Jessica Jones - 'AKA Ladies Night' and 'AKA Crush Syndrome'

Just another girl on the (former) IRT

Jessica Jones is a private investigator in Hell's Kitchen, New York. She takes photographs of cheating spouses, roots through your trash cans looking for clues, does a little process serving for lawyer Jeri Hogarth. She's canny, streetwise and good at improvisation; and she can bench press a large, all-American automobile one-handed.

In 'AKA Ladies Night' we meet Jessica and are introduced to her world, close to but not the same as Daredevil's. Where Matt Murdoch defends the virtuous, Jessica is mired in the grim world of disintegrating marriages and lost souls. The guy next door is a confused addict, the couple upstairs make a lot of noise, her door has a hole in it from where she ejected a client who blamed her for the failure of his marriage, and her worldview is so fucked up that she photographs the guy she kind of likes having sex with someone else instead of talking to him.

Hero for Hire.

Her isolation begins to crack when a couple come to her for help finding their daughter, Hope (she needs to find Hope, do you see) and bartender Luke Cage invites her into his bar to drink for free because it is 'ladies night'. After a really unappealing-looking hook up with Cage, she begins to suspect that Hope has been taken by Kilgrave, a man with the ability to persuade people to do anything and who once had control of her. Her suspicions are confirmed when she tracks Hope based on Kilgrave's established routine, but when she returns Hope to her parents, the mind-controlled Hope shoots them in cold blood (a false Hope!)

We need someone to play an overweight, male lawyer. Get me Trinity from
The Matrix!

In 'AKA Crush Syndrome', Jessica sets out to prove Kilgrave's involvement so that Jeri will take on Hope's case. This leads her back down memory lane, as she establishes how Kilgrave survived an apparently fatal accident. At the same time, she struggles with best friend Trish Walker's attempts to re-establish the friendship and with her surveillance of Cage being revealed. She claims she was watching his girlfriend, whom he did not know was married, setting off a chain of events resulting in a bar fight in which she tosses a guy across a room and Cage takes a bottle to the face with no apparent harm.

BFFEWYLION

Eventually, Jessica finds someone to corroborate her description of Kilgrave's ability and Jeri takes the case (a new Hope? I'm overthinking this, right?) Trish has Jessica's door replaced and Jessica meets her upstairs neighbours, a brother and sister named Rueben and Robyn who are hella weird.

Kilgrave shows up on a random doorstep and tells the owners he'll be their guest and that their children will be fine living in the closet*.

It's the Doctor! (Hint: It really, really isn't.)

We close as Luke Cage confronts Jessica about her strength, then shatters a power saw on his abs to prove that he is unbreakable.

Jessica Jones is... really weird. It's like watching a regular gritty, noirish PI show and then suddenly someone lifts up a Buick or bends someone's mind to their will with but a word. Two episodes in and its hard to credit that this is going on in the same world as Daredevil, never mind Ant-Man.

Krysten Ritter is better as the brittle, emotionally scarred Jessica than anyone who looks that young has a right to be, bringing a weary harshness to the role reminiscent of Eliza Dushku at her best and crankiest Faith. The supporting cast is also excellent. Rachael Taylor hasn't done much but look sincere as Trish, but she does look very sincere, while Mike Colter brings much needed gravity to the roll of Luke Cage, sometime hero for hire. My one concern is whether Ritter or Colter will be able to play happy if needed, having spent pretty much the entirety of the first two episodes looking like they're in an episode of Arrow.

The muscle casting comes in the form of Carrie-Anne Moss and David Tennant. Moss plays a female version of a comic book character who was cheating on his wife. Props to Marvel on this one, because it maintains the show as a strong, female ensemble in their primarily male-led field. They also opted to keep the character's difficult personal life, with Jeri beginning the series in trouble with her wife over an affair with her female assistant. Go Marriage Equality Act (New York)!

And then there's Tennant. You know that thing where sometimes it's hard to distance an actor from their most famous character? Yeah, that's not a thing here. Kilgrave is a smooth, reptilian bastard with a thinly veiled streak of cruelty and violence; a man who can have anything he wants, but will never be satisfied until he can find and have the thing that he can't have, and whose obsession with Jessica is thus predicated on her having once broken his control.

* This is the one area where the show is on rocky ground with me. Kids are a raw nerve.