When she first became Marvel’s Jessica Jones for Netflix in 2015, Krysten Ritter had layers of resonance and magnetism. The actor, whose undignified exit from Breaking Bad had left a world jonesing for her, is quite the performer; not an ounce of sentimentality or shop-bought softness. In her role as superhero Jones, she is the private detective with all the flaws one should have: broken office door-glass; a whisky habit conceived by someone with absolutely no experience of trying to drink throughout the working day; a crummy, shoestring lifestyle despite constantly being handed fists of money; and a deadly enemy in the shape of malevolent mind controller Kilgrave (David Tennant).

Jones has superpowers; quite poorly defined ones that mainly involve throwing people, although she often falls, in a Buzz Lightyear fashion (“That wasn’t flying, that was falling with style”). Emotionally, she is held in suspended animation by her PTSD, which was triggered by a series of harrowing events contributing to her traumatic backstory. She is caught in the eye of a three-way storm: the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Kilgrave; the car crash that killed her entire family; and the institutional violence that somehow bestowed superpowers upon her while she was in a coma (“horrific” experiments took place on Jones, the nature of which are still opaque, but hospital doors give her the most awful flashbacks). Kilgrave’s abuse (she was his sex slave) left her with more than ambient trauma; it hollowed out her belief in her own power as a force for good. In Jessica Jones, the past never passes, just crashes back into the present, in flashbacks, in parallel cases she undertakes to investigate, and now – in the second series – in the queasy expectation of the victim, that she be the town crier of her own experience, for the prevention of future crimes.

The second season also arrives post #MeToo, like an answer to questions that were unvoiced when it first came out. What does sexual assault mean, and what does it do? Why does it leave the wrong person ashamed and everybody silent? A bit of quickfire dialogue – “I don’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” says a new villain who wants to take over her business; “How rapey,” Jones replies – marks out the new terrain, where the things that have always been said crash headlong into the things that are never said. Yet – never mind even the chronology of the filming – this is no opportunistic female-empowerment yarn. “It’s a coincidence, that it comes out just as we’re all talking about abuse,” Ritter tells me over the phone. “Me Too was only a couple of months ago, we were already done shooting by then. I think what the movement has done, it’s made women so reactive and so emotional. You read the stories and you do an inventory of your own life. So everyone has been triggered or poked at. Which I think is awesome. It’s a crazy coincidence because that’s what our show does as well.”

The show is ensconced in a noir atmosphere – a feeling prompted by the sense Jessica Jones is so close to the hero that nearly but never was: she is the female Humphrey Bogart. The hard-boiled subgenre of noir was getting very near gender parity, with Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man, a man and a woman as wise-cracking and hard-drinking as one another. But then the 1950s happened and the moment passed. Scroll forward 65 years and, even post-Wonder Woman, female physical strength and mental verve have the vividness of the unfamiliar. Yet there is one trope more unusual still: the strong victim. As a dramatic construct, the victim functions as a frame and counterpoint to the hero. But in the case of Jessica Jones she is both victim and hero. Despite the fact we repeatedly see examples of Jones’s weakness against Kilgrave and a backstory that reveals rape and forced murder, she is not the damsel in distress but the knight.

It is well-known Jessica Jones lore that the production team is predominantly female. One exec, Liz Friedman, wrote A Feminist and Class-Based Analysis of Slasher Films for her graduate thesis. “It is a very supportive environment,” says Ritter. “There’s no ego, there’s no infighting, which is important, because I can go into darker places if I feel safe to be vulnerable.”

In this environment the show remodels the victim narrative, and asks the question: how do we define what rape is? Last season, in a psychedelic amplification of a courtroom cross-questioning (“Yet the complainant had previously had dinner with the accused, your honour …”), Kilgrave and Jones had a showdown over what mind-control meant. “We used to do a lot more than just touch hands,” he says. “Yeah. It’s called rape,” she replies. “Which part of staying in five-star hotels, eating at all the best places, doing whatever the hell you wanted, is rape?” he persists. “The part where I didn’t want to do any of it! Not only did you physically rape me, but you violated every cell in my body and every thought in my goddamn head.” A realm where mind control exists can crack open a conversation about violation in terms where the subtle doesn’t undermine the literal, where the spirit is as real as the flesh. Even at the level of the premise, the show made a statement about rape that is fundamental, seldom made and hard to render more boldly than with a superhero. Serious voices on the subject often cite the muting effect that violation has on women, stretching past the event so that their power is quelled for years afterwards. Nobody violent needs an academic to tell them this, which is why rape is such a timeless and prevalent war crime. But the world at large probably needs to be told, and what could be plainer than a woman with superpowers literally eschewing their full potential and going freelance to get away from her trauma?

“Real women on the street came up to me in tears because this was the first time they felt represented by the lead; it made them feel so much better about their own traumas,” Ritter says. “Even hearing women saying they were excited to see a badass female character was great: people responded to her in such a huge way.”

Having covered so much ground, in its second season the show winkles into the knottier areas of the feminist dilemma. Jessica Jones always had a scratchy relationship with her sometime employer Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss) and in the second season, Hogarth has gone full Sheryl Sandberg but distills no feminist ideal. Her feminism stretches no further than the coincidence of wanting what she wants, while simultaneously being female. Indeed, without wanting to give anything away, she is the opposite of sisterly, operating to a rule book that more or less demands she make an enemy of anyone whom she cannot use instrumentally. It is another interesting route, into a conversation that is so murky it’s generally easier not to have: is the cooperative more feminist than the competitive? To Jessica Jones, those external struggles are ancillary to the question of her PTSD – whether or not she has a responsibility to open the door further to the traumas of her past, or whether doing so will make concrete what she suspects: that she has been brutalised by her past and become a monster that only wilful ignorance will contain.

It is a rarely discussed element of the trauma story: part of silence is that to say anything makes you inherently implausible, yet once you are believed you have a responsibility to yourself and the world to delve as deeply as possible, speak as much as possible. It’s the Rose McGowan bind: an ounce of bravery is never enough. You have to have all the bravery in the world, and then it turns out that you’ve said too much. Here the Humphrey Bogart reticence works beautifully, catching all her avoidance in a caustic self-awareness, while underscoring the harsh truth that post-traumatic stress, like depression, is subject to endless scrutiny about its legitimacy, yet costs the sufferer so much more to explore than it does the casual observer who demands its exploration. There are so many capital-I issues here that it’s amazing it still functions as drama, but it does. You know … Krysten Ritter … being able to throw people, and also kind-of fly.

Jessica Jones returns to Netflix on 8 March