RANT TIME.
So, that happened. By “that” I mean Jessica Jones season 2, and by “happened” I mean mercifully ended so I can go on with my life.
Spoilers ahoy!!
Shortly after I wrote my bitch session about the first part of the season, I poked around the internet to see if other folks had concerns, too. They did! But the general consensus was the show took off after episode seven, when it’s revealed the Big Bad is Jessica’s mom and they bond over having super-strength and missing each other and whatnot. If only that’s what happened. In reality, it just kept getting worse until I cheered when the season was blessedly over. Hubby is happy too, cuz now he doesn’t have to hear me constantly complaining through every episode.
I’m a harsh critic, I’ll admit it. I guess I have impossibly high standards, I don’t know. To ensure this post doesn’t devolve into one long stream of explicative-laden consciousness, I’ll break it up into my main reasons why this season of Jessica Jones was so bad I probably won’t watch season 3:
1. The story is rife with continuity errors and dead ends
In addition to all the continuity errors and obvious contrivances I detailed in my first post, we also get flashbacks of Jessica as a young twenty-something ripping open ATMs, stealing her signature jacket, and generally smashing-and-grabbing anything she wants…and somehow never getting caught, because apparently New York City has no cameras or police officers who see any of this. There’s also a point 2/3 of the way through the season where Jessica accidentally kills an abusive prison guard in his home, then covers it up so it looks like a suicide and spends the rest of the episode hallucinating about Kilgrave because she’s so freaked out she’ll get caught. Of course, she does not get caught; in fact, after this episode it’s never mentioned again. The whole subplot seemed to exist only as an excuse to shoehorn David Tennant into the show to remind the audience how awesome it used to be.
Also, Jeri’s whole storyline about being diagnosed with ALS, then getting fake-healed by a con artist and extracting sweet revenge, was also an ultimately pointless journey. I mean, what was her story arc? She was a cold-hearted bitch, then learned to open her heart after she thought she’d been miraculously healed by an ex-con and homeless chick, then went back to being a cold-hearted bitch after she discovered she’d been scammed. Her character ended the season as the same person she was when she started…so what was the point of her storyline again?
The point, I’m now certain, was to fill time, because:
2. There’s not enough story to fill 13 episodes
This whole season meandered from one plot point to another with no strong narrative drive, as if the writers weren’t sure what to do and ended up stringing together a series of events until they got to the requisite 13 episodes. For instance, the only reason Jessica looks into her origins is because Trish, being a terrible fucking human being (see below), forces her to. Then when Jessica finds out her mom is the Big Bad, she turns her in to the police, then helps her escape, then turns her in again, then helps her escape again, all while constantly moaning about how she doesn’t know what to do (TRANSLATION: the writers don’t know what to do). While Jessica is waffling, Mom gets captured, escapes, captured, escapes, cornered, escapes, cornered, escapes, then killed.
It’s all a lot of wheel-spinning to get to what was pretty much a foregone conclusion – Mom bites the dust. I mean come on, where else could the story have realistically gone if they needed to posture for a third season? The season could have been cut down to seven episodes, if that, and nothing critical would have been lost.
3. Everybody does stupid things
This season has a serious case of Stupid Cops Syndrome. SCS, as I call it, is when the writers dumb down the police to Forrest Gump-levels of intellect so the plot can churn along without things like competent law enforcement getting in the way. Besides the fact no one notices Jessica’s adolescent looting spree, they also fail to shoot Evil Mom, who’s a MASS MURDERER, even though they have multiple opportunities. I know the woman has super-strength, but she’s not immune to bullets, and yet nobody just FUCKING SHOOTS HER when they’ve all got guns and she’s literally ripping people apart or throwing them through walls or to their deaths.
Another example: Trish forces Evil Mom’s evil scientist boyfriend – who’s really not that evil, honestly – to give her superpowers because Trish is the fucking worst. Then when he thinks he’s failed, he decides out of nowhere to kill himself by shooting tanks of explosive stuff nearby…Who does that??? Seriously, raise your hand if you think suicide via giant fireball is the best way to shuffle off this mortal coil.
Meanwhile: Jeri tracks down the homeless nurse and ex-con who scammed her, who are now living large off the money they got for pawning Jeri’s valuables after they ransacked her condo. She sweet-talks the nurse, convinces her that her ex-con boyfriend actually has a harem on the side, then gives the nurse a gun. Because the nurse – who’s a seasoned scam artist BTW – doesn’t see this obvious set-up coming from a mile away, she uses the gun to shoot her ex-con boyfriend five minutes later in a convenient fit of rage. Then Jeri calls the cops to report the shooting – revenge complete! So…I guess the nurse won’t say anything about where she got the gun? Maybe the cops won’t ask because they have SCS. Or maybe Jeri had the gun enchanted with a memory-wiping spell. Sure.
And: Jessica keeps trusting her mom not to kill people, then is shocked when she kills people.
And: Trish is a walking ball of stupidity who makes everyone around her stupid all the time.
Finally: I’m pretty sure my IQ has dropped, and it’s Trish’s fault.
4. Nobody is held accountable for their terrible decisions
Evil Mom keeps killing innocent people, and Jessica keeps helping her escape because she thinks maybe her mom will suddenly stop murdering people. That’s great you get to have your family back, Jessica…at the expense of the families of all those people your mom killed and the massacres she keeps going on because you keep helping her escape to kill again. Who’s supposed to be the good guy in this series again?
There’s also a scene where Evil Mom tries to assassinate Trish (YES!) but is stopped (NO!) by Jessica and a couple detectives, named Sunday and Costa. Evil Mom literally uses Sunday as a human shield while she slowly backs up to a window, which she intends to jump out of because jumping from high places won’t hurt her but will kill Sunday. Sunday begs her partner, Costa, to take the shot as Evil Mom is dragging her to her death. So what does Costa do? He looks straight into his partner’s eyes as Evil Mom jumps out the window and kills Sunday.
“WTF??” I literally yelled at my computer screen. “Why did you let your partner die without even trying to save her???”
In the next scene, Costa looks mildly upset about how Evil Mom just “killed his partner.” No, YOU killed your partner, asshat. This is the point where I officially thought, “Fuck this show.”
Which brings me to the ultimate unaccountable piece of shit human being: Trish.
5. Trish is a monster
The truth is, I would be willing to forgive all of the above ridiculousness and tune in for season 3…except for the Trish Problem.
Here, dear reader, is a quick rundown of what Trish gets up to in season 2:
Trish gets herself addicted to a combat enhancer inhaler thingy (the thing Simpson used in season 1 to get rage-strength) even though she knows it’s a drug and she’s had drug problems in the past…because she just wants to help people so bad, and having superpowers is the only way! (“Thanks a lot, twatwaffle,” say the world’s doctors, nurses, firefighters, teachers, pro bono attorneys, charity workers, competent police officers, and all the other “losers” who somehow manage to do good without superpowers) She just feels so helpless despite the fact she has money and fame and good looks and good health and good friends and people who love her and FUCK YOU TRISH.
She then forces the inhaler on Malcom, who she know is a prior drug addict, and can’t believe it when he flips out.
Then she goes on a vague rant on her radio show about how not enough people report on the stuff that matters, like human trafficking and drugs and murder and bad stuff even though people report on that shit all the time.
Then some douchecanoe at a CNN rip-off is so impressed with her rant that he asks her to audition for his network to become a serious anchor woman reporting on serious stuff (Trish’s Dream Job), but she bombs the interview because it turns out she doesn’t actually have anything substantial to say about any of the world’s ills because she doesn’t really care about other people – she just wants to be treated like a hero.
Then she sleeps with poor vulnerable Malcom, then cold-cocks him in the back of the head and traps him in the trunk of her car while she kidnaps Evil Mom’s evil scientist boyfriend at gun point and forces him to give her superpowers the same way he did Jessica all those years before…You read that right. Poor Trish! She just wants people to loooooove her! And yet when the procedure goes horribly wrong and Trish is near death, everyone blames the scientist boyfriend and not FUCKING TRISH for doing it to herself, brutally violating Malcom’s trust, and forcing Jessica to come rescue her stupid ass.
THEN when Trish has recovered and finds out where Jessica and Evil Mom are hiding out, even though Evil Mom has FINALLY decided to turn herself in for real this time, FUCKING TRISH shows up to SHOOT JESSICA’S MOTHER IN THE HEAD RIGHT IN FRONT OF JESSICA. Then Trish has the fucking gall to claim she did it for Jessica rather than to feed her own need to feel important.
AND THEN, in the final moments of the show, we get hints that Trish actually does have superpowers after all (wow. what a shocker.) and we can expect Trish as fucking Hellcat or some shit to be a major plot point for season 3.
HELL NO.
Trish is a self-centered piece of shit who’s beyond redemption. She wants to feel important and powerful but doesn’t actually care about other people. That’s the definition of a VILLAIN, not a superhero. I should probably cut Rachel Taylor some slack for what I said about her acting abilities in the first post, because even an Oscar-winning actress couldn’t pull off Trish as a sympathetic character at this point in the story.
If we’re supposed to root for Hellcat in season 3, which seems to be what the writers expect, then I’m out. I love Jessica Jones and basically everyone else on this show, but Trish is a deal-breaker. To hell with her.
