Hmmm…I like that. She does explicitly say in the series that “she heals faster than normal” so even in the tv-verse she may have an accelerated immune system ( never gets colds or flus, etc. ). So over a period of months her super-immune system was slowly building up resistance and it was the combination of that and the severe mental shock of murdering on command that finally triggered her ability to resist him.
As fanwanks go, that’s fairly plausible in-universe.
As mentioned, Killgrave’s powers are “viral” and Jessica not only explicitly tells Patsy that she heals faster, it’s demonstrated again and again by her shrugging off injuries like the broken rib.
Furthermore, by the time she’s done with Killgrave’s control, she’s already shown resisting his commands - on the rooftop flashback he has to tell her several times to come down off the ledge (and he’s obviously annoyed by it).
Spoiler for more of the comic. Or speculation. I can’t remember which
Specifically another truck in the convoy that had the radioactive material that was either rushing away from or rushing towards Hell’s Kitchen where a container-ful would be dumped on L’il Matt Murdock. I don’t remember if this was said in the comic itself (it was certainly implied) or if it was Bendis during an interview or just fanwank. Either way, I like the link with DD’s origin
Close, but not quite. During a flashback to how Jessica got her powers, she’s a shy, unpopular teenager at highschool with a wicked crush on Peter Parker. She tries to talk to him on a field trip, but he’s distracted when a spider bites him. Later, she’s crossing the street, and is very nearly hit by a truck that’s got the same logo on it as the one that hit Matt Murdock. There’s one other near-miss with a famous origin story, before she gets her powers, but I forget how it worked.
The Daredevil connection is cute, but the scene with Peter means the timelines don’t work. Peter and Matt are roughly the same age, but Pete was a teen when he got his powers, and Matt was around ten.
One thing I don’t see mentioned much that I’m very proud of the show for is how it handled rape. They didn’t outright say it at first, so I was very concerned they were going to dodge handling the topic explicitly but they really grabbed that bull by the horns and tackled the issue very effectively. It’s rare to see a show (or movie, or popular book, or game) tackle that subject in a way that isn’t either juvenile, tepid, or kinda gross. Seriously, shows just suck at it. Even Buffy, for all the love it gets, had a kiiiiiinda weird relationship with the subject (in that it was used basically as a throwaway wakeup moment for Spike).
When it is used, it’s often just some cheap tactic to get you to either sympathize with or condemn someone, but the whole sexual assault angle is just woven into the entire fabric of the show along with the PTSD and identity aspects. Kilgrave’s power is probably the best power set I’ve seen for tackling these issues. Mind Control villains are usually really, really lame and this is the first one I’ve really seen where they tackled it the way I’ve always thought mind control should be handled. Usually it’s just an excuse for why this unlikable psycho has mooks, or set up a moment where the hero has to fight their brother or whatever. MAYBE they acknowledge the creepiness enough to have the hero knock the slaves out instead of outright killing them.
No, there’s just the two before the crash. After that, she’s in a coma, and wakes up during the Galactus incident – maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?
I know it’s comics, so these things are… malleable, but Matt was clearly in his teens when he got hit with the radioactive canister in the original comic (which I took Alias as specifically referencing, from the look of the truck). Then again, when he first meets Spider-Man, he’s a practicing lawyer in his early twenties, and Peter’s still a year away from graduating High School, so you’re right either way: the timelines don’t match up.
Presumably Ajax Atomic Labs just never got around to improving their transport arrangements in the intervening five or six years?
Best part of that analysis: the scene where she’s having dinner with Kilgrave, there’s an Amstel Light on the table, and they say:
There’s also a scene later, when she’s talking to the morgue guy and says “Call me if you get any more old dudes, especially if the body’s messed up. Pieces missing, head literally shoved up the ass, knees bent backwards, body dissolved in acid…” Now that has to be an intentional reference. 
Yes, its voice is authentic and stands out for how straightforward it all was, including the JJ/Trish relationship I and others have already commented on. Interesting to compare with the new CBS Supergirl, which actually does a decent job, but is much more girl power/affirmation focused.
It’s new times in comic book land. Cool.
This commentor at Salon had a different take on it, asserting that the comic didn’t actually get into the cause of Jessica’s need to cope until late in the series, but the TV show made it the focus because “We’d rather watch a woman be abused than heal”. A comparison is made to Game of Thrones, which I haven’t watched but which apparently adds rapes that weren’t even in the books. The rest of us saw a woman stand strong if not unwaveringly against a pervasive menace at a tremendous cost to herself and those she loved and in the end stopping him was not exactly the same as winning, but she did wrest power over her life away from him. But this guy somehow saw a story reducible to “about a woman being abused”, and projected on us a desire to see abuse.
I can’t help but compare this guy’s insight to the more incisive analysis at Slate that Jessica Jones plays out the underlying anxienties of the GamerGate era, where a woman can be menaced from a long-distance and other people can be inducted to help abuse her and she might as well not bother fixing her broken door because security is an illusion anyway.
I’ll spoiler this, just in case.
He didn’t have power over her. That’s my point. Which means when Jessica went into the cage with him to provoke the use of his powers, Kilgrave knew that he couldn’t do anything to stop her even if he wanted to. The interrogation was doomed to fail, and Kilgrave may have been showing some genuine terror there.
Ah. Yeah, that is a bit of a plot hole. I will excuse myself not having seen it as such because I actually thought the entire plan was doomed when it had to deal with the actual exigencies of the law. Whatever happened in that secret chamber that they would then have to explain knowing about would be written off as coerced or otherwise explained away or suppressed as evidence.
Yeah, but it’s Salon. Which is kinda baity and dumb 
Okay, while I feel that way about Salon for the most part, maybe it deserves a better response. I don’t see this at all the same as the shit you see in a lot of shows. That article is absolutely right, I could barely handle the first episode of GoT. There’s a ton of sexual assault they put on nowadays because you need to fill out a checklist of the shittiest things you can imagine to happen to characters before a show is “grown up” enough.
Jessica Jones just isn’t that… harrowing. From that article you’d think the show was just a constant crushing of Jessica, but… it wasn’t. It had a ton of hopeful moments, a lot of it with the support group. And an awful lot about the show was about Jessica healing and taking matters into her own hands.
Also, the article really complains about “agency” which is a complaint a lot of feminists use way to often in a way that’s not entirely clear to me. I understand what it’s supposed to be: a (in feminist discourse, usually female) character’s ability to make meaningful choices and not be a slave to other (usually male) characters. But people have a striking tendency to take this to the extreme and criticize any time a female character doesn’t have absolute, unfettered free reign to take any action without any external pressures pushing her in any direction. Which makes for really shitty drama.
All I can think of is that the writer viewed a lot of Kilgrave’s actions in a much more dire light than I did. While holding two people hostage with mind control so you ex will have dinner with you is, in theory (and real life), reprehensible, in practice it is a goofy as hell comic villain-y move. It even plays up the goofiness and pettiness of a lot of Kilgrave’s bullshit.
I liked Slate’s analysis a lot more, and wasn’t an angle I had considered. Edit: Ah, the second one was an Arthur Chu article, he’s usually pretty good and it’s little surprise I agree with him.
Edit2: One criticism I will give this show is that Krysten Ritter has some serious “Harrison Ford in Bladerunner” levels of hokey noire narration and “New York may be the city that never sleeps, but it sure as hell sleeps around” is one of the most amazingly bad lines I’ve ever heard.
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. They’re now in transition from “Jon Stewart sucks and we can’t wait for him to drop off the earth” to “Trevor Noah isn’t worthy to eat Jon Stewart’s poop”. But they still have plenty of material in the hopper about how atheist should shut the fuck up.
I would characterize it differently: it’s harrowing, but not indulgent. I only saw the first episode Game of Thrones, but I felt its darkness verged on masturbatory. Jessica Jones didn’t feel the need to go all Grand Guignol on us, and was more worthy of being taken seriously because of it.
Here, let me touch it up for you: “Man, New York is fucked up. Speaking of fucking…”
Honestly, I don’t know why they don’t demand that I write for television.
Personally, I thought the series was like a slightly-less-upbeat version of Gotham.
Just rewatched the episode where Luke gets the whammy put on him by Kilgrave, and during the flashback, whenever Kilgrave tells him to do something, afterwards Luke keeps blinking his eyes and looking confused, like he’s trying to fight the effect. I don’t recall anyone else reacting that way to being under Kilgrave, so that might support the idea that his powers aren’t as effective on supers, and that Luke might also have been able to break out of the effect, given enough time.
… No, it’s not a plot hole.
Isn’t your point that they both had to have known that he couldn’t be demonstrated to have used his powers on Jessica, so Jessica’s trying to goad him into using them was useless for the purpose of generating exculpatory evidence?
NOTE: I have only watched the pilot episode, and have only read through post #43, and won’t be back until I finish the entire season. If then.
I just wanted to pop in and say that I miss the “water cooler” style of threads where everyone gathers to discuss the latest episode (whether it is an episode by episode separate threads, or even a season long thread like Dr Who). It is usually enlightening and interesting to me.
With this new style of programming where an entire season is released at once, it makes that approach impossible. I could come back to the thread after I finish the season (which might take me 6 months), but even though I don’t post much anymore, there is no viable option for an interactive dialog with other Dopers on a particular aspect of an episode. Or no collective ability to wonder (or speculate) what-the-hell-is-going-on like with Lost for example.
I’m not really complaining about Netflix releasing the entire series at once because it definitely increases the viewership flexibility. I am simply disappointed that I can’t follow along in a thread like this.
You’re forgetting that until he escaped from the confinement cell Jessica didn’t know she was immune to his powers.
Damnit. Now I’m going to have to watch the whole thing again, because for some reason I remember that being in the air the whole time.