Yeah, that’s the one thing that’s bugging me so far. I mean, sure, be skeptical that this particular person was mind-controlled to commit this particular crime, but the absolute skepticism about the mere possibility of mind control is weird in context.
We binged and finished the series last night. It’s a little better than Daredevil, and shares its strengths and weaknesses.
The good: Great show, great premise, fine acting, good choreography. I loved the setup of this powerful hero still trying to heal from an awful trauma. It actually reminded me a bit of Upstream Color and those damaged people trying to come back from an unspeakable invasion of privacy/the soul. Whether it’s a metaphor for drug addiction or recovery from sexual abuse or just both, you can’t help but feel empathetic for those people.
Mr. Purple Man Killgrave also reminded of another Marvel property, Days of Future Past, wherein a speedster displayed such a casual disregard for the laws of man and physics, he seemed impossible to beat, if it came to that. In this case the villain uses mind control instead of a bit player using superspeed, but the hero’s faced with an impossible task, and yet she was the only person that could do the impossible. What drama!
The chemistry between Jones and Cage was also intense. After Daredevil, I could scarcely contain my enthusiasm for the Jessica Jones show. Now I can hardly wait for the Luke Cage show. I just wish that Jones had learned that the longer you hold on to a terrible secret, the worse it is when the other party learns about it. Hasn’t she ever seen a TV show?
The bad: Speaking of biting off more than they could chew, some of the effects demonstrating Jessica’s super-strength and “controlled jumping and falling” didn’t quite have the effect to pull off the effect. But we could use our imagination to picture what it “really” looked like. Also, the series went on too long.
The spoilers:
As easy to enter as Jessica’s office.
[spoiler]Like Daredevil, I think the back half of this series got a little lost in the weeds. While I liked seeing a fully fleshed out setting with interesting characters with their own richly-realized lives, I didn’t like that so much of the other nonsense got in the way of the core story of stopping the Killgrave. The plot thread with Poor Man’s Captain America using Poor Man’s Captain America Serum on behalf of Poor Man’s Hydra seemed especially egregious. The surviving comic relief twin took up too much screen time. The good guys inconvenience the bad guys, vice versa, the bad guys have the good guys in their control, vice versa, and so on. I’m glad they incorporated all the key points in Jessica’s life–her family, her origin story, her friendship with her adopted sister, her flirtation with heroism, her life in the enemy’s control, and her detective days. But I wish this was about four episodes shorter.
That said, the supporting actors, plus one crossover with Daredevil, really sold the idea that this is a living, breathing section of one of the capitals of the world.
Carrie-Ann Moss! Where has she been since Memento? What a fascinating ice queen, able to combine glamour and squalor in a hyper-intelligent package!
Another veteran African-American actor gets suddenly and tragically killed before the series’ end? I hope this isn’t a trend for all the Marvel series from here on out. Clarke Peters didn’t have enough time to etch out the kind of smart, experienced detective that he did in The Wire, but it was nice to see him again. For a short time.
David Tennant was the kind of liar where you think maybe, for a second, he can be redeemed. What an asshole.[/spoiler]
If it was a little bit shorter, this would be my favorite superhero movie.
You guys are making this sound pretty good. But I couldn’t stand this actress in Breaking Bad. Is she strong enough to carry the show, or do you kinda just end up hoping she’ll run into the characters you really care about?
I am about 4 episodes in… slow start but I like it now. Good show.
A few references to the green guy (the Hulk I assume) and aliens (what reference is this?) and a war that has recently happened… which war? What timeline / recent events have occurred with respect to the plotline of this series?
Thanks
AFAIK, this is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I think all of the events they refer to in the first four episodes occur in the first Avengers movie, when the Avengers save New York from an alien invasion (led by Loki). This is also occurring in the same timeline and part of New York as Daredevil, though I haven’t noticed any references to that so far.
I think she’s great in this role. I didn’t mind her in Breaking Bad though, so YMMV.
There is a small visual reference to events from Daredevil in a shot midway through JJ, so it likely takes place after. It’s Easter Egg-ish, so definitely not some emphatic declaration of canon or anything. Still holding out hope for explicit interlinks with one of the movies or especially another TV show, but slowly accepting that Marvel may bitch out on paying anyone big enough to matter for a cameo :-(
She’s great in the role, and one of the best matches for the animated character imaginable. So is the actor who plays Luke Cage. So was vincent d’onofrio as Kingpin. David Tenant may not be a perfect fit for the comic character, but he’s done a great job with the character as written for the show. Netflix Marvel has done a really good job with casting.
I agree completely with Djscman’s criticisms. I like this and I’m glad it’s getting attention, but I’m a little surprised to see as many reviews as I did holding it above Daredevil (or saying Tennant was a better villain than D’Onofrio). Jessica Jones was a riskier project, maybe that’s putting that reviews on a curve.
Don’t want to sound too down on it though, I enjoyed it and recommend it.
I missed that! Could you enlighten me?
I think you missed …
…that the nurse who helps JJ and gets LC out of the hospital and back to JJ’s in the last episode is the nurse who helped DD and had a romantic thing with him in DD.
Final verdict: awesome show, just a bit too much side-plot padding, as Djscman pin-points.
It seems to be a thing. Both this and DD could easily have been 3 or 4 episodes shorter, although the problems are a bit different. JJ has too much rambling side-plot that it’s difficult to care about, whereas with DD there perhaps wasn’t enough side-plot flavouring, and its main plot was stretched too thin.
Maybe they’ve just got to accept going forward that around 9-10 episodes is quite enough for these kinds of shows. They probably need to avoid getting a bad rep for the same problem again and again.
Oh, spoiler about Simpson.
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I didn’t realize Simpson was Nuke until googling it this morning, although I actually thought about it during the show. I couldn’t remember much about Nuke other than that he had the flag painted on his face, so when Simpson was taking red white and blue pills I thought maybe that was just a reference to Nuke. I even googled Simpson’s name during that episode and somehow in half-paying attention on my phone I didn’t realize at the time that he actually was Nuke (I don’t think I knew Nuke took the same pills, I just vaguely remembered him as another Captain America type gone wrong). That was the biggest misstep of the show for me. Padding out the episodes dragged things, but that felt like one coincidence too far in a show that somehow had me buying a mind controller stumbling onto a super-strength woman who knows an unbreakable bartender. Especially after I’d started liking him at first because of the way he slowly goes from another random Kilgrave victim to a part of the team with very believable motivations for joining up and equally believably reasons for eventually butting heads with Jessica and her approach.
In Episode 7, in the police station, you’ll see a newspaper about the real estate scandal from Daredevil in the background of a couple of shots. Very minor, but a passing nod, at the least.
Guru, sadly, since Tapatalk doesn’t respect Spoiler Tags in thread previews, I saw the start of your message. I’d heard that particular, ah, return was scheduled for this show, but still, that’s nothing too significant and remains restricted to the Netflix properties, AFAIK. With the wealth of material out and about for the show to feed on (AoS, the movies), a couple of passing mentions of “aliens in the city” and a kid in a cap costume (plus what you pointed out in the 1-2 lines of your spoiler I accidentally read) still makes the universe feel a lot more claustrophobic than it has to.
I’m only three episodes in, but really liking it so far. This is the show that I think I wanted Heroes to be.
I don’t mind that there’s not much crossover with the rest of the MCU. The Avengers have more important things to do than get involved with a low level villain who’s just messing with individual people.
But I imagine we’ll see a Daredevil appearance at some point, especially if JJ gets a season 2. And we’re getting a stand-alone Luke Cage series, too, right?
I don’t want to spend my entire output in this thread whining, because at the point I’m at (finished Episode 7 over the weekend, on break till Thanksgiving, unfortunately), I’d give the show a 9/10 at the very least. . .
. . . but yeah, while I wouldn’t expect Thor to soar down from the space-heavens to tell Killgrave to stop being a weird, rapey dick, I do think it’s interesting that you’ve got multiple fairly obviously superpowered people running around downtown NYC without attracting the attention of SHIELD or especially the ATCU–much less some wing of Hydra (who always seem to have a boner for powered people). Even if they all got dismissed for not being Inhuman enough to fit the needs of the ongoing Agents storyline, you’d still expect them to at least check.
All of which is still leagues better than the schizophrenic canon-mess that DC is burying themselves in over in their multiverse of properties. Tossing out any sense of world/universe-building they might have gleaned from the Nolan flicks, Superman Returns, or Green Lantern (admittedly, in the latter two cases, with good enough reason) in favor of ramming Justice League down our throats with an absolute minimum of preparation while letting their various TV properties flounder, unconnected between networks and thoroughly divorced from their film properties, they seem intent on having as many separate timelines and storyline buildups as possible. I mean hell, are we even going to meet/learn to give a shit about any of the villains in Suicide Squad before seeing them form, well, the Suicide Squad? Half of what made the group so delightfully vile in Arrow was seeing the villains in their natural element for a few episodes first. Nevermind that we lost a really great Deadshot in Arrow because DC was apparently afraid people would get confused between him and Will Smith in the movie. Gyahhhfuck.
Err, anyway, Jessica Jones’ first half is really fuckin good. People should watch it. Yeahhhh
I know this is the wrong thread, but you brought it up and I respect your sensibilities about stuff like this; I gave up on Arrow after one-too-many “Batman-, er, I mean Arrow” moments. Did it get better as the show progressed?
Speaking for myself obviously, but yes, it got better. I don’t know how far you made it, but season one started to find its way in the second half, and season two was great start to finish. Season three was less focused and the villain was weak (not written well, not acted well), but still had its moments, and season four is great all around again. And season three and four both benefit from overlap with Flash.
I didn’t quite wrap up season one. I’m curious, as I’m home sick and wouldn’t mind watching something to keep my mind off the illness.
A couple of observations while watching Jessica Jones:
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For someone who drinks booze all the time, she sure seems sober a lot. I don’t need to see her falling down drunk or anything, but I’d like to see a bit more effect from supposedly being a drunk. And yes, I get that she’s supposed to be a functioning alcoholic in the maintenance drinking phase, but having been around a couple of real-life drunks in my life, there should be more visible impairment.
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The sex isn’t dirty enough. I know that sounds weird, but bear with me. If the idea is to show how broken Jessica is by having empty self-destructive sex, then the show fails utterly. The scenes with Jessica and Cage in flagrante are too sexy and too clean. It’s just normal sex, shot in tasteful ways. Show me some clumsy drunk sex. (See my complaint above.) Show me Jessica asking for acts that kind of scare or freak out Cage. Show Jessica asking to be hurt emotionally and physically.
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David Tennant as Kilgrave is good stuff. I give the show major props for holding back on scenes with Kilgrave for as long as it does.
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As for the rest of the MCU, I’m not buying the tie at all. This has even less relationship to everything else that’s happening than even Daredevil. That’s simultaneously a strength and a weakness. Jessica Jones has a lot of freedom to tell its own story, but in the context of the MCU, it makes no damn sense at all. People act like mind control is flat-out impossible which at this point in the MCU/SHIELD arc is nuts. By this point, that should be an easy sell.
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Overall, I’ll stick with it for season 2, but I’m not loving it as much as you guys. I’m more curious to see how Marvel and Netflix fit together the rest of the Hell’s Kitchen plan.
Can’t say I disagree with Wholly there. Arrow’s held back by its CW roots (young, beautiful people engaged in tons of relationship drama set in [SHOW-SETTING]), no doubt, and it does crib liberally from Batman (a certain Season 3 villain is particularly egregious). . . but somehow, it winds up being some of my favorite superhero TV. Oliver’s evolution through the 3.5 seasons we’ve seen is fantastic (and Amell’s grown a lot as an actor), and watching more and more parts of the Arrow mythos show up–either seriously or via lampshade hanging–is a lot of fun. And sometimes that relationship drama even winds up being accidentally compelling (the evolving relationship between Oliver and Diggle in S4 is really great).
Season 2’s probably the strongest overall (great villain, good X-of-the-week eps, impactful arc, good character development, good flashbacks), but S4 is shaping up to be awesome, too. S3 wasn’t bad by any stretch (the early villain was delightfully cheesy-wonderful), just not quite to the level of 2/4. And yes, absolutely, the interconnection with Flash, although rarely essential (plot-wise), is fantastic. I’d go so far as to say that Flash is probably the better show, but it’s also extremely different (far brighter, happier, and faster-paced–no pun intended). But they’re stronger for existing in the same universe, and the buildup to Legends of Tomorrow during the mid-season break seems like CW intends to continue building its own DC empire that is–thus far–way better than anything outside of the Nolanverse and maybe the Donner Superman films.