Jessica Jones - from Marvel and Netflix

Finished JJ yesterday morning and really liked it. I think I preferred it over DareDevil. I would never have guessed the actress playing Jessica is the same one that played Lucy in Gilmore Girls 10+ years ago. Wow.

I thought Tenant was fantastic and the show did a great job building up how creepy and evil Killgrave is. I can’t think of many shows in which I hated the bad guy so thoroughly and so early in the show. Cage was awesome…even the way he fights seemed so believable. I look forward to season two of both DD and JJ.

Note to Marvel TV writers: if something like the Hulk existed everyone on Earth would know his name. Just say “the Hulk.” They know he’s the Hulk, we know he’s the Hulk. Stop trying to be cute about it. Every time one of your characters says “the green guy” it’s like we can hear the writing room trying to be clever making an Avengers reference.

Well, then it’s pretty true to the comics. The Green Arrow comics were basically Batman in green. Dude had an Arrowcave, an Arrowmobile and an Arrowplane.

I actually meant to have a line about "Then again, if you’re a vengeful billionaire martial artist fighting crime, there’s bound to be some overlap. . . " but it appears that editing ate that at some point :)

S4 seems like it might be moving us in the [to me] more interesting direction of the more socially progressive, politically active Green Arrow of the 60s/70s (that they keep teasing Hal Jordan is just cruel, IMO). That’ll probably have things feeling nice and fresh going into S5.

Arrowplane is one of my favorite RHCP songs.

Dammit Armando, really sorry about that :( I vaguely assumed you’d seen the whole thing and just didn’t recognize her for some odd reason; and I’ll be aware of that Tapatalk limitation from now on.

Re. the mind control problem some people are talking about. I don’t know if it is all that weird for mind control to still be a stretch for most ordinary people in that situation. So far all they know of the superhero thing is aliens, hardware, muscle, etc. (Would they even have an inkling about the Mind Gem shenanigans?) Tremendous power in the physical sense, physical weirdness (so you see the beginning of acceptance of “gifts” and you get things like “you’re one of THEM”), yes. But mind control?

Also, this is set BEFORE the second Cap movie reveal isn’t it? So even a vague connection between the possibility of mind control and Hydra/SHIELD shenanigans wouldn’t flit through peoples’ minds.

Agree with the Arrow assessments people are having. It’s never been quite as consistent a show as the Flash (although to be fair, the Flash hasn’t been on as long), and seasons 2/4 being a bit better quality than 1/3 is about right. I actually very nearly didn’t finish Season 1, I just hung in there because I was starting to enjoy the characters.

And Amell really has improved a lot as an actor over the course of the seasons. He’s much less stiff and “I’m acting” than he used to be - I think that he’s now actually quite capable of pulling off the canny Progressive politicized version of GA now, whereas he never would have been before, even right up to the 3rd season. It’s quite nice to see an actor actually getting more skilled right before your eyes. (Same with Laurel, although less so - she was abysmally bad in the first 2 seasons, but she’s quite tolerable now, and as an added bonus, really looks quite awesomely kinky as Canary.)

Back to JJ, and re. Telefrog’s booze point - they do mention at one point that she’s got a bit faster healing than a normal human being, so maybe that explains her high tolerance to alcohol. Which is reminiscent of Cap - in fact, her raw power level seems roughly equivalent to Cap’s, which no doubt will play into next season’s reveals about the origin of her abilities, if that is indeed where her investigations go.

I wasn’t aware that this was supposed to be taking place before Winter Soldier. Where did they show/say that?

Regardless, I think once you accept alien invasions and The Avengers as parts of “normal” life, you shouldn’t easily dismiss the possibility of mind control. The people in Jessica Jones acted like only crazy people would have anything to do with the idea, which doesn’t jibe. I can see why you’d still need legal proof of mind control for a particular crime to not be your fault, but the story as presented in the show makes it seem like mind control is just as far-fetched as our world.

No worries gurugeorge; like I said, you weren’t really the one to spoil that for me, and I appreciate your liberal use of tags in discussing that stuff. It’s far more Tapatalk’s fault here than anyone’s :)


Re: timeline foibles, it’s really becoming increasingly confused. Daredevil seems to be set around the same time as Agents of Shield S2 and Avengers 2: Age of Ultron, insofar as characters mention the Battle of NY being about 2 years prior when discussing the reconstruction efforts, but no one is talking about a bunch of Murder-Robots stalking the earth and slaying people.

Neither Daredevil nor Jessica Jones appears to directly acknowledge the events of Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier or Thor 2: The Dark World (unless we take the line about knowing mind control isn’t real in the same way they also know elves aren’t real to mean that TDW hasn’t taken place yet–lulz), but then again, aside from some very limited references to the Battle of NY, they just seem not to reference the broader MCU much at all. Now, I get that these are more “street level” heroes with very immediate, pressing, and thoroughly personal concerns who might not spend a lot of time waxing philosophical about the implications of the US government funding a shadowy Nazi (or not! AoS S3 spoilers :P) organization for decades. . . but still, it’s hard to tell if it’s the shows going out of their way to be vague about the rest of the MCU, or if the big events in TWS, AoU, and TDW just haven’t occurred yet.

It’s probably worth noting here that AoU/AoS S2 both occur after TWS and TDW fairly definitively (AoS S2 in particular, since S1 directly deals with the fallout from TWS and TDW, and AoU because it deals with material gleaned from AoS S2). So yeah, hence my genuine confusion about the timeline moving forward.

edit: MCU fanmade Wiki valiantly strives to timeline the shows/movies, probably fails.


Also, to continue my offtopic discussions and directly contradict myself from earlier (sort of), I will say that while Amell’s range has grown a lot, I actually read a nice little fan theory about his “stick up the ass” emotional “acting” in the early seasons of Arrow. Some posited that after “5 years on a Hellish island” and returning home as a grizzled spirit of vengeance, Oliver had to actively “reset” back to a more human/normal persona before interacting with people in a “non-shooting-with-arrows” manner, hence his literal “big sigh and stare straight ahead” routine before every emotional conversation in the early seasons. I mean, maybe that was also due to the actor just not being able to swing said scenes in any other (more believable) way, but the in-universe explanation makes it a lot more palatable :-D

I don’t think we know anything about the time period either, other than that it’s after Daredevil.

If we were just talking about the movies, I could still buy a city that lived through the invasion from The Avengers* struggling to believe in mind control. Not that it couldn’t happen, but that it’s such an uncomfortable idea (specifically from another human walking around among us, not some interstellar threat) and so difficult to prove that people would do everything they could to rationalize it away—and obviously it would be especially hard to demonstrate legally.

But then if I try to figure out where Agents of SHIELD fits in, I just shrug and laugh. I’m a few episodes behind on that show, so I don’t even know the latest events, but all that Inhuman stuff is all over the place. I can’t remember who said earlier that these shows felt very disconnected from the rest of the MCU—maybe you Telefrog?—but to me it’s specifically Agents of SHIELD that doesn’t fit if you think about it at all. DD and JJ are telling smaller stories that are believable in the context of the larger events of the movies, even while completely different in tone. AoS wants to be a big deal, it’s tackling stories that should be a big deal, but between production constraints and alleged tensions past and/or ongoing in the management between the movies and TV, it just seems to highlight its weird standing in the MCU more often than it enriches or advances it.

*I don’t think it’s really important whether Winter Soldier, Thor 2, or Age of Ultron have happened as far as DD and JJ are concerned.

Yeah, that was me. The whole MCU/show continuity is weird.

By the way, the showrunner is saying that season 2 may not happen until after The Defenders (the show with Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Daredevil teaming up) is wrapped.

…Which may be quite far out.

Is there room for a second season of Jessica Jones before The Defenders in your mind?

I hope so. There certainly is storytelling wise. The question becomes is there actual time? There are logistics involved, because Defenders has to shoot by a certain time, contractually. Actually, I’m not sure; I’m not at all involved in those conversations, much to my dismay. The first question is whether or not we will even get a second season. The second question is, if so, when? Will it be before The Defenders or after? I’d certainly love it to be before but there are things that play into that — time, availability.

Regarding all the sex… I mentioned to my fiancee early ‘man this show has a lot of banging in it’, then repeated this just about every episode. then in the later ones the sex was replaced with the fighting, so the ‘man this show has a lot of banging in it’ came when people’s heads were being banged in. good times.

Loved the show, thought Kilgrave was an amazing villain.

Ep 1 down. Amazing start.

What an utterly fantastic show. I binge watched my way through the whole thing. Very genre defying, in that is discards virtually all of the standard tropes of Superhero films/shows. I half suspect that the writing team had a really compelling story about an abuse survivor they wanted to tell and sprinkled in some Marvel heroes and villains to get it on the air.

We’re at episode 7, and man this is depressing. The show is great, but its REALLY slow and dark and depressing.

The story is directly from the Marvel comic.

Yup - that writing team.

Two eps in and absolutely loving this. Really enjoy the lead; she’s as good as JJ as Charlie Cox is as Daredevil and I adored his performance. Marvel/Netflix are just kicking ass.

Awesome, comics have apparently gotten better writing since I last read on in the 80s.

…and worse again. It was published during a really experimental time in the early 2000s, when Marvel really pushed boundaries and launched its new “adult” line.

Since the company was acquired by Disney (and even prior to that, after President Bill Jemas left in the mid-2000s), Marvel has gotten much more politically correct and concerned about offending anyone, and more illiberal and safe with its publishing as a result.

Eh. There’s still a lot more talented writers doing cool stuff at Marvel than there were back in the day. Bendis, who wrote the Jessica Jones comic, is one of the people running things nowadays, and titles like Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye are flipping incredible. Whereas their MAX line produced a few cool things (Ennis’s Punisher MAX, Alias, Supreme Power, etc) but was never up to the standards of DC’s Vertigo imprint, the clear inspiration, and there were also MAX titles that seemed edgy just to be edgy.

That said, if you want the best comics writing, mainstream superhero comics from either publisher aren’t exactly the forefront. They’re just better than they used to be because of people like Bendis, Fraction, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, etc all doing a lot of work for the big two.