! Complicate this further, or something!
I’m not sure what to do with Trish. Trish is Jessica’s rich, famous, radio-show friend, who has some kind of troubled past due to her safe room and security measures. (I think it has to do with Kilgrave, or her mother? It didn’t seem clear.) Trish knows that Kilgrave can control other people, yet when a cop comes to her reinforced door for some Obviously Incredibly Sketchy Reasons and asks to come in without a warrant, Trish frowns for a bit, then opens the door, and he of course tries to kill her. (Cue my wife yelling, “WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?”) None of this is particularly intelligent – it is unwise to fuck with telepaths, then doubly unwise to open your door to anyone. She and the cop later bond over the incident, and hook up, but it’s not clear what she adds to the central conflict between Kilgrave and Jessica. She’s just kind of there.
Also, as nice as it is to see Carrie-Anne Moss on TV, and to see two married gay women past their 40′s, I’m not yet sure what she’s adding to the plot. She’s cheating on her wife, sure, and then splits up with her wife… but, I mean, okay? So what? I suspect the show will do something with this later – but it’s taking its sweet time doing this. Right now we’re stepping away from a superpowered stalker story to deal with some not-quite-fleshed-out matrimonial issues. For significant minutes at a time. It’s not like things were moving slow enough already.
And not to get too uber nerdy, but how is it that Jessica has the strength and the physical durability to stop a speeding car in its tracks, yet can also cut her fingers on glass and get shot and wounded like any other person? How is it that her ankles and legs can take the punishment of jumping on and off skyscrapers, yet a punch to the face still jacks her up? If she punches someone in the chest hard enough to kill them, shouldn’t her fist basically explode under the strain, if it isn’t superhumanly durable? The show hasn’t made the rules there quite clear.
THIS IS NOT JUST JESSICA JONES’S PROBLEM

Lest we forget, Daredevil, Marvel’s other Netflix show, had lots of these problems too.

Daredevil was a mightily wheel-spinny show. There were a lot of plots toward the middle that just felt like they weren’t pertinent to some degree. Lots of talk about journalism and corporate embezzlement and vague real estate deals that frankly just seemed to suck up time and not matter much, especially when there were fucking ninjas going to town on each other in the background.

The difference with DD was that it had three advantages:

It was terribly derivative: it played the vigilante superhero origin story completely straight, right down to the grim monologues about “My City.” But while this would ordinarily be a weakness (and it still kind of is), because it’s such a familiar story model, we kind of knew what’s going to happen. That meant that the show’s choices and development were sort of preordained. There was always movement in one direction – the creation of Daredevil – and though the show sometimes took its sweet fucking time in getting there, we and everyone in the cast knew it was going to get there eventually.
It had Wilson Fisk. He was probably everyone’s favorite thing on the show. We got to know him right about at the 1/3 mark of the show (See?? See how that can help structure things?) and from there on out it was about watching him and DD collide with each other. This formed a structure that gave the story events a feeling of momentum (even when the show struggled to deliver on that momentum).
The show had Lesser Goons that DD would inevitably meet, almost always leading to a Beatdown of the Week. Jessica Jones has no per-episode conflict. No mystery or monster or phenomenon to form the conflict of that one episode. That leaves the show feeling weirdly unmoored and unfocused.
Between these three elements, the show was given a sense of structure and momentum. Sure, it frequently overplayed the grimness (Beheading a dude with a car door? Voluntarily impaling your own skull on a spike? Come the fuck on) and it made some weirdo doofy racial choices, but at the end it stacked up to be a solidly decent, if somewhat derivative, television show.

Yet it still obviously had the same issues as Jessica Jones, the same hesitancy as to how to advance its own plot.

It’s worth noting that these are two Netflix shows, developed beyond the confines of regular television. But for funsies, let’s compare Jessica Jones to another show about a female abuse survivor who tries to strike out in New York and make a living for herself all in the shadow of a sinister, controlling man who can make other people do what he wants.

I’m talking here, of course, about The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

OTHER SHOWS HAVE DONE THIS BETTER

Kimmy Schmidt was an exuberant story about someone doing her absolute best not to let her own victimhood define her. It was a story about someone who actively challenged herself: Kimmy got an apartment, a job, tried to get her diploma, tried to throw a party, and though some episodes were hit and misses (and though the show also made its own wackadoo racial choices), the show did a good job of interrogating victimhood. Kimmy Schmidt is a show about the choice to live in fear and delusion, and how sometimes people can make those choices for themselves, and sometimes they can’t.

From what I’ve seen thus far – and I feel like 5 whole hours is a good enough sample of a story – Kimmy Schmidt is a far more disciplined show than Jessica Jones is. Kimmy Schmidt knows what it wants to do, how it wants to galvanize its characters, and then it goes out and does it.

And I wonder – is this because Kimmy Schmidt was originally made for network television, by some old school NBC comedy vets? Would Kimmy Schmidt be as good as it is if it was made for binge-watching, made to be consumed in one weekend? (Is this even possible for a sitcom, though? Sitcoms are some of the most highly structured pieces of comedy out there.)

Let’s look at another dark, pulpy, feminist show with a female anti-hero: Orphan Black. Is there a show with a stronger first few episodes than that one? Sarah’s goals are laid clear from the get-go: she needs money, and she needs to find and protect her daughter, so she begins impersonating a well-off woman she saw kill herself – a woman with a striking physical resemblance to Sarah.

But then the show keeps changing the stakes on her, bringing up unknowns that Sarah can’t help but look into: she realizes she’s impersonating a police detective (which she has no idea how to be), and then it turns out this police detective is under investigation, and then it turns out this detective was investigating a series of murders… of women who look exactly like Sarah. This happens within the first three episodes.

Do you see how this show, unlike Jessica Jones, keeps upping the questions and complicating the plot, while making the goals clear? And how Sarah is always given a very specific objective, which she smartly and practically pursues, despite her murky circumstances?

But, again, this is a cable TV show. This was made to fit within strict boundaries. I wonder if we can say the same of Jessica Jones.

It’s a weird situation. I feel like DD and JJ (and oh my god that sounds like the names of two bratty twin girls) are both TV shows that would have been vastly improved if they’d had 1/3 less episodes to work in. Rather than a season of 13 episodes, it should have been maybe 8 or 9. That would have forced the writers and showrunners to cut to the goddamn point already, and stop wandering around in the weeds, making their characters bump into things like dolts.

And this could be done, right? Since this is all just on Netflix, can’t they rightsize their seasons? Can’t they make the episodes fit the contour of the story? Can’t they get rid of the stretch episodes, and make the season fit the story?

If so, they aren’t doing it yet. And they need to.

maybe it goes back to my own time in creative writing, both fiction and non, but I always resented the idea of there being any rules to how a thing is told.

I don't discredit anything that this guy says, because it's a "fundamental" argument and is hard to argue against. But that wasn't my experience with the show.

Episode 1: Introduced to all the characters, curious how all of them are going to act and factor in.

Episode 2: See the first depths of Kilgrave's evil (man who drove him to the hospital forced to donate both kidneys to him), learn Luke's power, learn Kilgrave's primary weakness, learn why Jessica watches Luke at night.

Episode 3: Introduced to Nuke, Jessica and Kilgrave see each others' faces and she learns he's having someone spy on her. Also a cute rom-com episode squeezed in the middle.

Episode 4: Jessica discovers who's been following her and it's her junkie neighbor who's possibly not actually a junkie at all, Simpson makes his way into the group, Jessica realizes no one can get close to her at this time especially not someone as strong as Luke and cuts him off.

Episode 5: Jessica captures and then loses Kilgrave, realizes that he is always going to have a plan for the situation at hand which affects how she approaches every attempt to capture him afterward, and her neighbor begins his redemption arc.

Episode 6: Jessica and Luke have more cute moments as a buddy cop team, building their bond to its strongest point on the surface while Jessica's anxiety is secretly burning it all down. Luke discovers why Jessica cut him off and is understandably angry about it.

Episode 7: Ruben is killed, Jessica realizes how close Kilgrave will get to Jessica's personal life just to drive her towards him, Jessica becomes so desperate that she attempts to go to super-max prison in the hopes he'll be drawn to her there, we get rewarded with Kilgrave exposing what his motivation is. Jessica moves in with Kilgrave at her childhood home.

Episode 8: Great comedic banter between two enemies trying to figure out how they can manipulate the other into getting what they want out of each other. Simpson reveals he's losing his grasp on what's going on, Jessica nearly becomes Kilgrave's right hand before deciding he can never truly be redeemed.

Episode 9: Everything happens. One of the most thematically cohesive episodes of television I've seen since the peaks of all those Golden Age shows we love to talk about.

Episode 10: Kilgrave goes ballistic, everything hits rock bottom for all of our heroes, and Kilgrave learns that what he wants most just may be a thing he can never have, beginning his descent into considering killing Jessica rather than attempting to own her.

Episode 11: Simpson begins his transformation into Nuke, becoming a far more interesting character, and the show also allows its central thesis on male abusers and female victims to take center stage, with Nuke essentially performing the role of several variants of abusers in a single episode to fantastic effect. Kilgrave begins his long con with Luke as a test of his new powers (unbeknownst to the audience).

Episode 12: We learn about IGH, Jessica's childhood, Kilgrave's enhanced power, Kilgrave's enhanced cruelty (that apartment scene was seriously brutal, even compared to the restaurant), get to see the best (of an admittedly weak selection) of the series' fight scenes and watch a woman shoot the man she loves in the head with a shotgun on the off chance it might not kill him thanks to his skin.

Episode 13: Awesome showdown between the best live action villain in comic history and the most unique live action hero in comic history. All the themes of abuse and power and betrayal and weakness and obsession come to a head, and in my opinion BECAUSE the central conflict has remained in stasis throughout the entire show, it's impossible to know (within your suspension of disbelief) whether Jessica will come out ahead in the end. Personally, I really thought Kilgrave was going to get on that boat with Trish and we wouldn't hear from him again until the Defenders mini-series.


This writer makes a great case that not a lot happened in terms of the backbone of the story, but whenever I see someone making that argument I also see them missing all the things that DID happen. Each episode of Jessica Jones changes something about the show itself, whether a character finds a new role (several characters play both hero and villain across its thirteen episodes, even Jones and Kilgrave) or discovers a new piece of information or the plot itself moves forward.


This show doubled down on "Jessica Jones is a cynical, traumatized superhero being harassed and threatened by the incredibly powerful mind-controller Kilgrave, who can strike at her at any moment," and then explored what that means for everyone around her. It dove DEEP into that ONE thing, and maybe it was an episode or two too long (I personally found sober Malcolm to be a fairly wooden, childish character and wouldn't have missed him much) or that's not enough capital-letters CHANGE for some people, but I just don't buy that it's a thing that makes the show actually, truly bad just because it didn't follow some "rule of writing".


Within it's confines of "Jessica vs. Kilgrave, abusers vs. survivors" I would love to argue this show was one of the most thematically rich I've seen since AMC retired its two flagships. Not written as well, directed as well, or even acted as well. But thematically, Jessica Jones gives you a lot to unpack, and I disagree with the premise that it could provide all that it does if it kept expanding its lens. This was a story about a villain with a power subtle enough he could rule the world with it, and yet all he wanted to use it for was to be with the woman he "loved". The stakes began small, yet were so relatable they didn't need to get much bigger to tell a great story.


That's what season 2, Nuke, IGH, Luke and all the rest can be for. Season one was a very intimate story and I think they fucking nailed it.

That he adds Kimmy Schmidt to his defense only furthers my point that sometimes a strict adherence to "forward momentum" can cloud someone's judgement. That was a funny, fine show, but it wasn't 30 Rock, it wasn't Parks & Rec, hell I don't even care if there isn't another season of it. It was just a dumb comedy with some great Jon Hamm cameos.

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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

shit felt like little more than masturbation for the writer.

Agreed

the white, (un)sympathetic anti-heroine, Luke Cage as Mandingo 3.0, stalking, intimate partner violence, murder/disdain/erasure of Black women/WoC, lesbians, mindcontrol, white women friendship squad goals, rape, a lovable Black junkie, super abusive white guy villian, super loving white guy...It had everything!!

Faaar from a great series but solid. They keep improving w/ these Marvel-hero(ine) centered series. Hopefully, Luke Cage will be the apex b/c I want Mike Colter to win until further notice lol.

>the white, (un)sympathetic anti-heroine, Luke Cage as
>Mandingo 3.0, stalking, intimate partner violence,
>murder/disdain/erasure of Black women/WoC, lesbians,
>mindcontrol, white women friendship squad goals, rape, a
>lovable Black junkie, super abusive white guy villian, super
>loving white guy...It had everything!!

This is spot on. How did WOC get erased? Other than that I wholeheartedly agree. Misty Knight couldn't get away with half the things Jessica does in this show. Yep, this is an ITWAN.

i'm one who normally doesn't mind nitpicking to a degree, but claiming you don't like the show because Jessica isn't a likable character - when it's pretty clear that she's not really supposed to be that likable of a character to begin with - is just dumb.

I will give the caveat that everything about this one spoke strongly to my sensibilities.

I like antiheroes.

I relate well to dark, broken characters with flaws.

My preference in villains tends to toward more psychologically driven characters.

I absolutely LOVE mean spirited, cynical, irreverent comedy. This was embodied to a large degree in Killgrave and Jessica both.
Frankly I thought everyone played it straight and rather understated. Nobody was over the top in their role. Jessica could have easily become a stereotypical angsty teenage goth chick and was anything but. She had depth and heart and heartache. The fact that she gives two fucks about anyone is a minor miracle and she’s just as driven to protect those she loves to an intense degree as she is to get the bad guy. Everyone who dies or is hurt on her watch is another deep wound to her psyche. I like this element juxtaposed against her flawed willingness to use people as bait.

I’m not saying she’s some hyper complex character the likes of which we’ve never seen, but there’s a lot of meat to her. There’s a lot to appreciate.

The show excels in other ways. Patsy could have easily been clichéd CW gossip girl sidekick and, again,she was anything but. On the comic side of things she adds just the right amount of levity to a situation without being overly quippy and she provides an emotional home base for Jessica. Their friendship is a glimpse into the sort of completely unconditional love that we don’t really get to see a lot of in this genre, at least not in depth.

And Killgrave? Yeah. This was official. Instead of being a raging, gregarious psychopath, he’s nonchalant. Instead of decedent, masturbatory monologues, we get flippant, haughty ambivalence. His emotional outbursts carry serious weight when we get them because he’s truly a god among insects and actually acts like it.

Some guy is screaming at him and his response? “That coffee looks hot. Throw it in your face.” and then dips. He doesn’t stand there and cackle. He doesn’t savor it.

There’s just a lot of depth to this show IMO and while it’s not perfect it’s very well written and acted.

It’s a fantastic show.

going forward, I think the show (assuming it gets a second season) will really struggle to overcome the loss of Kilgrave. It was a fine show in the first four episodes, but it's as Kilgrave comes into the foreground that things really heat up. Once the big switch happens and he's a primary character for the remainder of the show, it's almost like it becomes a whole different animal. I don't think they'll be able to pull that off again, and it'll be hard to find a better villain than the man who could have anything but all he wants is love.



~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

That’s a very valid concern.

I think it’s going to be extremely difficult to equal, let alone top, that kind of chemistry.

I actually disagree that it couldn’t have ended without her killing him.

In fact I think a FAR better scenario exists:

Jessica completely flips out and beats him into oblivion before Jessica is caught and apprehended by the police. The final scene would be him in a hospital somewhere, beaten to dogshit and in a coma. We hear a doctor talking about his health situation and as the camera pans up, it’s the doctor from that military group Simpson was with and then the credits roll.

Then you have him as a major thread in the next season, with Killgrave in a coma the entire season or possibly on a leash of some kind created by the doctor after having engineered some sort of antidote to Killgraves virus. There are several good options there IMO.

In general I dislike the idea of killing off villains. I’d rather see a rogue’s gallery built up. As it stands I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Killgrave though. He’ll be resurrected somehow.

it could turn out the additional injections of the virus also invigorated his spinal column to the point it could self repair similar to some obscure plant out there or something. a broken neck is probably one of the least definitive ways a person could die in the Marvel universe.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

I saw the same criticism for Daredevil, but idk, I was on board with that pretty early. For me JJ didn't get going until they were back in her childhood house, and that's over the halfway point I believe. If this wasn't Marvel and wasn't hyped up by people I trust I wouldn't have lasted past a couple eps.

Two things really stick in my memory with Daredevil and that's the oldboy homage scene and the Kingpin backstory. I don't think I'll remember much about JJ honestly. Glad to see Ritter in this role though. Plus I'm glad they're tackling some dark shit (they did NOT shy away from the word rape one bit).

so, for the record i'm loving the Marvel TV shows even more than most of the Marvel movies so far.

(then again, generally speaking i tend to REALLY enjoy and lean towards character build stuff and texture first...so these shows are right up my alley so far. obviously TV more easily allows the space to cultivate that kinda thing more than stand alone movies do )

but one specific thing thats different between the Netflix shows and the Movies is that the villains in the TV shows are as interesting, intriguing and well-fleshed-out and as powerful as the heroes...maybe even moreso on some level....and THAT 'captivating genuinely powerful villian' element lays the foundation for a potentially MUCH more compelling/gripping story overall if ya ask me.

both main villains so far are fully realized story wise and EXTREMELY well performed by the excellently cast actors.

keep that up in the rest of these, and the Netflix stuff could very well be the Marvel thing that has the longest 'lasting power' in the end....

I like all the characters and thought the acting was good. Looking forward to the future shows.

http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/07/28/you-have-a-long-time-to-wait-for-jessica-jones-season-2

It'll be no earlier than 2018.

By Devin Faraci Jul. 28, 2016

Here's how Netflix is doing their Marvel shows right now: two a year. You get one in spring and one in the fall. They snuck a Daredevil season 2 in there, which maybe makes you think that they'll introduce two shows a year but also bring old shows back for new seasons, but that is not yet the case. Talking at the Television Critics Association press trail of tears, Ted Sarandos made it clear that the next two post-Luke Cage Marvel series are Iron Fist and The Defenders in 2017, and that anything else will have to wait. Maybe for a long time. That means no Jessica Jones season two until at least 2018.

The good news? Sarandos is no dummy, and he understands how hot these Marvel shows are. When IGN asked him if we could one day see up to five series a year he said, "I doubt that we could produce at the quality that they produce at that speed. But we’re gonna try to make them quicker so we can get less downtime between them." Which means it is probable we could get to three a year, which might mean The Punisher could hit in 2018 as opposed to 2019.

Speaking of The Punisher, will he be in The Defenders? When asked, Sarandos just said "Uh... stay tuned."

Source: IGN

It definitely felt like the relatively quick turnaround on DD2 hurt it on the back half. I'd also like to see them take a cue from Stranger Things and recognize that they don't need to be doing 13 episodes seasons.