American Gods - 'A Murder of Gods'

So... a happy story?

In a very topical Coming to America, we open this week with a group of Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande. One falters in the water, but a long-haired man with a kind face walks on the water to rescue him. "You know my name," he assures the man, and light blossoms behind his head, but the light comes from the headlights of a posse of faceless killers, who clutch crucifixes and write holy slogans on the rifles that they use to gun down men, women, children, and even Mexican Jesus.

Elsewhere, Shadow's world is getting weirder by the day. Even as Wednesday uses the threat of the New Gods to hurry him away from any chance of meeting his wife again, a wound inflicted by some sort of walking treeoid becomes infested with a wooden being. People have always had 'a god shaped hole'(1) inside them, Wednesday explains, and trees were the first things that learned to fill it. He is evasive, however, as to what he and his ilk really are; perhaps, in the end, no-one really knows.

Vulcan, Virginia; where we love guns.

Wednesday takes Shadow to Vulcan, Virginia, to meet one of his potential big guns, as it were. Vulcan, god of the forge, has become a god of guns; the power of fire is now fire power. Industrial accidents and a cult of the gun are his meat and drink, and every shooting with his bullets – including those in the opening scene – a prayer to him. Veteran comic actor Corbin Bernsen plays Vulcan deadly straight, as he menaces Shadow with a hanging tree and revels in the power given him by every movie theatre massacre and NRA rally. He is as menacing as Byelobog, but full of force and vigour, and his talk of franchising his worship comes close to the rebranding offered by the New Gods.

Buddies.

Meanwhile, Laura is left behind at the diner, where Mad Sweeney makes her an offer. He'll find someone to properly resurrect her – in Kentucky – after which she will have no more need of the coin and can return it to him. They try to steal a taxi and thus end up travelling with former salesman Saleem, who is looking for his djinn. Mostly to fuck with Mad Sweeney, but also for her own reasons, Laura detours to Indiana where she looks through her mother's window, but does not stay.

Vulcan forges a blade for Wednesday, who realises that he has been betrayed by this one time comrade for the favour of the New Gods who have helped Vulcan to maintain his power. Vulcan calls Wednesday a martyr, but Wendesday insists that that honour goes to the one who joined his fight, forged him a blade and was then cut down. Shadow's reaction of utter horror as Wednesday first decapitates Vulcan and pushes him into a vat of molten steel to steal his power, before pissing into the vat to curse the entire factory and all it produces(2) is flawless.

As Shadow walks further into darkness, Laura finds a moment of light as she watches Saleem pray. "God is great," he tells her. "Life is great," she returns.

Affable evil to the hilt.

'A Murder of Gods' confirms two things: First, that Wednesday has no interest in surviving if it means adapting to the methods of the New Gods. He doesn't want to tap into the zeitgeist and feed on the attention of mortals directed to some icon or other. He wants the real deal; blood and iron and his name as a holy word, giving purpose as well as receiving veneration. And second, that just because they are modern, the New Gods are no kind of nice. I liken him to a more vital Byelobog, but Vulcan is actually much more sinister with his impersonal, uncaring drive to see weapons used, and that's New God to the hilt. As Wednesday notes, his new cult has nothing personal about it, no craftsmanship. The gun and the sword are the martial expressions of this division: One machined and mass produced, efficient and impersonal; the other hand-forged, very personal, but still a device for making people bleed and die.

In the parallel road trip, Saleem is one of the first to show something entirely new. He has hope; he has joy. He's been handed a new life driving a cab which someone took a shit in the back of, and he's loving it. He's looking for his djinn, but not for wishes or for power, and his outlook seems to be affecting Laura somewhat (Mad Sweeney less so.)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this episode is that it is basically all new. Vulcan wasn't in the book at all, and neither was Laura's road trip. While recognising the need to expand the text for a TV series, I was concerned that the new material might be jarring, but this is pretty much spot on. I think my only complaint is that the Vulcan, Virginia gun cult seems to be made up, whereas the book content grew out of what was there. And it's not as if Vulcan doesn't have its story(3).

(1) Which any other week would have been title material.

(2) I strongly suspect that the curse on Vulcan's bullets will turn up later in the series.

(3) When the state of Virginia refused to pay to have the only bridge into and out of town repaired, they approached the Soviet Union for international aid. Virginia cut them a cheque.

Powers - 'Like a Power'

Ah, the glamour of superpowers.

Full disclosure, I'm not hitting Powers, an adaptation of a Marvel Icon (the company's creator-owned line for keeping top writers in-house) comic series about a world where superpowers are just part of the status quo, at full speed. I missed the first episode, so I was sort of playing catch up through this one.

Charlie Walker is a detective with the Powers Division, a section of the LAPD dealing with superpowered crimes. Himself a former power, he is partnered with a rookie named Deena Pilgrim to investigate the murder of a superhero named Olympia, linking his death to a drug named Sway and a young woman named Calista Secor. Also involved are superpowered criminal Wolfe, who among other things stole Walker's powers, Walker's former partner Retro Girl, and dodgy teleporting power Johnny Royalle.

Powers is a grungy, street-level superpowers story, with noirish elements of constructed identity and mysterious pasts. Across these mean skies a man must fly who is not himself mean and all that. The characters are pretty much cyphers so far, but a lot of that is deliberate - we're kind of coming in in media res after all - and some is probably due to missing the pilot. The cast are pretty good, but the sense of the plot is as yet sketchy (again, that's partly the noir influence and partly missing the murder of Olympia, on which much of the current movement hangs, entirely.) It's got definite potential, anyway, and is better than the first original drama commissioned by the Playstation network necessarily deserves to expect.

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 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.