Jessica Jones hates the sinister Kilgrave, so why, when he requests a selfie of her smiling, does she send him one? Illustration by Tomer Hanuka

“I promise that I won’t touch you until I get your genuine consent,” the sinister Kilgrave (David Tennant) announces, on “Marvel’s Jessica Jones,” the latest tentacle to emerge from the Marvel universe. It’s a villain’s line, but one that carries a throb of multiple meanings. It’s Kilgrave’s vow not to hurt a woman he’s already brutalized. It’s delivered as a romantic seduction. And it seethes with modern ironies, as if culled from a freshman handbook aimed at preventing sexual assault.

Jessica Jones (played with a traumatized glare by Krysten Ritter) has, like her peers, supernatural gifts: extreme strength and the ability to jump enormous heights. (Her flying abilities aren’t quite there yet.) But she’s damaged goods, as the jerks might put it, having been scarred by her time in the good-guy business, when she was coerced into becoming Kilgrave’s girlfriend. Using mind control, Kilgrave kept Jessica in a state of total submission—dressed up like a pretty trophy, exploited as a sex toy, continually smiling at his command. In the aftermath of this nightmare, she’s found a gig more suited to her jaundiced mind-set: noir private eye. Holed up in her apartment, binge drinking, Jessica is a hostile basket case, barely keeping her P.T.S.D. in check, while she spends her nights tracking the ugly adulteries of strangers, confirming her dark view of the world.

In this state of nihilistic freefall, she gets involved with a beautiful fellow-superhero, Luke Cage (played by Mike Colter, best known as Lemond Bishop from “The Good Wife”—an actor with so much sexual gravity that he could be his own planet). She tests the loyalties of her oldest friend, Trish, who is a talk-show host and a former child star; she also does investigatory gigs for a corporate attorney (a nicely metallic Carrie-Anne Moss) who is going through a bitter divorce from her wife. But Kilgrave still lingers on the fringes of Jessica’s life, wreaking havoc. His crimes are chilling: no matter what he says, his words get taken literally, as commands, compelling innocent people to stab themselves or to abandon their children, shove their arms into whirring blenders or never, ever blink. But it is always Jessica who is his real target, his crimes intended to send messages to her—a courtship, in his eyes.

In early episodes, Jessica is a bit of a drag: she’s like the self-image of every brooding brunette, a hot punk Daria in shredded Citizens of Humanity jeans and red lipstick. But whenever the plot snaps her together with her horrifying ex it springs to life, suggesting disturbing ambiguities about the hangover of abuse. Kilgrave raped Jessica, but since he did so using mind control, rather than physical force, the scenario emerges as a plastic, unsettling metaphor, a violation that produces a sense of collusion. Mind control is a roofie, but it’s also an addiction. It’s mental illness; it’s domestic violence. At times, the psychological scars that Kilgrave leaves on his victims, who gather in a support group, suggest the result of an extreme political ideology, the sort that might cause a soldier to commit atrocities that would never have occurred in isolation. It’s any mind-set that causes you to do something against your nature—a guilty burden but also, for some, an eerie escape from responsibility. Jessica hates Kilgrave, so why, when he requests a selfie of her smiling, does she send him one? She has strategic reasons. But to the world it looks as if she were flirting—and that’s what he keeps telling her, too.

It’s a particularly effective form of gaslighting, since he has cast her in a popular narrative, one that shows up in many forms these days, in books and movies, and particularly in stories aimed at and embraced by female audiences. Is it really such a reach for Kilgrave to insist that Jessica will succumb to him in the end? Tweak Kilgrave’s banter, and he’d be a wealthy vampire who desires Jessica above any other woman, a man who is literally irresistible, as in “Twilight.” Wrench it again, and they’d be role-playing “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

“I am new to love,” Kilgrave tells Jessica. “But I know what it looks like. I do watch television.” Much of the reason that their dynamic works is because of Tennant’s sly and layered performance, which suggests a grotesque innocence beneath Kilgrave’s sadism, a distorted belief that this is true romance. It’s the ultimate in entitlement: he deserves Jessica because he desires her, which means that her own desires are just obstacles. (He won’t even take responsibility for the brainwashing, arguing that his supernatural powers are actually a burden: “I have to painstakingly choose every word I say. I once told a man to go screw himself. Can you even imagine?”) At times, their relationship reminded me of the Jonathan Coulton song “Skullcrusher Mountain,” in which a supervillain regards his hostage as a mysteriously recalcitrant date. “I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you,” he croons. “But I get the feeling you don’t like it. What’s with all the screaming? . . . Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?”

Of course, a modern TV show needs to be more than go-girl feminist to be any good. (If you doubt that, check out the absolute disaster that is the pilot for Amazon’s “Good Girls Revolt.”) And, truth be told, “Jessica Jones” wasn’t entirely my jam. It took five episodes for me to get interested—three too many, in these days of television glut. And only after the seventh and eighth did the cruel and clever plot twists (which include graphic torture) become truly gripping. In the early episodes, the pacing was logy and the action muddy, with several subplots that itched to be trimmed or recast.

Still, right away I could tell what was firing up so many viewers, particularly online: in the world of Marvel Comics, a female antihero—a female anything—is a step forward. But a rape survivor, struggling with P.T.S.D., is a genuine leap. While the fact that “Jessica Jones” is Marvel’s first TV franchise starring a superpowered woman—and that it was created by a female showrunner, Melissa Rosenberg—amounts to a pretty limited sort of artistic progress, the show doesn’t need to be perfect in order to deepen the debate. In a genre format that is often reflexively juvenile about sexuality, “Jessica Jones” is distinctly adult, an allegory that is unafraid of ugliness.

As I watched Jessica and Kilgrave spar, another show kept coming to mind: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the comic-book-inflected series that made me into a television critic, and which was airing around the same time that the original Jessica Jones comic-book series, “Alias,” came out. “Buffy” ’s most divisive season was its sixth, when the villains weren’t the show’s traditional “big bads” but extremely little ones: three comic-book-loving nerds, Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew, who began as minor characters, precisely the type of geeky guys who bicker over the merits of TV adaptations of Marvel comics. Their gang, the Trio, was a goofy lark, designed as much to catch the attention of the superpowered Buffy as it was to defeat her. Only over time did they slide, in increments, into real crimes, attempted rape and murder. And, like “Jessica Jones,” the show was less obsessed with pure-cut violent misogyny than with the queasy intersection of seduction and mind control, with fantasies about overriding consent and the excuses that abusers make for their worst acts.