Jessica Jones, series 3, review: a flawed but wildly enjoyable end
The third series of Jessica Jones begins with what we’ve come to expect: Jessica doing something heroic in an entirely un-heroic way, making more enemies than she does friends, and complaining about it the whole time. It continues this a similar vein for the first eight episodes.
This isn’t a criticism. It would be so easy to hate a character like Jessica for being so deeply unpleasant, but she’s written so well and Krysten Ritter plays her with such odd charm that she’s fun to watch. And, as before, series three doesn’t rely on this charm or lots of fight scenes to make it entertaining, but instead uses the unique traits and history of the character to create a fantastical world which lets us look into the complexities of our own.
It shouldn’t matter that Jessica Jones is a woman, but it does, because everything she does and is suddenly has a different weight to it. Jessica’s powers mean that the thing that men would (and do) use to threaten or intimidate women – namely, their increased physical size and strength – doesn’t work. That’s why, in Jessica Jones, the best adversaries are the ones who use mind games to make her feel helpless or powerless.
In series one, with Kilgrave, it was coercive consent and living with the aftermath of abuse. In series two, it was being caught between her murderous biological mother and her found-family in the form of Trish (Rachael Taylor), and the emotional and moral complexities that came with it. And in the third series, we have Gregory Salinger – known in the comics as “Foolkiller”.
It’s never explicitly spelled out, but Salinger is basically an incel, or “involuntary celibate” – one of the men online who congregate in forums like Reddit to rage against women for having a social capital that they don’t. Salinger doesn’t specifically hate women, but he does hate anyone that he thinks hasn’t earned their skills. While he has had to work hard for everything in his life (such as his multiple degrees), he thinks that powered people are “frauds” for getting their powers from luck. He hates them for having the respect he craves, and this hatred has taken over his life.
Salinger is a delicious villain, even scarier in some ways than Kilgrave: while there was an element of the fantastical about Kilgrave, Salinger feels worryingly like someone you could meet in real life. A scene where he demands that Jeri Hogarth earn his respect as a lawyer, despite her astonishing career so far, will be familiar to many woman who are expected to prove their knowledge of geek culture or other expertise to be taken seriously. Jeremy Bobb plays him perfectly – he is (mostly) rational and calm, with an intensity bubbling under the surface that gives the people around him reason to pause, but nothing that they can explicitly say is a problem.
Salinger’s argument is that powered people aren’t heroes but frauds, and to set this up the first few episodes look at newly-powered Trish and Jessica’s very different approaches to being a hero. Jessica has accepted, begrudgingly, that there is something in her that needs to help people – but she struggles with being labelled a hero. Trish, meanwhile, has wanted to be a hero her whole life, is overjoyed to finally have the means to do so, and resentful of the fact that no-one recognises her for it. Jessica operates almost entirely in the grey area of morality, whereas Trish sees things in stark black-and-white.
The relationship between Trish and Jessica has always been one of the best parts of the show, and this series it’s a lot more complicated – especially when Trish starts to realise that being the hero she’s always wanted to be is just as miserable as Jessica always said it was. Love, anger, duty, resentment, forgiveness and respect all fight with each other when the two women interact, and the intense climax to episode eight suggests that the five final episodes of the series will be once again focusing on the human aspects of a very superhuman situation – which has always been where Jessica Jones is at its best.
Similar, the very human situations in which the secondary characters find themselves in this season are wonderful. She only has a small part, but I could watch Aneesh Sheth as Jessica’s gloriously snarky new secretary, Gillian, forever. Malcolm (Eka Darville) is the foil to Jessica and Trish, a non-powered man trying to figure out how to be a good person even as his day-job sees him do some morally dubious things. He, along with the excellent Detective Costa (John Ventimiglia), who is an ally to Jones, both discover, just like Jessica and Trish, that doing good things and being the hero sometimes means ruining your own life in the process.
But the real kudos has to go to Carrie-Ann Moss as Jeri Hogarth, who may be having more fun with her role than any actor has ever had. Jeri’s worsening motor neurone disease has given her a kind of desperation that means every action is turned up to 11. The first episode sees Hogarth and Jones have a terrible, heart-wrenching scene in her living room that makes you wonder if the former will ever feel happiness again. Two episodes later, she’s having cello-aided sex with an ex-girlfriend, and later we see said girlfriend puts those musical fingers to good use under Jeri’s skirt during a concert.
Hogarth makes bold decisions in order to maximise the time she has left, and when they start to crumble around her, Moss somehow makes you feel both vindicated and sympathetic. It’s not always entirely clear why we’re spending so much time on Jeri; she doesn’t have much of a role in the main story apart from to make things a bit more complicated for Jessica. Still, her story is so entertaining, you don’t care.
The series isn’t perfect. Although I’m a fan of the slow-burn approach, some episodes in series three feel very flabby, and there are some ridiculous plot holes where the story clearly needs Jessica and Trish to be in certain situations and will tie itself in knots to get them there. There is no mention of the rest of the MCU, which is frustrating – why is no-one talking about the events of Infinity War and Endgame? – and there are a few instances where a theme that was gently probed for several episodes is then whacked over your head with all the subtly of Jessica vs a parked car.
Even so, it’s wildly enjoyable, and a relief to see that after a slow series two, Jessica Jones has returned to form in what we now know will be its final series. It’s an enormous shame that the show is ending, because even with the enormous amount of superhero media out there, it’s unlike anything else on screen right now. The same can be said of the other Netflix MCU shows, which were cancelled one by one last year after Disney, who own Marvel, announced their own streaming service. Culture is best when it’s a mirror to the world, and all of the shows did that in their own way.
Daredevil was a cinematic masterpiece and, at its core, was a story about a brilliant lawyer who couldn’t find justice in a broken legal system; Luke Cage was about a bulletproof black man in a world where young black men are 9 to 16 times more likely to be shot by police than other demographic groups. The Punisher looked at the effects of PTSD and army violence on a man who fundamentally wanted to do the right thing.
Although season one of Iron Fist was… um, interesting, the second season looked at what it meant for a white, privileged billionaire to realise that he didn’t want or need to be the hero. And Jessica Jones had a woman who was physically strong but (understandably) mentally shaky after the world kept battering her – but who kept going anyway.
Netflix only released the first eight episodes of Jessica Jones as screeners, so I’m not sure how the series will end. The arc of the series so far has been focused on the ideas of power, strength, vulnerability and what truly makes a hero, so I hope that those questions are, if not answered, then at least the basis of the plot for the final few episodes. So far, though, although this series doesn’t have as many impressive fight scenes as Daredevil or Iron Fist, the mental gymnastics it forces you to do in order to figure out how you feel about the characters and what’s happening on screen makes it more than engaging enough.
Let’s raise a glass of bourbon (neat) in honour of a show that, just like its titular character, may not have been perfect, but was doing a damn good job anyway. Alias Investigations, you will be missed.
Jessica Jones is streaming now on Netflix
