I browse io9 all the time but that link has crashed every browser I have on three different platforms (iOS, Android, Windows). Odd.
That stinks. The link worked for me on my old iPad. Good backstory/context.
So, I’ve never heard of Jessica Jones prior to this series, don’t read comic books, etc. Coming in cold.
I’ve watched about 7 episodes and I don’t get what is the deal with her “powers” (and Power Saw Black Guy’s). Are they just really shitty versions of Kryptonians? I mean, they have super strength but instead of stopping a train or a speeding bullet, she can only stop (in her words) “a slow-moving car”. When her friend said she could “fly” she corrected her to say it was more like “controlled falling”. Furthermore, the powers are almost completely superfluous and as often as not she’s just using them as a gimmick rather than to really help her in her endeavors.
I’ll eventually finish the series, and maybe this gets explained more later (I don’t mind spoilers, as I’m posting in this thread, but I haven’t read all of it). But every other superhero story always starts with the Origin Myth, that explains how they got their powers and what those powers are. Not the case here, and they just seem really weak (compared to typical superheroes, of course) and unimportant so far.
I think you get it, but simply may not like it 
The show is intentionally positioning super powers as a spice occasionally used on what is meant to be a gritty, noir-ish mystery who’s arc is defined by a case to solve, etc.
The characters have both been around and yeah, they have, relative to their Big-Kid peers in the MCU, the Avengers, kinda B-Grade powers. But that is core to the characters, how they ended up where they have, and their street-wise approach.
OK, but what are these “gifted” people? Where’s the origin story? Were they born this way or did something imbue the powers on them? Most superhero fiction considers all this stuff to be important but in this series it’s just like “oh yeah by the way, she has some mild powers which she occasionally uses to beat a guy up or for comic relief when a guy hits on her in a bar, but it’s not a big deal.”
Yep; they clearly didn’t focus on her origin story, per se, but you know enough to understand she was in an accident that killed her family and gave her powers.
We are in this thread, so spoilers are fair game - a reasonably mild one that is spoken to upthread is that this season ends with indications that the company that owned that truck may be a focus in the next season.
They focused this time on her PTSD coming from her being violated by Kilgrave, with her backstory/origin glimpsed at as needed. They are holding cards back to play later.
TL;DR: origin stories are used to establish the hero’s motivation and introduce the audience to the character. In this case, they chose to focus on her “origin” as a PTSD survivor of Kilgrave - it defined her motivation this season, and introduced us to her from that POV.
That was my main criticism about Daredevil as well, although I’d blame it more on Fisk (“I’m a murderer, blackmailer and drug dealer with a secret army of minions at every level of power, but it’s all worth it to build luxury condos”) instead of Daredevil (who is trying to take down a murderer and blackmailer, after all).
Jessica Jones definitely had a more interesting bad guy, although it again seemed to repeat the idea of defeating a secret army of bad guys by punching the head bad guy in the face (so to speak).
The Simpson subplot was one of the weaker points, but I’ll take that over the Stick subplot from Daredevil any day. Ugh.
Well now if that wasn’t the most satisfying neck snap in the history of neck snaps.
Enjoyed it overall, even though there were some things that grated on me—the lack of ear plugs being one thing, the general lack of plan in dealing with Kilgrave another. Hell, at one point the ex-junkie neighbor even says that they ought to pause and think of ways to counteract Kilgrave’s power, but Jessica just blows him off, visibly annoyed by all this sensible talk and intelligent approach type of thing. Come to think about it, Jessica blowing people off was another thing.
That said, as with Daredevil, they created a really fantastic bad guy, I think. Both were very welcome breaks from your stereotypical 2d comic book villain.
Yeah, part of the disconnect here is that the vast majority of comic book super-heroes aren’t Superman, Thor or Iron Man. You’re seeing a lot of the heavy-lifters make onto the big screen. Even Spiderman is a super-medium weight. Captain America and Daredevil-types ( who rate well below Jessica Jones and Luke Cage in terms of raw strength, but well above them in combat training ) are quite common in comics. There really isn’t a “typical” super-hero - they’re all on a continuum.
Remember, this show takes place in the same universe as The Avengers. In that movie, you’ve got guys who have powers because they’ve built a robot suit, or been acidentally exposed to radiation, or were given super steroids by the government, or were just plain born on another planet. So, we’ve already established that this is a world where weird shit just happens some times, and as result, some people can punch through brick walls. Once you’ve got that as baseline, you can start to kind of glide over the origin story part.
Plus, once you’ve established a world where there’s a consistent baseline of strangeness, you have more room to tell different kinds of stories. Jessica Jones lives in a world where there’s at least two different guys who can hold multi-ton weights over their head. Jessica, I’m guessing, tops out around 500 pounds. That’s impressive, but when the alien invaders show up, you’re definitely taking a back seat to the green guy and the dude in a cape. Having a large, shared universe like you do with the Marvel superhero movies allows you to look at things like the concept of “mediocre super powers,” which is more-or-less the sell-line for these Netflix series. Jessica Jones, Daredevil, and the upcoming Luke Cage and Iron Fist series are supposed to be about “street level” superheroes - people with powers, but not “major league” powers like you see in the films, and who consequently deal with smaller level threats like organized crime, corrupt cops, and the occasional ninja clan.
I’d say Luke Cage is at least Captain America level, probably tougher and at least as strong. Maybe not as well trained and without access to unbreakable super metal weapons, but their super powers are at least comparable and probably favoring Luke.
Also, origin stories have simply been done to death, to the point of seeming just cobbled together from random grabs into the super-science grab bag. Only speaking for myself of course, but I didn’t really need the nth iteration of ‘evil company toys with dangerous science accidentally creating superpowers’ spelled out in all detail. (How often has Peter Parker by now been bitten by that damn spider?)
Likewise, I find it refreshing to see a more ordinary kind of gifted person. Let’s face it, for most of us, even if we fell into the vat of glowing goo or get bitten by an irradiated lab rat, we wouldn’t be up for either saving the world, or trying to take it over. So in a universe where these things happen, there ought to be a few people with powers just trying to get by, like the rest of us. I appreciate seeing them for a change, and I think Marvel’s made a very good call bringin their A-list to the big screen, while giving their not-so-heavy-hitters an outing closer to home.
Also, for the big guns, since every new threat must be bigger than the previous one to create tension, things just tend to balloon to ludicrous dimensions—when saving the world is just an ordinary workday, you end up having to hang whole universes in the balance eventually. Bringing that whole thing down to scale creates the same dramatic possibilities, but on a less outrageous and unrelatable level.
I found it very anticlimactic, myself. I would have preferred:
Kilgrave: Jessica…
Jessica: [quickly clams her hand over Killgrave’s mouth and lower jaw] No. No more. [she lifts him off the ground] No! More! [she squeezes and Killgrave screams behind her hand as his jaw snaps, blood spilling over her fingers. She slams him down to the ground, still holding his jaw] You’ve hurt a lot a people, Kevin, but they were never real to you. Let me show you reality.
Then she uses her free hand to meticulously break his arms and legs, leaving his body in twisted agony. She puts both hands on his head and starts to squeeze and we get a close-up of his tear-streaming bloodshot eyes before cutting to her face. At the moment his muffled screams stop, there a large blood spatter across her face and she relaxes at last.
While that would have made for nice watching, I think what she did was dramatically much more effective: torturing Killgrave would ultimately boil down to admitting how much power he had over her, while just dispensing with him like that, she ultimately denied him, negating his hold over her. Kind of like how Batman’s triumph over the Joker is in not killing him, but with less annoying moral grandstanding.
A little harder to say in tv/movie-verse, but in the comics he is much stronger than Captain America. The super-soldier formula supposedly transformed CA into the ultimate specimen of physical humanity - he is Olympics+ category in every conceivable physical trait. However he is not stronger than the theoretical maximum for a human being - he is a just right at that upper edge.
Luke Cage and Jessica Jones are superhuman. They are stronger and more durable ( slightly more durable in JJ’s case, vastly more so in Luke Cage’s ) than any human could ever be. CA might have better reaction time, agility, and other traits that JJ and LC didn’t have boosted except tangentially, but he is much weaker. Of course the other difference is that he is an elite combat machine in terms of training with an expert tactical mind. They’re barely at the street brawler level.
I think that Jessica’s strength in the comics has fluctuated but, if I had to guess, I’d say that she can probably lift around a half a ton, more or less. Didn’t she pick up the back of that car one-handed, or am I misremembering? I seem to recall that, in some stories, she’s barely stronger than Captain America and, in some others, she’s around Spider-Man level.
And that of course is another problem - comics are the kings of inconsistency ;). Despite numerous published comics guides directed at the stats nerds, the real power level of heroes and villains frequently fluctuate to meet the desires of a given writer and the needs of the plot.
I realize they tried to handicap her down a bit with broken ribs so the fight with proto-Nuke wouldn’t be over in five seconds flat, but at other times she has trouble with ordinary humans when she should be able to brush them aside like curtains.
The Nuke in the Jessica Jones show wasn’t nearly as powerful as the guy in the show and also considerably more sane, even at his worst.
Did love Jessica calling him “Rambo” because all the imagery surrounding him in the comics is clearly inspired by Rambo(which Frank Miller clearly hated)rather than the way soldiers actually dressed or behaved.
I don’t think anyone has noted that Simpson’s mention of Det. Clemons’ exceptional “clearance rate”. Clemons is played by Clarke Peters, who previously played Det. Lester Freamon on The Wire, responsible for cleaning the Jane Doe murders and eventually running Major Crimes.
Stranger