Marvel’s Jessica Jones - S1E2 - AKA Crush Syndrome
Previously on Jessica Jones, ‘AKA Ladies Night’
Once Jessica decided she was sticking around to fight Kilgrave, Hope Schlotman, the last person to see Kilgrave alive, is her first stop. Jessica learns Kilgrave tortured poor Hope in some weird ways, for example, forcing her to jump up and down over and over again. It seems like he’s trying to recreate Jessica in those he controls. After an unsatisfying and totally depressing visit with Hope, Jessica turns to Hogarth for help asking her to take on Hope’s case. If Jessica can prove Kilgrave exists and find other victims, Hogarth will take the case. Then Hogarth has to call her wife, who apparently knows about her affair with the blond leggy assistant.
Jessica is stopped by Trish on the street and is forced to confront the fact that while Kilgrave is still out there, the people she allows herself to care for are a danger to her as much as she is a danger to them. To prove her point, in an unrelated incident, some pictures she took of Luke lead to an angry husband and his rugby team attacking Luke at his bar. When Jessica gets involved in the brawl, she and Luke both find their secrets laid bare.
Jessica’s search for Kilgrave leads her to a hospital, then to the home of the ultra-religious mother of an ambulance driver, then to a community college where she chases a professor into the boiler room only to have him recount his horrifying experience with Kilgrave. Jessica learns that Kilgrave’s greatest weakness lies in having a specific brain function cut off through anesthetic. With this information in her arsenal, Jessica feels more comfortable about moving forward with her plan to take Kilgrave down. She allows some of her walls to come down and maybe lets a few people in.
Number of Inappropriate Relationships: 2
- Paramedic and his mom: So the paramedic who picked up Kilgrave after the bus crash and, by no choice of his own, ends up being Kilgrave’s kidney donor, is incapable of caring for himself. His mother, a hyper-religious crazy lady, is his very creepy caregiver. There’s a Bates-like feel to the relationship, and then he begs Jessica to kill him and put him out of his Kilgrave-induced and mother-supported misery. Jessica, however, is not the Kevorkian type and refuses to do so after assuring him it was not God who put him in that chair, but the Devil, and that she was going to kill him.
- Kilgrave and his new host family: Really any relationship that Kilgrave enters into is going to be inappropriate. This poor family, though! He interrupts their dinner, forces the kids into the closet, and sets up shop with a nice big glass of wine. The little girl pees in the closet and it’s very disturbing. It appears that Kilgrave is the definition of a monster.
Number of Kilgrave Flashbacks: 2
- A lot of this episode is flash backs due to the fact that Jessica spends most of it reliving the last time she saw Kilgrave and left him for dead after the bus crash that she assumed had killed him, but she does have a moment on the subway that ends in a splintered subway window. I’ve never been on the subway but I’d imagine those windows are pretty tough to break…
Kilgrave’s Death Count: 3.5 total
- This week takes us back to the event that left Jessica thinking Kilgrave had died, the bus crash. That crash, while it didn’t kill Kilgrave, did kill one young woman.
- There was also the ambulance driver whom Kilgrave half killed. The guy is still technically alive, but without his kidneys and normal brain function his quality of life has greatly deteriorated.
Characters you might need to know
- The upstairs weird siblings. What we know so far: they are loud, they fight all the time, the brother is suuuper creepy and possibly obsessed with Jessica… and needs to learn to wear pants, or at least boxers. The tighty-whiteys are just not working for you, bro.
Superpowers displayed
- Luke and Jessica took on a horde of rugby players and Luke got stabbed in the neck with a broken bottle that shattered upon coming into contact with his skin. Later, he shows up at Jessica’s place and puts an electric saw to his rock hard abs… and when I say rock hard, I mean literally… he broke the saw.
