I loved it so much. I normally don’t like Kilgrave/Doctor. Like his performance in Harry Potter makes me ANGRY, it was so bad. But he was perfect in this and I’d be a big fan if this was the only thing I’d seen him in. Krysten was great and all the supporting cast. I cannot wait for more.
I think my favorite aspect of it was that just about nothing went where I thought it was going to go. I like being surprised by my tv shows, and it was unexpected turn after unexpected turn. And even when I had good guess as to what would happen next, it wasn’t exactly what happened.
I’m glad the whole supermax idea didn’t work out. I hate prison movies/tv shows and I’m glad this didn’t turn into one.
BTW, in case anyone didn’t notice, Simpson is supposed to be the comic book supervillain Nuke.
Have watched through Episode 7 Entirely possible I’ll say Spoilery things through Episode 7
I already like this series so much better than Daredevil.
Ritter is an extremely watchable lead actress and there’s enough mystery going on that I keep wanting to jump right to the next episode.
Agreed. Well said- the feel of a comic book without feeling comic booky.
Funny that, in Don’t Trust the B-, the blonde roommate/friend… the actress was named Walker.
And in Jessica Jones, the blonde (former) roommate/friend… the character is named Walker.
How old does that actress seem everyone else?
She is a beautiful woman- I feel like when I say that a woman looks older than she actually is that it comes off as if I’m saying that she’s not beautiful. I’m not saying that. But as I watched the first few episodes I would have guessed the actress to be about 40. Turns out she’s only 31, more than 2 years younger than Ritter.
I like how they show her fight training from the very beginning, and they show that her wish for Jessica to become a super hero is something that she wants in a vicarious kind of way- that she wishes she could be that herself- so that when her character eventually becomes who her character is meant to become it will not feel like it came from out of nowhere.
Even not being familiar with the comics, I got the feel from the Simpson character that he was from the comics and would have more going on eventually. Reading the Wiki page for Nuke, I can already see that Black/White kind of morality in Simpson as he’s been presented in the series. I was already guessing that would lead him down a darker path.
Again, not familiar with the comics so I can’t say what personal traits Carrie-Anne Moss’ character has with the comic book version but I think it’s interesting to see that in the comic books, the character is a man. Also, from the Wiki bio, seems the character is very tied up with Iron Fist, who will also be getting a Netflix series, so I wonder if they’ll follow the comics and keep Moss’ character important as part of the Iron Fist series.
I must say, she really comes off as a potential villain. If they’re going that direction, I wonder if they’ll leave it unresolved in this series so that they can keep her involved in the Luke Cage series and the Iron Fist series.
Doesn’t bother me because I don’t think they’re supposed to have chemistry yet …well, not beyond the sexual chemistry. They are definitely meant to have sexual chemistry right away but the sex scenes have been very brief and those aren’t the scenes where the actors have really been given a chance to actually act together. In the scenes where they’ve got real acting to be doing with one another, these are the non-sex scenes and Jessica is actively being distant and aloof and specifically trying to avoid any chemistry with Cage (again, I’m talking up to about halfway through the series at this point).
His power could be the most overused cliché in the book and I would still love this villain because it is his motivation that I’m constantly left guessing about. So far (again, I’m up to episode 7), he seems to have no desire or intent to be any kind of supervillain. Up until he met Jessica, it seems like he was perfectly happy to use his power for simple selfishness and immediate gratification, to live an indulgent lifestyle with neither any responsibility nor consequences. Then, after spending time holding her in his power and losing her, he’s become obsessed with Jessica. Not sure yet what to make of his declaration of love (which only just happened in the most recent episode I’ve watched).
The only thing that suggests he’s been involved in some kind of villainy beyond living a life of gratification without responsibility is whatever he was involved in with Cage’s wife. She had some kind of dirt on him. Something important enough that she felt compelled to hide it where only Cage could have gotten to it (she thought) and something important enough that Kilgrave, after having retrieved it from her, felt the need to kill her to keep his secret safe.
So, yeah, I don’t know what to make of his motivations and I find that very intriguing.
Carrie-Anne Moss owns that role, so good on her for making that gender switch from Comics fly by seamlessly to this viewer. The…“richness”(??) and complexity of her relationships with her soon-to-be-ex and trophy assistant fiancee are a great thread to the arc of the story.
WotNot - yes, JJ’s killing of Reva, Luke’s wife. That seems like a HUGE difference to bake into the characters how they interact and come together.
I recently re-read the original Alias comic series, practically everything in it relied on Jessica interacting with the results of decades of broad comicbook continuity that simply doesn’t exist on screen. Just about the whole series is a huge change, I think.
Very helpful to understand, thanks. A couple of other questions:
Does Trish exist in comics as a child actor with a psycho stage mom and best friend/adopted sister to JJ?
Did JJ have a brother and was she a petty teenage bitch when the accident happened, adding another layer of shit to her self-esteem?
A couple of episodes felt slightly unnecessary. The one with the fake client who secretly wanted to kill Jessica didn’t seem to serve much narrative purpose.
The ending was a little anti-climactic. Kilgrave’s plan to force his dad to increase his powers felt rushed, and once his powers were strengthened, he didn’t seem to do all that much with them.
Certain logical inconsistencies in the plot: Why, for example, didn’t Kilgrave have Hope under his control in the restaurant? There was no reason for him not to. Why did Trish, who had a safe-room, a reinforced door, security cameras and a personal Krav Maga trainer, not bother to buy a gun? It’s a small point, but it seemed weird to me. And why, most importantly, didn’t they just kill Kilgrave at the first opportunity? Yeah, on the one hand, it would have meant Hope took the fall for killing her parents. That’s a definite downside. But on the other hand, I find it hard to believe that a team consisting of a woman with super strength, a man with unbreakable skin, an ex-special forces commando, an extremely rich celebrity and a very well connected crook lawyer couldn’t have contrived some way of breaking her out of prison and getting her into hiding. Even if they couldn’t, offing Kilgrave at the first opportunity was still the moral choice, given the damage he could (and did) do.
Things I liked:
Absolutely everything else. The above notwithstanding, it really is a terrific show. I give it a strong 8[sup]1/2[/sup] out of 10, and I’m a hard marker. It’s not perfect, but then, what show is?* It was very atmospheric, the performances were great, the characters were complex and interesting, you couldn’t really ask for much more. I’d strongly recommend it.
Patsy Walker first appeared in teenage humour/romance comics in the 40s, published by the company that later became Marvel. In (I think) the 70s, Marvel introduced Patsy in their superhero comics as the “real” version of that character, whose mother used to write comics based on the adventures of her and her friends. She didn’t have any connection to Jessica Jones, though – in the TV series she’s taken over the best friend role from Carol Danvers (Ms Marvel as was, now the umpteenth Captain Marvel).
JJ did have a brother, but she was more of the plain, bookish type (she had a crush on this kid at school, Peter Parker, don’t know what happened to him) and not any more of a bitch than any young teen with an annoying younger brother.
I actually found it to be quite a fascinating look into how certain properties get reused across comic book continuities as I read up on Trish/Patsy (you’ll recall in the show she went by Patsy when she was a child star). In real life (our real life, the flesh and blood world), Patsy Walker appeared from the 1940s through the mid-60s in comedic romance comic books (similar to The Archies as I understand it). A few years after the character was cancelled in the run of comedic romances, she was brought into the main Marvel continuity.
Now here’s the part that I found to be fascinating: when she was brought into the main superhero continuity, part of her character’s backstory was that her mother was a comic book writer/artist who had developed a comic book series based on a fictionalized version of her real life daughter, Patsy. All of the comic books she had been in exist but they exist AS COMIC BOOKS!
So, in her reality in the main Marvel continuity, people knew about the comic book. She had annoying fans. And people wrongly assume that she’ll be just like the fictional version of herself that was presented in the comic books created by her mother.
So, this all compares pretty well with the Jessica Jones version of the character: instead of there having been a fictionalized version of herself in a comic book created by her mother, she was a child star playing a fictionalized version of herself on a T.V. show created by her mother.
So… pretty neat.
As far as her relationship with Jessica, it seems like this series is the first time they’ve had much to do with one another. Jessica Jones as a character didn’t even exist until 2001, at which point Trish/Patsy already had a long rich history.
On the Jessica Jones page on the Marvel Wiki, did a search for each of these names: Patsy, Walker, Trish, (her alter ego). I only got one result- under her alter ego, she’s listed as one of many people interviewed to possibly be nanny to Jessica and Luke’s daughter (and she didn’t get the job). I also searched all those names on the Marvel Wiki page for the Ultimate version of Jessica Jones. Nothing.
I searched “Jessica” on the Walker character’s pages and the only results were mentions that a version of the character appears on the Jessica Jones Netflix series.
So I’ve just watched episode 5 now, and I’m certainly going to watch through the rest, and I do like the series—but a couple of things bother me. First of all, which is a minor point, the fight choreography, which was beyond excellent in Daredevil, just isn’t there here. Whenever Jessica fights, it basically looks like kids fighting in the schoolyard—just sort of pushing and pulling here and there. I don’t really get a sense of seeing a superpowered character fighting. To a degree, I think this is probably intentional—with her powers, she’s probably never had to learn how to fight properly, and I don’t get the sense she’s ever put any work into getting the most out of them. But I still find it distracting, a little at least.
Also, besides the anaesthesia drugs, they so far haven’t even tried to figure out ways to stop/combat Kilgrave’s power. I mean, it seems that just hearing his voice doesn’t suffice, you have to be in his presence somehow. But hearing his voice appears at least necessary—barring some form of telepathy which there was no hint of so far, at the very leas to hear his orders—, so why not try noise-cancelling headphones? Or, when they had him in the truck, why not break his jaw, hell, crush his larynx or rip out his tongue? That’d eliminate the threat, without killing him outright (and leaving him able to communicate, say, via writing).
Actually, at first, I thought that’s where they were going with Jessica hitting him, at least the broken-jaw part, which I would’ve found quite interesting—Kilgrave is a bit too much of a ‘20 steps ahead of you’-villain as is, so this would’ve forced him to try and rely on some other skills besides his mind control. But anyway, I guess I’ll see where they take this…
Of course, within the Marvel comic universe, there is a “Marvel Comics” that publishes the ongoing adventures of all the (in their reality) real superheroes: fictionalised stories, based on public domain information about what they’ve been up to lately. So Patsy’s not alone in being a “real-life” comic character, in that universe, though she may be the only one to have deliberately changed genres.
Also, Kilgrave in the comics is aware that he, and everyone he interacts with, is a comicbook character.
Trish even suggests the superhero name “Jewel” (which does go with that costume in the comics) saying that it’s a great superhero name. To which Jessica replies, “It’s a stripper name.”
Just saw the end of Episode 10. Jeez, that was bleak - I get it; it gives Hope the only redemption she’d settle for and sparks Jessica to cross the line. But, man.
…I nearly died during the costume scene. I would have much preferred the whole comic backstory to have been included but understood why it couldn’t. But getting to see the costume? Hearing the name Jewel? Awesome.
