Jessica Jones - 'AKA Top Shelf Perverts', 'AKA WWJD', 'AKA Sin Bin', 'AKA 1,000 Cuts', 'AKA I've Got the Blues', 'AKA Take a Bloody Number' and 'AKA Smile'

Kilgrave: What a guy!

“You’re the first thing—excuse me person—I ever wanted that walked away from me.”

'Top Shelf Perverts' opens with harmless stalker Reuben running into Kilgrave as he sneaks around Jessica's apartment. It is not an encounter which unexpectedly reveals that Reuben is a worse villain than Kilgrave, and the poor lad turns up dead on Jessica's bed. Now desperate, Jessica plans to turn herself in for Reuben's murder and so lure Kilgrave into a confrontation in a highly monitored supermax penitentiary. We also see Jessica's already dubious moral compass drift a little further, as she roughs up Jeri Hogarth's wife to try to force her to sign the divorce papers.

Her master plan is hampered as Malcolm and Trisha try to disappear the evidence, but she perseveres, and after bidding farewell to New York in a showstopping hero-shot atop the Manhattan Bridge (I wasn't keeping exact count, but this may have come at the exact central point of the total run time) and warning Trisha's mother, a pushy child talent agent, to keep her distance, she retrieves Reuben's head and hands herself in to Detective Clemons, who previously suspected her in Hope's case. He is willing to arrest her, but not to push for supermax, but then Kilgrave turns up and puts the whole thing to bed by making everyone in the precinct turn their guns on one another and release Jessica. Returning home, she finds the gift that Kilgrave had intended her to find before she was distracted by Reuben's corpse; her childhood journal.

'Top Shelf Perverts' falls in the middle of the first season of Jessica Jones, and it's a game changer. Killing off Reuben and setting Jessica against her support team, as well as marking the first direct confrontation between Jessica and Kilgrave, it also makes explicit that Kilgrave's power has rendered him incapable of seeing his own actions as reprehensible. Reuben dies because he was annoying, and he can not conceive that anyone could be upset about it. We end with Jessica apparently bowing to Kilgrave's invitation, and returning to her family home, while Office Simpson, who has gone kind of rogue, watches.

Make you cry!

“How do you people live like this? Day after day, just hoping people are gonna do what you want. It’s unbearable.”

In 'WWJD', we learn a little about the past of both Jessica and Kilgrave. Jessica was taken in by Trisha's mother after her family were killed in a car crash for which she feels responsible, while Kilgrave was subjected to experimentation by his own parents. Video of the latter proves to be what was on the flash drive Reva hid, along with video of various other kids.

As Kilgrave strives to win Jessica over without mind control, a power struggle ensues, with Jessica pushing Kilgrave over his treatment of the help (as a contingency plan, he constantly orders them to harm themselves horribly if Jessica goes too far beyond his boundaries) and finally taking him out to do some heroing with his power. She discusses with Trisha whether it would be worth giving up her freedom to use Kilgrave's powers for good, but ultimately she chooses to do things her way, knocking out the staff so she can safely dope Kilgrave and displaying her prodigious leaping ability to give Simpson the slip when he moves in to execute Kilgrave.

This episode really gets into the meat of the twisted relationship between Jessica and Kilgrave, and while it toys with the idea that she might try to find some pragmatic rapprochement, she never lets him think that what he did was okay. He aggressively rejects the term rape, but that's part of the pathological fantasy that he doesn't do anything wrong; that sending the elderly neighbour to take out Simpson as a suicide bomber is okay because she upset Jessica by talking about the accident.

And I did.

"Was Murdercorpse already taken?"

In 'Sin Bin', Trisha rushes Simpson to hospital, while Jessica locks Kilgrave in the containment chamber and begins pressuring him to force a filmable demonstration of his powers. She brings in Jeri to help, the Trisha and finally Detective Clemons, handcuffed to a pipe, but the last not until she has her trump card ready to play. Based on the video of the experiments conducted on him, she has located Kilgrave's parents and introduces them into the cage. Sure enough, he snaps and orders his mother to stab herself once for every year she abandoned him for. And then the emergency Kilgrave zapper malfunctions and all hell breaks loose.

After Jessica ended up completely in control at the end of 'WWJD', 'Sin Bin' reiterates that, long term, her life tends towards chaos. One on one she can overcome Kilgrave, but she can't get her confession without help and we've already seen how good she is at organising a team (speaking of which, Simpson's friendly doctor appears to be the head of a dodgy military programme which Simpson volunteers to re-enter) and thus this ensemble effort goes to pot. Similarly, we get to see her once more pissing off the Kilgrave support group with her attitude as she flushes out Kilgrave's mother.

But most importantly, as Kilgrave escapes we see that her resistance to his powers after killing Reva wasn't a one off, and he hasn't been trying to get her consent from desire, but from need: He has no power over her.

The plan worked almost perfectly.

As '1,000 Cuts' begins, Kilgrave apparently kidnaps Hogarth, leaving Jessica to deal with the fallout from his escape. She and Trisha leave Clemons to clean and contain the scene, while Trisha takes Kilgrave's father to work on a vaccine for the virus which enables Kilgrave to control others. Then Simpson pops up and murders Clemons (Hell's Kitchen is a bad place to be a principled black man of a certain age,) his discount Captain America treatments turning his dipshit tendencies up to eleven.

Meanwhile, Hogarth - who cut the cables on the fail safe so that Kilgrave could force Wendy to sign her divorce papers - takes him to Wendy to get his bullet wound treated. After Wendy describes the decline of their relationship as 'a death of a thousand cuts', Kilgrave leaves them with a command for her to take her revenge in like manner, slicing at Hogarth while keeping count. Then Pam hits Wendy in the head and... well, see the image for this episode.

But wait! There's more!

Kilgrave arranges for Hope to be released, if she goes along with him, but rather than appease him she  knocks him out and ties him up. Unfortunately, Robin finds out what happened to her brother and leads a group of disgruntled survivors to break down the door. Finding a man tied up, she cuts him loose, and we end up in a restaurant with the support group ready to hang themselves until Hope kills herself in order to free Jessica to kill Kilgrave.

He even looks like a slightly less convincing Cap.

We now enter the home stretch, and events are a bit more jumbled in my mind, so the blow by blow may devolve a little.

We learn some more about the relationship between Trisha and Jessica. The latter turns out to have been adopted as a publicity stunt, and there was much tension before Jessica stepped in - against the then Patsy's request - to protect her from her domineering showbiz mother. Simpson comes gunning for Jessica, seeing her as an obstacle to his assassination of Kilgrave. With his super-roids he is a match for the injured Jessica, but Trisha drops one of his pills and takes him out. While she is recovering from this in hospital, her mother reaches out and eventually shows her a file which reveals that the same company who created the supersoldier pills paid for Jessica's hospital treatment.

Crap.

Luke blows himself up in his bar after a failed attempt to kill Kilgrave. They try to track Kilgrave through the drug supplies he is using as he forces his father to develop treatments to increase his powers. While still unable to control Jessica, it turns out the duration of his influence has increased and Luke has been his catspaw. He sets Luke on Jessica, and the fight is only ended when Jessica shoots him point blank in the head with a shotgun; which for Luke Cage turns out to be roughly the equivalent of getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer: Very bad, but not 'point blank shotgun' bad.

It's the crossover!

Jessica rushes Luke to hospital, but that just brings more problems, with that whole 'unbreakable skin' thing. Fortunately, there's an understanding nurse to help her spirit him away: Claire Temple; Daredevil's friendly medic.

While Claire gets Luke away, Kilgrave shows a new trick, mass-controlling the hospital staff and patients via PA. Jessica gets away, but realises that time is running out. After finding Kilgrave's father, dying, she heads out to a final confrontation. As a mark of growth, she willingly allows Trish to be her backup, and ultimately wins out against her enemy.

After Hogarth gets her off a murder charge, Jessica returns home and begins deleting calls from people asking for help, but with some support from Malcolm (who has rekindled his intention to help others through helping Robin with her grief) begins to realise that she might not be a hero, but she could perhaps pretend enough to act as one.

Binging on Jessica Jones is an emotional meatgrinder, especially in this second half of the series, but it's rewarding viewing. Like the best noir, it's grittiness makes it all the more emotionally satisfying, and it makes a better case for the ultimate sanction than Man of Steel ever did. Kilgrave is both a chilling and unrepentant villain, and a victim of a bad childhood, and the fact that it is possible to simultaneously feel for Kevin and loathe Kilgrave is one of the great triumphs of the series. Others include Jessica herself, a harsh, abrasive lead whose vulnerabilities are clear, and whose morality is both self-deprecating and unsentimental. The supporting cast is also wonderful. Trisha and Malcolm are the heart of the show, while Hogarth is a gay female character unabashedly occupying a role which would normally have gone to a straight male (like the comics' Hogarth;) an unmitigated arsehole, but a useful one.

Daredevil was incredible, but this has been something else entirely. I don't know how Season 2 will manage - likely it will depend on the villain - but I look forward to finding out.