Jessica Jones

Having been a fan of Marvel's Daredevil, the first of its Netflix shows, I was eager to take a look at Jessica Jones, their next foray into the kind of "Marvel at Night," darker stories.

The star is Jessica Jones, a hard-drinking private investigator. Jessica is hardboiled as they come, a depressed loner who claims not to have friends and works pretty hard to push people away from her. There are people in her life, like an old friend Trish who has a popular talk-radio show, or Hogarth, a lawyer contact who provides her with some of her leads. Then there's Luke, the bartender who she photographs despite no one hiring her to do so.

But there are two very big details that set her aside from your typical Sam-Spade type (apart from her gender,) and that make the show Jessica Jones a Marvel story rather than your standard neo-Noir. The first is that Jessica has superpowers, namely incredible strength. She easily lifts a summons-dodging strip club proprietor's car to prevent him from avoiding getting served his papers, and she easily jumps multiple stories to a fire escape in order to take pictures of Luke.

The other big detail is that she is haunted by visions of "Kilgrave," the monstrous man who, for some period of time, had her under his complete mind control.

There's very little ambiguity that her experiences are allegorical for rape, unless her time under his control also included that more literally (which the show strongly hints may be the case.) Jessica is literally a strong woman, and the memory of this violation has gnawed at her - we can probably interpret her current lifestyle as the result of this trauma.

When she investigates the disappearance of a college student whose midwestern parents come to her with a referral from the police station (but as we discover later, not from the police themselves,) she realizes that, contrary to what she had thought, Kilgrave (whose more comic-booky name is "The Purple Man," which is alluded to with the appearance of purple lighting signaling that she is having a vision of him,) is alive, and has kidnapped this girl.

Jessica manages to rescue her, but she doesn't realize that there is one last compulsion that Kilgrave has left her with, and as Hope rides down in the elevator, reunited with her parents and instructed by Jessica to get the hell out of dodge, Hope pulls out a gun and kills her parents, only to collapse and burst into horrified screams once she realizes what she has done.

The arc of the season, I imagine, would be Jessica's attempts to track down Kilgrave and kill him. That's obviously tricky, given that he has the incredibly powerful ability to force anyone he talks to to do whatever he asks of them.

We're left with a bunch of questions after two episodes. We get glimpses of Jessica under Kilgrave's thrall, but we don't know exactly what she did under his control. Given her super-strength, I wouldn't be surprised to find that she did something very bad indeed. We don't know where her strength comes from, or how long she or Trish has known about them. We do find out, however, that Luke is Luke Cage, himself super-powered with, as far as I can tell, complete indestructibility (I'm not a big comics guy, so forgive me for not knowing this already.)

Jessica Jones follows very much in Daredevil's Netflix footsteps, being a much darker, more brutal story than you see with Captain America or Iron Man. It's on a smaller scale, obviously, with villains hiding within the urban landscape instead of razing said landscape to the ground, but it also has the luxury of being on what has sort of become a premium-cable-style service, without the obligation to keep things all soft PG-13 or easier (isn't it funny how movies and TV flipped some point in the last ten years?)

Though while it's similar in tone, I'm finding the distinction between the headlining villains of both shows to be kind of interesting. Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, was the most humanized, sympathetic Marvel villain we've seen (with a little scene-chewing for flavor.) In contrast, we haven't even really gotten a good look at Kilgrave's face (a face that most nerds would recognize as possibly the second-most-popular person to play the lead role of Doctor Who.) There's nothing sympathetic (so far) about the Purple Man - instead he seems to just be a specter of terror that haunts the show.

Anyway, I'm two episodes in, and so far I'm liking it.