The Marvel Takeover - Day Two: Jessica Jones Season 1 Recap

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THE MARVEL TAKEOVER

DAY TWO: JESSICA JONES SEASON ONE

Get out your Mighty Marvel Checklist and get ready to see if you won a no-prize, because we’re back with day two of our complete Marvel Takeover. She’s a hard drinking, hard fighting, rough and tumble private eye with superpowers – let’s dig in and take a look at Jessica Jones Season One!

SEASON 1 RECAP

Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter,) of Alias Investigations, is barely scraping a living off of the bottom of the barrel as a Private Investigator in New York – and it certainly doesn’t help that she’s an alcoholic who has really bad luck at keeping her office door intact. Also she has a strange obsession with this local bartender named Luke Cage (Mike Colter,) whom she is often following. She does the occasional job for lawyer Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss) but mostly she is hired to track people down, which is exactly how we find her at the beginning of the series. The Shlottman family hires Jessica to track down their daughter Hope, who Jessica quickly discovers is under thrall to Kilgrave (David Tennant,) a man with incredible mind control powers who took control of Jessica in a similar fashion and is the source of the alcoholic detective’s PTSD. Kilgrave is able to overthrow the mind of anyone and force them to do his bidding with but a simple command. Jessica wants nothing to do with the case and plans to bolt, but her good friend Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor) convinces her she has to do for Hope what no one could do for her. Giving it a brief, but valiant effort, Jessica is too late and the dangerous Kilgrave has forced Hope to murder her parents before severing his control of her.

Jeri Hogarth agrees to represent Hope, and Trish Walker agrees to use her radio show to try to help Hope and perhaps take Kilgrave down once and for all – while Jessica begins looking for medical grade anesthetic which she believes will put Kilgrave in a deep sleep state long enough for her to take him down. The result is that Trish puts herself in Kilgrave’s crosshairs who mind whammies Sergeant Will Simpson (Wil Traval) of the NYPD to kill Walker. Jessica arrives in time to use the powerful anesthetic meant for Kilgrave on Trish to make it look to Simpson that she is dead, Jessica then follows Simpson back to Kilgrave and manages to save Simpson from the command that he should walk off of a balcony to his death.

Jessica discovers that Kilgrave has a shrine to her in the place he was occupying and that he has a photographer spying on her for him. Jessica then spends a little time joining Luke Cage on a one way train to Pound Town when they both discover that with their superpowers they can have super-sex. Trish and Will Simpson have a tense exchange that leads to the two of them also getting fleshy with each other, and Hogarth begins processing a lot of people coming out of the woodwork claiming to be victims of Kilgrave.

Trish, Will, and Jessica launch a plan to capture Kilgrave that goes quite awry when, after injecting him with more of the anesthetic, they are attacked by bodyguards under the control of Kilgrave. It also turns out that Hope is pregnant with Kilgraves child, and after having an abortion Jeri Hogarth steals the fetal remains for some nefarious purpose. Luke Cage hires Jessica as a detective to help him recover some evidence about the death of his wife Reva, who it turns out Jessica killed on orders from Kilgrave – which she confesses to Luke, ending their relationship.

Getting desperate to take down Kilgrave, Jessica hatches a plan to get herself thrown into a Supermax Prison so that when Kilgrave comes for her all of his actions will be on tape for all to see – and when she discovers that her neighbor is dead she enacts said plan. Jessica takes the severed head of her neighbor into a police station and confesses to his murder, but before she can be taken in properly: Kilgrave arrives and shows that he is powerful enough to bend an entire precinct full of police officers to his will. Here, with the officers standing down from anything they intended to do to Jessica, Kilgrave admits that he is in love with Jessica because she is the only one who has ever resisted him. He then invites her to go home with him, promising that he will let the policemen go if she does. Jessica agrees and willingly goes with Kilgrave who takes her to her childhood home which he has now purchased and outfitted just as Jessica remembers from her youth.

Kilgrave and Jessica spend several days together, slowly entering a strange captor/captive relationship where Kilgrave reveals that his parents experimented on him as a child to create the monster he is today. Jessica tries to convince him to use his powers for good, and briefly he is able to – but his true nature comes through and he always uses his powers for his own benefit. Simpson plants a bomb to kill Kilgrave, but manages to wound himself severely – just as Jessica manages to incapacitate Kilgrave and take him to a hermetically sealed room where he cannot give anyone commands ever again.

Trish and Simpson go to a hospital, where a very near death Simpson insists upon seeing a Dr. Kozlov who gives him miraculous pills that nearly instantly heal him. Meanwhile Jessica goes to seek out Kilgrave’s parents and brings Hogarth and a police officer to witness the state of things with Kilgrave. While he is briefly contained, it doesn’t last long as Kilgrave uses his powers to get free and begin the process of killing his family who have been hand delivered to him by Jessica.

Simpson’s miracle pills make him much stronger, but they also make him paranoid and prone to violence and his condition deteriorates every time he takes more of the pills. Meanwhile Kilgrave has taken control of Luke Cage and sends him after Jessica in a knock down drag out fight between two powerful beings and puts Luke Cage in a place to meet Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) the nurse who is quickly becoming the medic to the heroes.

Kilgrave has holed up in an apartment and convinced his father to use Hogarth’s fetal tissue to make him even stronger in hopes he can again control Jessica. Jessica tracks him down to find he has control of the mooring slip of a yacht and all the people around, Kilgrave takes Trish hostage and believes he has control of Jessica whom he commands to say “I love you.” Jessica does exactly as she is told, only to prove she is still free of Kilgrave’s control she looks directly at Trish and as she says the words she snaps Kilgrave’s neck. Jessica is arrested for killing Kilgrave, but Hogarth pays her bail and agrees to defend her – and as news spreads of what happened: suddenly Jessica’s phone begins ringing off the hook with potential clients.

ANALYSIS

Based on the Brian Michael Bendis comic Alias, Jessica Jones leans very hard on comics accuracy in a way that Daredevil Season One didn’t. The production goes out of its way to recreate many of the important moments from the first few arcs of the comic, sometimes shot for shot replicating panel art from Alias. Krysten Ritter absolutely shines as the alcoholic PTSD victim Jones, and Rachel Taylor gives us a great glimpse of her comic origins as Hellcat as we see her take no shit attitude. Mike Colter as Luke Cage is incredible and makes you really want to see a Luke Cage series, and thankfully we won’t have to wait too long to see one. Wil Traval plays a great version of the comic character Nuke, who while named Frank Simpson rather than Will, is the product of the experimental program that created Wolverine. The real standout performance here though is David Tennant in a role so disturbingly charming that you very quickly forget this is the same man who played The Tenth Doctor.

Once more Rosario Dawson gives a fantastic performance that heightens the show around her and builds the connective tissue that ties Jessica Jones to Daredevil as we build toward The Defenders.

TOMORROW: Daredevil & Elektra

THURSDAY: Luke Cage & Misty Knight

FRIDAY: Danny Rand & Colleen Wing