Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Krysten Ritter as hard-hitting Jessica Jones
Krysten Ritter as hard-hitting Jessica Jones. Photograph: Myles Aronowitz/Netflix"
Krysten Ritter as hard-hitting Jessica Jones. Photograph: Myles Aronowitz/Netflix"

Jessica Jones recap, episodes 1-7: what do you make of Marvel’s newest TV hero?

This article is more than 8 years old

As a recent addition to the superhero pantheon, the hardbitten sleuth is unencumbered by too much backstory, but ironically she is haunted by flashbacks as she fights Kilgrave, Marvel’s most unsettling and unpleasant villain to date

Compared to most other heroes – Batman, say, or even her fellow Netflix vigilante Daredevil – Jessica Jones is an anomaly. It’s not just that the Hell’s Kitchen private eye doesn’t put on a colourful costume when using her super-strength, preferring grubby jeans, shapeless hoodies and a battered leather jacket. It’s not that she makes no effort to conceal her identity – “Do I look like I’m hiding?” she asks a nightclub-owning creep while manhandling his Aston Martin in the course of serving a subpoena. It’s not even that one of her secondary superpowers seems to be a bottomless capacity for bourbon; whether it’s slugging shots in Luke Cage’s dive bar, swigging straight from the bottle in bed or topping up her Thermos ahead of another nocturnal love-rat surveillance trip, Jones could give thirsty playboy Tony Stark a run for his money as the biggest boozer in the Marvel universe.

It’s that Jessica Jones, in comicbook terms, is impossibly young. She has baggage – boy, does she have baggage – but Jones isn’t freighted down by years of comics history. Batman began back in 1939, while even Daredevil has been around for more than 50 years. Superman, Green Lantern, Spider-Man … these are iconic characters dragging around decades of continuity, villains, sidekicks and notable story arcs. Jessica Jones only appeared in comics in 2000, so she is a relative superhero stripling, conceived to operate in a contemporary world from the outset. That makes her an appealing character for the sizeable audience who don’t give two hoots about comics; she is a thoroughly modern misanthrope, relatable even when delivering sardonic putdowns along with her bruising smackdowns.

If anything, Jones – the well-cast Krysten Ritter, transmitting constant wariness underneath the wisecracks – seems to have more in common with Carrie from Homeland than Wonder Woman. Both are gifted but volatile, often dealing with suppressed emotions and memories of trauma by cutting off those who can help them most. Her on-off squeeze Cage, not unkindly, calls Jessica a “hard-drinking, short-fused mess of a woman”, but as this first season has unfolded, we have learned why Jessica is so screwed up – she spent a prolonged period in thrall to Kilgrave (a disconcertingly callous David Tennant), an under-the-radar villain whose power is effortless mind control. There’s a long comics tradition of physically weedy and morally deficient bad guys brainwashing others – often innocents – to do their dirty work. But rarely has it been taken to such a chilling extreme.

Unlike Daredevil, where arch-enemy Wilson Fisk got more screen time than the title character in the early running, Kilgrave is a shadowy presence in the opening episodes of Jessica Jones. He is a horrible memory, glimpsed in flashbacks, hallucinated as a whisper. When Kilgrave does begin to make his presence felt, returning to haunt Jessica a year after his apparent death in an accident involving a city bus, he is cruel, capricious and very, very English: like an extremely evil Richard Hammond. Just like Fisk was never explicitly referred to as “the Kingpin”, his longstanding comics handle, Kilgrave is yet to be called “the Purple Man”, the mind-controlling Marvel villain who debuted fighting Daredevil back in 1964. This Kilgrave does have at least one exquisitely tailored purple suit, though.

Jessica Jones with her boss, Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss). Photograph: Myles Aronowitz/Netflix

How do you overcome an enemy who can rob you of your agency in a millisecond, or transform a passerby into their instrument of murder? While coping with paranoia, eyeing her neighbours in her crummy apartment building with increasing suspicion, Jessica pieces together the fate of Kilgrave by treating her problem like it was any other Alias Investigations case, beating the streets to turn up leads and gathering vital information by applying her own unorthodox methods of coercion.

When her sometimes-boss Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss) assembles an ad hoc support group for the many victims left in Kilgrave’s wake, attempting to rebuild their lives after he streamrollered through them, there is a darkly humorous charge to the fact that Jessica views it as a potential source of intelligence about Kilgrave’s habits and current movements rather than any opportunity for healing.

We have also learned that the music of Kendrick Lamar exists in this universe, got a glimpse of the shiny costume Jessica’s adopted sister Trish wanted her to wear as the superhero Jewel (“Jewel is a stripper’s name,” was the unimpressed response) and that lovestruck upstairs neighbour and Etch-a-Sketch fan Ruben will never get the chance to share his recipe for banana bread after an ill-timed brush with Kilgrave.

Watch David Tennant on playing Kilgrave. Guardian

Anecdotally, some viewers aren’t too hot on the hard-boiled narration, but it feels of a piece with the gumshoe setting and source material, and allows a greater insight into Jessica’s often turbulent thought processes. The one thing I am not entirely sold on is the theme music that accompanies the beautiful credits sequence – the slinky vibraphone motif with echoes of Sex and the City is OK, but the nu-metal guitar breakdown in the middle feels more than a little passe.

By the end of episode seven, Jessica has confessed to Luke about her culpability in the death of someone he dearly loved, and after having her plan to lure Kilgrave into a supermax prison foiled, she is belatedly going home – to the house where she was taken in by the Walker family. Recently acquired by Kilgrave and painstakingly restored to transport her back to childhood, it looks like dredging up even more bad memories.

Can she really “take herself out of the equation” and overcome the world’s most insidious stalker? Kilgrave is the most unpleasant and unsettling Marvel villain to date, but there’s a horrible sense of foreboding that taking him down will require Jessica to do something so awful, no amount of bourbon will keep the flashbacks at bay.

What do you think of Jessica Jones so far? Let us know in the comments below

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed