A Review of "The Defenders" Saga: Jessica Jones (season 1)

Following Marvel's Daredevil, comes to a different sort of Marvel superhero, rather than that a Marvel anti-hero. Marvel's Jessica Jones follows the first season of Daredevil in terms of continuity.

Immediately following the events of Daredevil, their rises another heroine in Hell's kitchen. Out of Alias Investigations is Jessica Jones, a private investigator who works private cases for private people. She also has inexplicable super powers that I'm not even sure on, I think mostly just super strength and high-jumping, I'm not sure. As far as these cases, they mostly consist of housewives charging her with finding out if their husbands are cheating on them or not. However, one case comes through where Jessica is tasked with finding and locating Hope Shlottman, who's been reported missing. Through her detective work, Jessica learns that Hope is with Kilgrave, a man with mind control abilities who once mind-controlled her, leaving her with PTSD. Jessica's adoptive sister and best friend, Trish Walker, convinces her to help Hope despite her PTSD. Hope, then under Kilgrave's control, kills her parents.

Jessica Jones

When not spying on people committing adultery, Jessica spies on a local tavern bartender named Luke Cage. He sees her looking into his bar and offers her free alcohol as a "Ladies Night" promotion, which leads to the two of them pounding each other into the mattress that night. Jessica gets investigated by Oscar Clemons, who's upset about the photos she took of Luke Cage and some mysterious woman. Luke gets attacked by friends of the woman's husband, but he easily subdues them and reveals to Jessica his unbreakable skin. 

The rest of the season follows Jessica as she hunts Kilgrave down and moves to destroy him. She finds the ambulance driver to whom Kilgrave used his powers to convince the driver to donate to him both kidneys, hooked up a dialysis machine. She then locates the doctor who anonymously donated the dialysis machine who volunteers to testify in court for Shlottman. On top of that, Jessica finds out that Kilgrave has been spying on her this whole time and that he's even recruited her neighbor, Malcolm Ducasse to spy on her.

In terms of the characters, Jessica Jones is well played by Krysten Ritter. She's stubborn, jovial and yet mocking when she's annoying. Ritter plays Jones as though she's always being watched, and the PTSD angle is played up really well. Ritter knows how to make Jones feel paranoid and insecure, while also making her tough and brutal. The way she plays the PI role is just spectacular. She never quits and she never surrenders to the odds. She will stop at nothing to find Kilgrave and to bring him to justice or kill him for what he's done to people. Hell, she even starts a Kilgrave support group, thanks to the pushback she's getting from her friend and colleague Jeri Hogarth, whom Jones strong-armed into taking Hope Shlottman's case.

Kilgrave

...but the guy who takes the show, runs with it, dunks it into the basket, gets the rebound, runs back the other way, and dunks it into the other bucket, is David Tennant as Kilgrave / The Purple Man. Kilgrave is such a sarcastic, British dillhole, you almost laugh at his twisted sense of humor and forget the fact that he's done terrible things. Some of the things that he makes people do is priceless. There's a part where he makes a man throws a coffee into his face, a part where he tells his own father to cut out his own heart and an even better part where he plays poker with a bunch of mob bosses, convinces them to go all in, goes all in himself, then convinces everyone else to fold. He wins the entire pot just by being a sarcastic asshole. When one of the guys try to stop him from leaving and to get their money back, he tells him to "see how long it takes to put his head through that post". Sure enough, the guy starts knocking his own head against the wall repeatedly until his head goes through the post. The way David Tennant gives those hypnotic stares and comands those goofy commands just makes him awesome to watch. "Assholes try, I just do".

There's also Will Simpson, a former police officer who gets recruited into a secret program regarding super soldier combat enhancement. He comes across Kilgrave and is told to walk off a ledge. Jessica arrives and stops him from doing so, so Will dedicates himself to fighting with Jones and her friend Trish to stop Kilgrave. During this super soldier program, Will is given three bottles of pills to take: red pills to increase his adrenaline, white pills to balance him out, and blue pills to cool him off. This is where Will ceases to be Will and becomes "Nuke" from the comics, but it isn't explicitly stated as such. In the comics, Nuke wasn't "Will Simpson" but was some other character named Frank Simpson. Pretty cool stuff.

Trish Walker

The series kind of drags at points. It takes a good while for the plot with Kilgrave to get going and until then, the show kind of just sits there and goes in circles. Jessica makes it interesting as much as she can, but I don't find a whole lot of the first four episodes very interesting or fun to watch. I was actually pretty bored watching them. In my opinion, the show picks up starting with episode eight, gets really good until like episode twelve, then it slows down again. My biggest gripe is that there isn't enough substance in the story to make it fun to sit through. Sure, I kind of forced myself to watch it since Marvel's The Defenders is on it's way, but I still feel like the show could've done with just a bit more action that Daredevil had. There was just something about Daredevil that made each and every episode fun to watch and that the story never got old or lame at any point. Jessica Jones kind of just feels like it's forced. It suffers from a lot of what Marvel puts forth at this point, but yeah, It just feels force and because of that, it can drag at points. It's still a good show, David Tennant makes it fun to behold and every scene he's in is spectacular, but the stuff he's not in his okay in entertainment value. Jessica's schtick can get really old really quick, since for the first half of the show, she's the only one the plot follows around.

Jessica Jones is fun at times and dull at others. It's not a healthy mix, but it's a decent addition into the Defenders-verse. It's fun to sit through at points, but other times it can make it feel like time is slowing way, way down while you're watching it. I still recommend it, though. Anything these days with Marvel in the title is worth the one view. Anything beyond one view means it's really good. I know I gave Jessica Jones the one view. Don't know if I would give it another one. Still worth the shot to me, but don't expect a show on Daredevil's level.