Marvel’s Jessica Jones - S1E1 - AKA Ladies Night
Jessica Jones is a misanthropic semi-alcoholic with some extraordinary abilities and her work as a private investigator in New York City certainly isn’t helping her general distain for human kind. She gets the money shot, she gets out, and every now and then she gets a little bit of alcohol-induced sleep only to be awakened by PTSD style flashbacks or her noisy upstairs neighbors, who never seem to do much but fight. It’s hard to blame her for being so jaded.
I’ve loved Krysten Ritter since she OMG’d and Like totally’d with the best of the 09ers on Veronica Mars so when I discovered she’d be playing Marvel’s edgier version of my favorite private eye, I may or may not have started jumping up and down for joy in a Gia Goodman-like manner. The Veronica Mars theme I had in my brain is certainly reinforced by Jones’ attitude towards people in general and in the voice-over style the show exhibits. That being said, it’s edgier.
In the first episode we discover that Jessica’s PTSD can be traced to her abduction by a man named Kilgrave, who has the ability to make anyone do just about anything he wants. He forced her to do some things that continue to haunt her. The memory of his control keeps sending her back to the bottle, and in this episode, into the arms of a very attractive bar owner who offers her a ladies night discount.
Jessica begins solving the disappearance of a young Ohio girl and NYU student, whose parents were sent to Jessica by someone at the police station. Her research reveals that Kilgrave isn’t dead as she’d thought, and he’s behind the girl’s disappearance and more.
Number of Inappropriate relationships: 4
- Wife and husband’s brother getting it on in an NYC alley, and then a car… this inappropriate relationship opens up this episode.
- Then Jessica spies on a woman on a treadmill having a little too much fun with a Big Mac.
- Lawyer lady Hogarth’s assistant is going above and beyond the call of duty to keep her boss happy… too bad Hogarth’s wife doesn’t know yet.
- Finally, Jessica’s case of the week, Hope, and Kilgrave engage in what appears to be an all too inappropriate relationship.
Number of Kilgrave Flashbacks: 3
Jessica’s go-to coping mechanism, or should I say her healthy go-to mechanism, for coping with these moments is one given to her by a shrink: She starts by naming the street she grew up on, then the next street over, and the next, and so on… “Main Street, Birch Street, Higgins Drive, Cobalt Lane.”
Kilgrave’s Death Count
Two this episode. He had poor, helpless Hope kill her parents in one of the saddest moments of this episode.
Characters You Might Need to Know
- Malcom- Jessica’s junkie friend who likes crunchy peanut butter.
- Hogarth- Lesbian lawyer Jessica sometimes does difficult jobs for. She’s tough and is having what I can only assume is a torrid affair with her skinny blonde assistant. It’s always the assistant, isn’t it?
- Luke Cage- bar owner Jessica spies on and then sleeps with, although his name is not mentioned in this episode he’s a pretty important character to Jessica’s story.
- Kilgrave- the villain of our story, who Jessica assumed was dead.
- Trish Walker- Jessica’s rich and famous friend, who has her own talk show… friend is a loose term, but they seem to trust each other and Trish may be the only person who knows what happened with Kilgrave.
Jessica’s Super Powers
- Big-ass jumps- ground to 4th story fire escape
- Super Strength – stopped a fancy sports car grabbing the bumper. Also, she chucked a guy out of her office through the door-window
- Super Liquor Tolerance (is that a super power or just a gift?) – she just drank like 80% of the episode so how she’s not dead is beyond me…
