Spoiler alert: this blog discusses events in episodes eight-12 of Marvel’s Jessica Jones on Netflix, don’t read on if you haven’t finished the entire season. You can read about episodes 1-7 here.



You can’t go home again. Unless, of course, you’re being stalked by a self-regarding sociopath with mind-control powers who is so obsessed with you he acquires the house you grew up in, painstakingly restores it to how it was when you lived there, and then emotionally blackmails you to co-habit with him alongside a suspicious bodyguard and a brace of distressed domestic staff.



That’s where Jessica Jones found herself at the start of episode eight, back on the same suburban streets she’d previously recited as a mantra to protect herself from unwelcome memories of her time in thrall to the smarmy Kilgrave. Jessica’s reconstructed bedroom even had authentic-looking Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers posters on the wall, while her fussy, overbearing suitor whined about how he’d recreated her teenage CD collection perfectly by zooming in on her old photos. The heightened, gaudy sense of artificial domesticity added an extra layer of horror to what was already an unsettling story of stalking and abuse.



Jessica Jones: shattering exploration of rape, addiction and control Read more

It was also an obvious opportunity to examine Jessica’s life before she became the most belligerent and perma-sozzled private eye in Hell’s Kitchen. While Kilgrave attempted to “make everything perfect” in a deluded attempt at seduction, Jessica relived formative moments from her youth, sometimes as discrete flashbacks, sometimes as nightmarish memories overlaid on to the present. She revisited the harrowing deaths of her parents and baby brother in a car crash, and the immediate aftermath when, as a PR stunt, she was adopted by showbiz mom Dorothy and her teen star daughter Trish. The opportunistic Walkers were unaware that the newest addition to their celebrity clan could suddenly benchpress a heavy marble sink.

From Spider-Man to the X-Men, the use of emerging superpowers as a metaphor for puberty is a fairly creaky comics trope, and Jessica Jones didn’t lean too heavily into it. It also never really explored It’s Patsy!, the saccharine teen show about a precocious redhead that made Trish a superstar and kept the cash rolling in for grasping Dorothy. Considering that Marvel is now owned by Disney, perhaps it’s not too surprising they didn’t go into much detail about the awfulness of being a heavily marketed child star.



With his laser-sighted focus, a cool head under pressure and penchant for natty waistcoats, David Tennant sometimes seemed to be playing Kilgrave as the world’s most malevolent snooker pro. After witnessing him turn people’s lives inside out for sport with his unnatural and callously offhanded influence, there was a thrill to seeing the blustery baddie finally outwitted by Jessica and whisked from his ersatz vision of domestic bliss to a chilly isolation cell with a plumbing defect jury-rigged into an electroshock delivery apparatus.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Tennant on playing a villain.

With Kilgrave neutralised and living out his own personal bottle episode, Jessica could drill into his past, reviewing archive footage of a shivering 10-year-old undergoing invasive brain biopsies and cerebral spinal fluid extractions at the University of Manchester, in a presumably unsanctioned research programme. Suffering at the hands of Albert and Louise, his apparently uncaring scientist parents, this was a version of Kilgrave it was possible to feel sympathy for, a scared child being brutalised. We also learned “Kilgrave” was a nom de guerre he had chosen, that he was born Kevin Thompson.

While Tennant modulated his performance to plant the seed that Kevin could potentially be just as much of victim as those he had manipulated, it was inevitably all a feint. In the nature-v-nurture debate, it seemed like he was always destined to be a villain, and that in saving Kevin from a degenerative neural disease with their aggressive treatments, the Thompsons had merely increased his capacity for evil a hundredfold by unlocking his mind control powers. Jessica’s hope that staging an impromptu family reunion would force Kilgrave to demonstrate his abilities on film (providing evidence to exonerate poor Hope, still accused of murdering her parents) seemed like a risky gambit. That it went so badly wrong – with Kilgrave coolly compelling his mother to repeatedly stab herself with a pair of scissors – was predictable, and not just because there were still four episodes to go.

In the penultimate phase of their cat-and-mouse chess game, Kilgrave pulled off the daring move of turning Luke Cage against Jessica, triggering a brutal slugfest in a hipster music venue that concluded with the brooding bartender with apparently impermeable skin taking both barrels of a shotgun to the face. That brought Cage and a frantic Jessica into the orbit of Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson), the night nurse who patches up Daredevil, the only explicit connection with Netflix’s previous Marvel show.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marvel’s Jessica Jones starring Mike Colter as Luke Cage. Photograph: MYLES ARONOWITZ/NETFLIX

As Luke recuperated in the totally trashed offices of Alias Investigations, Jessica poured out something else apart from a generous measure of bourbon – her heart. “You’re the first person I ever pictured a future with,” she told the unconscious Cage. “And you’re also the first person I ever shot in the head.” The final confrontation, when it came, was definitive. Kilgrave attempted to cover his escape by turning innocent civilians into a murderous mob tearing each other apart, and when that didn’t work, he attempted to co-opt Trish as a permanent human shield. Jessica, mentally and emotionally strong enough to overcome his insidious influence, snapped his neck like a chicken.

Does that make Jessica Jones less of a hero than, say, Daredevil? It certainly keeps her in a more morally grey area than the rest of the Marvel screen universe, a place that – as it endlessly expands – could probably use some points of differentiation. After everything that Jessica went through over the course of 13 episodes, a prolonged, exhausting gauntlet that required her to make imperfect decisions and live with them, it genuinely felt like she’d earned that break. It also can’t have been easy for Krysten Ritter, continuously called upon to play emotionally and physically draining scenes. Only Tatiana Maslany, playing multiple roles on Orphan Black, must have racked up a comparable number of minutes on-screen per episode.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Krysten Ritter and Rachael Taylor as Jessica Jones and Trish Walker. Photograph: Allstar/MARVEL STUDIOS

Not all of it worked. Simpson, the bug-eyed super-soldier popping red, white and blue pills, felt like a wild card too far. Poor upstairs neighbour Robyn, grieving the death and ungracious burial of her twin brother, was written as a vengeful kook, a surprisingly sour take on a marginalised character on a show that otherwise celebrated diversity. Like Daredevil, Jessica Jones also killed off some of its most interesting supporting characters late in the game, in an attempt to raise stakes that were already pretty high.

But overall, Jessica Jones has pushed beyond the usual limits of a superhero show by exploring the darker, more desperate sides of human behaviour, aided by black humour and Jessica’s permanently raised eyebrow. Will there be a second season before she’s called up for Netflix’s planned Hell’s Kitchen hero crossover The Defenders? The Alias Investigations door seems to have been deliberately left open, and not just because Jessica keeps throwing agitated clients through it.

What did you think of Jessica Jones? Let us know in the comments below