Jessica Jones

I should have watched this series earlier. I love Jessica. She’s vulnerable, friable, frayed at the edges, drifting with her personal connections trailing damaged behind her like loose cables, drinking spirits at low moments. But she’s still feisty and full of fire, sarcastic, cynical, but good-hearted in her protection of her drug addict neighbour, her tolerance of the idiots that live upstairs and the manipulations of the hot-shot lawyer Jeri Hogarth who she occasionally works for. (I like Hogarth. She’s a cool customer, a glamorous lesbian who has an affair with her secretary and later divorces her doctor wife, always dressed to the nines, sharp, sympathetic, but not afraid to cut a few bitches  and step on some necks to get her way.)

She started out as a super confident girl with superpowers who wanted to make a difference in the world, tried being a hero, and ended up falling prey to a predator called Kilgrave who by the awfulness of random chance walked by as she was beating up some thugs. A petty sociopath with the ability to control others by giving them verbal orders (although it appears he has to do so in person, and they wear off if not renewed), Kilgrave put Jessica under his thrall and by what’s hinted made her do some seriously unpleasant shit to herself and other people. Including murdering a woman just before the climactic bus crash that freed her from Kilgrave, although it left her believing that he was dead, and that she was safe. She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder which has left her a shadow of herself.

So Jessica reinvents herself as a private investigator, living in a dive, taking pictures of adulterers to keep the bills paid, until a case comes along in the first episode (AKA: Ladies Night) that leads to her discovering Kilgrave is still alive and still preying on others. He’s taken prisoner a fresh-faced college student from Omaha, manipulating her to do the same things he forced Jessica to do, from selling her apartment to give him money to having sex with him, and when Jessica finds her, she’s been lying in a bed for five hours in her own urine because Kilgrave told her not to move. Shortly afterwards, she murders her own parents on Kilgrave’s last order to her, leaving Jessica with a mission – to capture Kilgrave and somehow prove his abilities to the world in order to rescue the girl from a double homicide.

Jessica gets allies: her previously estranged adoptive sister, a famous talk-show host with a talent for krav maga; a police officer that Kilgrave tried to use to murder her sister, later her sister’s lover; and Luke Cage, who shares Jessica’s enhanced strength and has skin that can’t be damaged, even by a rotary saw. Jessica’s quest to vindicate the girl – the ironically named Hope – involves supporting her through the post-Kilgrave trauma, including finding that she’s pregnant with his child, which leads Hope to pay a fellow prisoner to punch her repeatedly in the stomach in order to try and induce a miscarriage. The psychological horror aspect of what Kilgrave does is understated compared to the megalomaniac drama queen shit that Loki and Hydra pull, but it’s infinitely scarier, and that is one of the great things about this show.