Don't Quit Halfway Through 'Jessica Jones' Season 2

The Marvel Cinematic Universe on Netflix is in sort of a weird place right now. All four series, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist have already combined for The Defenders, but all the shows continue to live on with fresh seasons, and new series are springing up as well like The Punisher.

Daredevil was the first show to get a second season, with mixed results, but now it’s Jessica Jones’ turn to see what she can do with another thirteen episodes.

It’s almost hilarious how content these Netflix shows are content to ignore not just the larger Marvel universe (they all take place in a Manhattan that was just invaded by aliens a few years ago), but also each other. Jessica Jones season 2 makes almost zero mention of the other Defenders, and literally doesn’t speak of anything that happened in the The Defenders team-up itself. While I understand these shows each want to do their own thing, it does strike me as a bit goofy how far they take the silent treatment.

My best advice for Jessica Jones season 2 is in the title. This season starts off very slow, to the point where I genuinely did not want to finish it after 5-6 episodes, as I just was not engaged in the least. But I’m glad I stuck around, as the second half is miles better than the first, yet the entire package is probably not as good as season 1, admittedly.

The problem with the first half of season 1 is that it plays like a low-rent version of Wolverine’s origin story. Jessica was the victim of experiments by a rogue group of scientists, which is how she got her powers. But it turns out they were doing experiments on a bunch of people, including one particularly monstrous creation that’s now hunting former scientists, and has Jessica and Trish in its crosshairs as well, given that they’re looking into the entire affair. It’s a very Wolverine/Sabertooth vibe for a while, and not terribly interesting, especially when you have to compare any new villain to season 1’s Kilgrave, who remains one of the MCU’s best short of Loki and Vulture.
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Jessica Jones is…barely a superhero show. You could probably replace Jones with a regular, hard-drinking PI and the villain with a standard serial killer, and not that much would change. But I do like how these Netflix shows are able to create little mini-genre offerings within the MCU, like how The Punisher was an awesome hard-R action flick, while Jessica Jones is more noire.

If you want to watch season 2 for yourself, stop reading now as I’m about to explain why the second half is so much better than the first. But if you don’t care or already binged it like I did this weekend, read on.

The turn happens when you realize who this murdering psycho is, Jessica’s mother, who also survived the initial car accident alongside her daughter. Her severe burns means she got a new face, but she also came back from being way more damaged which produced some…side effects. Mainly, she’s a lot stronger than even Jessica, and prone to fits of rage where she loses control and kills people. But other times, she’s just Jessica’s mother again, with all her memories, just desperate to get her daughter back.

What I found fascinating about Jessica Jones season 2 was that it effectively…has no villain. Once you learn that the “monster” is Jessica’s mother, things become a lot more murky, and everyone who could be the potential bad guy of this season are all colored in shades of grey. There’s Jessica’s mother, who seems to lack control of her murderous tendencies given her brain damage, though it’s also suspected that she might have more control than she lets on, as many of her murders seem premeditated. There’s Trish Walker, Jessica’s best friend who seems desperate to bring the rogue scientists to justice, yet it’s revealed her true motive is to get powers to become a hero like Jessica. She does some bad things to try and achieve this end, yet you could argue her intentions are still good. And even the “evil scientist,” Dr. Karl, is really just a kind of normal dude who wants to help people with gene therapy, and the powers were just a side effect. He purposefully avoids selling the tech to the military so they can weaponize it. He’s unethical, sure, but evil? Not particularly.
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I like this kind of moral complexity. All of these storylines are really well developed to the point where you don’t really even know what you want to happen by the end. I found Trish’s storyline in particular to be really well done, a combination of addict behavior, jealously and the understandable goal of wanting to be turned into a superhero. And while Jessica’s mother is not an iconic character like Kilgrave, this entire season really did a great job detailing why Jessica is the way she is, and featured an actual interesting debate about whether heroes should kill, and if they do, what affect that has on them. This is something that shows like these routinely mishandle, but JJ does it very well here.

This was a cool season. It started off slow, too slow, but if you can stick with it, I think it’s something entirely unique to this genre, and a very solid offering led by 13 women directors, one for each episode, and you can really feel that in the authentic relationships between Jessica and the other women and men in her life. There’s an emotional weight here that many of these other superhero offerings lack.

If you liked the first season, watch this one. Just be patient, as it gets better in time, and is very much worth it by the end.

*Let me know whatcha think. Comments are nice**