The Defenders

The Defenders.

Built as it is to binge, I thought it as apt to do a single, whole-series review of The Defenders as to do a blow-by-blow, especially considering my current rate of writing.

The Defenders, for the sake of internet historians of the far future, was Netflix’s answer to the Avengers, bringing together their corner of the MCU and uniting the four superpowered Defenders of New York who aren’t Spider-Man(1). Mind you, it takes its sweet time doing it, being a couple of episodes in before anyone actually meets up.

Danny Rand and Coleen Wing are chasing the Hand around the world when they get a tip off from a dying man that the real fight is in New York. They track down a weapons shop in New York and find a whole mess of dead martial artists. They confront the team sent to clean the crime scene, but they turn out to be a group of black youths offered the work by a man in a white suit. One of them is the brother of Candace, the hostess who was murdered at the end of Luke Cage, leading to the much anticipated ‘Luke Cage vs. Iron Fist’ event, in which Danny Rand bloodies his knuckles on Luke’s indestructible skin, before finally knocking him down with the Iron Fist. Then they both run from the law.

Now I have a lawyer. Ho-ho-ho.

Elsewhere, Foggy gives Matt some overflow, pro bon cases to help him kick the Daredevil habit. One of these is the case of Jessica Jones, who sort-of takes the case of a missing architect because someone calls to tell her not to. This leads her to an apartment full of explosives, and later brings the architect himself to her office with a gun(2). This particular Mexican standoff is interrupted when Elektra shows up, all Black Sky, to knock Jessica about and kill the architect. Matt shows up as her attorney, but she gives him the slip and is able to see him doing some ninja parkour shit(3).

Then there’s an earthquake.

Luke gives Danny an earful about privilege, and the four each make their way towards Midland Circle, an upscale newly built corporate headquarters full of evil and built on top of the big hole from Daredevil Season 2. Danny goes in all corporate to declare war on the Hand, only for their leader, the mysterious Alexandra, to order him captured. There follows a massive fight, with first Luke, then Matt and Jessica showing up to help, and the four of them finally being driven off by Elektra.

This restaurant scene has been a focus of the hype, and it was pretty cute.

Our totally not a superteam repair to a Chinese restaurant to regroup, with Matt and Danny explaining to Jessica and Luke who the Hand are(4) and that they will go after their loved ones. Stick then pops up to let us know that the Chaste – who were formed by the Elders of K’un-Lun, incidentally – have, other than him, been wiped out, give some deep background and name the five fingers of the Hand – Alexandra, Madame Gao, Sowande – the man in the white suit – Bakuto and angry Japanese challenge-seeker(5) Murakami. These five were booted out of K’un-Lun for trying to live forever and have been at it ever since. From scenes of the Hand, however, we learn that Alexandra blew the last of their stores of ‘the substance’ to resurrect Elektra. Jessica leaves, Alexandra catches up with them, but Jessica returns and hits the Black Sky with a car before another big brawl, in which Matt stuffs it by going after Elektra alone and trying to get through to her.

Our heroes get police protection for their friends, but play it coy with Misty for the sake of tension. Luke is able to capture Sowande, and from Alexandra’s actions and his taunting they realise that the Hand wants Danny. Stick kills Sowande after he tries to escape with Danny, and the rest of the team decide that Danny needs to be kept off the front line until they know what the Hand want with him. Danny isn’t having it, because he’s the Immortal Iron Fist, damnit, so they have to tie him to a chair. He and Luke bond a little, but then Stick uses drugged incense to incapacitate Luke and tries to kill Danny. Unfortunately, he drags it out too long, Matt and Jessica get back from finding the architect’s plans to blow up Midland Circle and bury whatever the hole leads to, and in the end Elektra clashes the party, kills her father figure and kidnaps Danny, before murdering Alexandra and declaring herself the new boss of the Hand.

Punchy punchy kick kick.

 Jessica, Luke and Matt are picked up by the cops in suspicious proximity to one stabbed guy and one decapitated corpse. They eventually break out of the precinct and go to Midland Circle, where they fight the remaining fingers of the Hand to an inconclusive result. Colleen meets them with a stack of explosives, which she and Clare go to set up while the others go down to rescue Danny, who has let himself be gulled into fighting Elektra, allowing her to redirect the Iron Fist and open the dome structure buried deep beneath the city, which turns out to be a vault covering a dragon’s skeleton. Because why the fuck not.

Gao explains that the Subtance is basically ground up dragon, and that removing the bones from beneath New York will basically fuck the city’s foundations, because never mind rock and roll, they built this city(6) on dragon’s bones. The others arrive and a battle royale ensues, while Coleen and Clare set charges and battle Bakuto and some goons. Misty shows up with the assist, and gets her arm sliced off before Coleen decapitates Bakuto, who inconsiderately falls on the detonator controls, starting an unstoppable countdown.

Matt gets the others to evacuate, while he tries once more to get through to Elektra, despite the fact that she was a dangerous, thrill-seeking egoist at her best. Murakami gets thrown off the lift, Gao gets fatalistic, Jessica catches the falling lift by its cables and Luke persuades the police to evacuate before the building comes down on top of Matt, Elektra, Murakami and Gao.

Nuns!

The police drop the matter. Jessica reopens Alias Investigations. Luke goes home to Harlem. Danny offers to pay for Misty’s treatment at a state of the art hospital (presumably doing great work with robot arms,) then crouches on a roof like he’s Daredevil. And Matt wakes up in what appears to be the Budapest convent hospital from Dracula.

So, that was The Defenders, a perfectly serviceable series which takes the uniqueness of the four Netflix Marvel series and combines them into something kind of generic. The best stuff stylistically is when they’re operating apart and cutting from the visual style of one series to another between scenes – perpetual darkness for Matt Murdock, seventies sepia-toned for Luke Cage, washed out noir for Jessica Jones, entirely bland television colours for Danny Rand(7) – but that only carries the story so far, and when they unite the series proves to share Iron Fist’s lack of a distinct visual language. Sadly, it also shares the lacklustre martial arts work, although having the other three means that you get their distinctive styles, and say what you will about Charlie Cox’s Daredevil, but there’s a thesp who put the hours in on his fight training.

Name dropping historical events liek s

The story is decent enough, but suffers somewhat from being basically what the League of Shadows/Assassins is all about in Batman/Arrow – take one city, add ninjas, stir until well and truly done – but with less ruthless Utopianism and more dragons. Elodie Yung does her best with what she’s given, but Elektra is just too much of a cypher and the Black Sky prophecy too vague for the show to paint a compelling picture of the Hand’s internal power struggles. It is also unclear how using up the last of the Substance makes them vulnerable when Bakuto has come back from the dead and can still shrug off bullet wounds in the chestal area. They still seem to have little to fear save decapitation and massive organ failure, putting them just one down on Connor MacLeod.

The Fingers of the Hand are a mixed bag, with Sigourney Weaver a menacing presence, but never a physical threat because of the characters frailty. Murakami has quirks, more than character – only speaks in Japanese, seeks a challenge(8) – and while Sowande has some personality, Bakuto is as bland as everything else coming out of Iron Fist, leaving Madame Gao to do most of the heavy lifting. It was also frankly disappointing that, after Stick warns Luke that Sowande can mess with the functions of his body and kill him without physical trauma, Luke turns out to be as impervious to the old pressure point deal as he is to blades, bullets and harsh language. 

And watching Danny try to kung fu Luke is priceless.

Truth to tell, Luke Cage is a bit of a problem here all around, his power set being basically a massive fuck you to all martial artists. One on one he could have a good fight against someone agile enough to make him wear himself out, but it never happens. Occasionally he gets slapped around by Danny or Elektra, but he really just gets up again. Danny, meanwhile, once more demands the question ‘how did you become the Iron Fist?’ I know he plunged his hand into the molten heart of Shao Lao, but how was this yoyo the greatest martial artist in K’un-Lun when he gets his arse kicked so much? He’s really got nothing but the Fist going for him a lot of the time, and not even that when he’s trying to charge off despite knowing that’s what the Hand wants, or getting suckered into shattering the vault created by a former Iron Fist. Never has a character so ably converted a strength into a liability.

Despite this, some of my favourite character moments in the series are between Luke and Danny, and I confess I’m broshipping them more than a little, and that at least is something that they’ve got right. Luke Cage might have another solo series in him, but I’d definitely take a Heroes for Hire show over Iron Fist season 2.

Speaking of characters, let’s talk about journeys.

Welcome to the Jungle.

Jessica Jones begins the long walk back to humanity, and probably has the best arc of any of the leads. Now in part this is because she appears at the start of the series slightly regressed from the end of her first season, still refusing to take on the cases being thrown at her since she became famous, and by the finale is seen opening up the office again. Luke Cage has a lot to do with that, of course, giving her the chance to cauterise one old wound for reals, but working with a team, be it ever so dysfunctional, brings her out of the darkness. It’s a shame not to see Trish and Malcolm play more of a part in that, but so it goes. We’ve got a lot of characters knocking around and some of them are going to miss out. I did like that they acknowledge her turning this particular corner by greeting Malcolm with something other than an angry insistence that he stop trying to get her to act like a human being.

Luke Cage and Danny Rand do their best work playing off each other. Danny is a big picture guy, while Luke looks after his own. They help each other see things from another perspective, with Luke knocking a sliver of sense into Danny, and Danny showing Luke that he can’t always protect his own by being insular. It’s disappointing that Danny doesn’t grow more significantly during the course of the series, but he is at least forced to confront the fact that he has issues, even if he doesn’t really do anything about them.

The big problem with Elektra is that she is less a character and more Matt
Murdock's issues.

And finally, Matt Murdock, who… Well, if he had died in this series, it would have been no more than he deserved, and actually an apt ending to the arc established in Daredevil. Unfortunately, they kind of take a weird direction with him. He is pitched as the team’s natural leader, but besides his reflexive secrecy, he repeatedly prioritises saving Elektra, even after she proves herself to have utterly embraced her dark side, leaving the team to their own devices because of this. One of my friends was pondering to what degree Jessica Jones gets a pass for being a bitch because she’s pretty, but Matt at least is willing overlook frankly a lot of murder, purely because he really fancies Elektra. I get it; she’s his dark reflection, and saving her means he is not damned, but this is an arc which does not sit well with this ‘natural leader’ thing, an informed trait if ever there was one.

So anyway, that’s The Defenders, which if nothing else provides strong evidence that secret ninja magic crime cults may be over as a thing. Compared to their appearances in Daredevil, the Hand just don’t seem all that mysterious. The Five Fingers are near-immortals with thousands of years behind them, but only Madame Gao has the right sort of unearthly feel to her. Sigourney Weaver does fine work with what she has, but lacks the time to get properly established. They just come off as regular – if highly successful – criminals, and even the dragon bones that they are digging for don’t really feel as epic as they ought.

In fact, ‘not as epic as they ought’ is pretty much the watchword of the series. Like the Avengers movies, it has a lot to fit in, and in doing so doesn’t reliably do any of it much beyond ‘quite good.’

(1) The fact that Spider-Man is a thing in the MCU does sting The Defenders’ cred a little. I mean, even if Iron Man has moved upstate, the friendly neighbourhood wall-crawler is only in Queens. Does spider sense not work on ninjas? Does MCU Spidey even have spider sense?

(2) The second of many times I thought Malcolm was going to get fridged.

(3) Not sure how she manages this, since she’s a good PI but he’s supposed to be able to track a heartbeat at half a mile.

(4) A spiel which goes down like a cockroach sandwich.

(5) That is literally his character: He’s angry, he’s Japanese, and he seeks for something to challenge him.

(6) And by implication, given how much time they spend talking about this being ‘just a city’ and that Elektra can expect to see many cities fall, many, if not all cities.

(7) Seriously, the sin of Iron Fist – well, one of them – is not really having a style to back up its lack of substance. It’s almost unique in being a series that needed its foreign language scenes to be dubbed instead of subtitled.

(8) And yet is not determined to pit himself one on one against the Iron Fist (which would probably be disappointing) or even the Black Sky.

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.

Jessica Jones - 'AKA You're a Winner'

I love these helmets. They're so... WWII.

Jessica's Kilgrave hunt is once more interrupted as Luke hires her to find someone, the brother of a friend, he says, but Jessica suspects something more behind it. This gives us a chance to see Jessica get her PI on, but when it turns out that he's doing this in exchange for information on the death of his wife, whom Jessica murdered on Kilgrave's instruction, she might be wishing she wasn't so good.

Meanwhile, Hope has been beaten up in prison, which she turns out to have paid for in an attempt to miscarry Kilgrave's child. Jessica promises to do a number on Jeri's wife in order to secure the divorce if Jeri will arrange an abortion for Hope. If this wasn't bleak enough, Jeri bribes the prison doctor to have the foetus delivered to a lab for reasons, perhaps trying to recoup some of her costs by flogging super-stem cells to nuHydra (and I find it weird and slightly sad to contemplate that this series exists in the same universe as Grant Ward.)

Jessica tries to get a jump on Luke and secure the information ahead of him, but it turns out to be incriminating evidence against the bus driver. When Luke sets out for revenge, Jessica tries to stop him, eventually confessing her own guilt - that Kilgrave made her dig up something that Luke's wife had buried, then kill her. Luke... takes it better than he might have done, I guess, but not well.

And Kilgrave uses his power to win a million at poker so he can buy a house, peeling back the wallpaper to reveal Jessica's growth chart. It was at this point that I decided when we move we're sanding down the door frame with Arya's growth marks on, just in case.

Jessica Jones continues to be dark and compelling in equal measure. I'm a little disappointed that as well as being unbreakable, Luke is shown to be stronger than Jessica, but it's a minor quibble given that Jessica's powers aren't her defining quality.

Jessica Jones - 'AKA 99 Friends' and 'AKA The Sandwich Saved Me'

A key part of the noir tone of Jessica Jones is the way that she doesn't stand
out from the crowd.

Jessica Jones continues her search for Kilgrave by trying to track down the photographer who has been keeping tabs on her. She gets Trish to offer an apology to Kilgrave on air to get the hit taken off. At the same time, a new client finds her through a referral, which immediately triggers alarms after all that happened with Hope's parents. Thankfully, it turns out that the mystery client is actually just a crazed vigilante looking to bump off superhumans, leading Jessica to assure her that she knows 99 other 'gifted' (the titular '99 Friends') in Hell's Kitchen alone.

The hunt for the photographer gets a break when people start calling in their experiences with Kilgrave to Jeri Hogarth. 'Kilgrave made me do it' may be the new excuse du jour, but Jessica is able to pick out a few genuine cases and puts together a support group, from whom she is able to get a key description of the photographer - her junkie friend Malcolm.

It's hilarious how much this guy wants to be Captain America.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Simpson - ex-special forces cop and Trish's erstwhile assassin - comes by to apologise by way of giving Trish a clean and highly illegal gun for self defence. This is apparently the way to her heart, or at least her bed, which comes as something of a shock to Jessica, especially when Simpson then wants in on the Kilgrave hunt.

With some help from Simpson, who is a bit of a manly jerk, but actually seems to be as good as he thinks he is, Jessica manages to ambush Kilgrave, darting him with Sufentanol and whisking him away, only to discover that he's hired a security detail just in case his powers were compromised. They turn up in numbers too great for Jessica to handle, even with Simpson, and Kilgrave is rescued.

A series of flashbacks reveal that Trish once tried to persuade Jessica to become a superhero, but that her first serious efforts at nocturnal vigilantism - in which she rescued Malcolm from a mugging - were interrupted by Kilgrave. The scene in which they meet actually sheds a lot of light on Kilgrave's personality, and you can see in Tennant's performance that a lot of what makes him tick is that fact that, as no-one will ever refuse him, disagree with him, or fail to laugh at his jokes, Kilgrave genuinely believes himself to be a pretty rad guy. He says that he never makes anyone do anything they don't want to, but this more than anything reveals his distorted view of the world. To Kilgrave, people must want to neglect or abandon their children, take him in and pander to him, or they wouldn't do it. It's creepy as hell.

On the other side of the coin, Jessica's true colours shine through when, in the aftermath of the attempted snatch, she picks up the abandoned Malcolm and tries to help him beat the habit that Kilgrave forced him into in order to control him long term (his powers max out at 10 hours of persistence.) Yes, she offers him the drugs if he wants to self destruct, but is clearly pleased that he rejects them. Despite the continuing noir sentiment, Jessica gets a lot more likable at that moment.

Jessica Jones - 'AKA It's Called Whisky'

"Secretly photographing someone isn't very... Oh; hang on."

We open this week with Jessica and Luke getting enthusiastically groinal, and suddenly the rather awkward sex scene from 'AKA Ladies' Night' clicks into place, because they are completely different together now that they're sure the other won't snap like a dry reed. Netflix is working to ratings, however, so their Man of Steel, Woman of Steel, World of Cardboard shenanigans are interrupted by Reuben from upstairs asking them to keep the noise down and then we jump cut to after and the two of them discussing powers. She admits that she used to do the hero thing, but the good she did is outweighed by the bad.

The A plot of the episode, more or less, is the continuing quest to prove Hope's innocence. Public opinion is against her, so Jessica persuades Trish to do a talk piece, but when Jeri converts this into an interview with Hope and then pushes an insanity plea, Trish goes off on an attack of Kilgrave which ends with him calling the studio to ask isn't it a bad idea to publicly insult a mind-controlling murderer? Sure enough, a cop swings by and tries to murder Trish while Jessica is seeking the surgical anesthaesia she believes will disable Kilgrave's powers.

She does this first by trying to coerce Jeri's wife, then by taking her addict friend to hospital after he mistakenly walks into Robyn and Reuben's flat and gets hit with a bowling trophy. She throws the almost unconscious Malcolm at a nurse in a palpable betrayal of trust to create a distraction, getting the drugs, but almost certainly losing a friend.

Thankfully, Trish is tougher than she looks - we establish this in a scene in which she is able to throw Jessica, and it is notable that Jessica doesn't push back and use her superior strength to try to frighten her into being more careful - and she is able to hold out until Jessica arrives. Jessica uses one of her anesthaetic shots to fake Trish's death and trigger the cop's programmed need to return to Kilgrave. Through this, she is able to track and almost confront her nemesis, but with a nice family set to kill her and the cop ordered to jump off a roof, he gets away.

In the B plot, Jessica's increasingly intense relationship with Luke - a later scene does for his bed what invoicing disputes did for her door - is cut off when she finds the photograph of his dead wife in his bathroom cupboard, not because she's his dead wife, but because Jessica killed her under Kilgrave's control, perhaps explaining her initial fascination with him.

'AKA It's Called Whisky' firmly establishes that if we're looking for a villain of the week show, we can fuck off. Even more than Daredevil, Jessica Jones is going story a season. And why not given the Netflix instant delivery model? It continues to be hardcore noir, with betrayal going hand in hand with loyalty; Jessica willing to sacrifice a friendship to catch Kilgrave, but not a mind-controlled cop's life. As with a lot of noir, it doesn't overflow with attractive characters, but makes it easier to take sides with its truly horrible villain.

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.