Marvel’s Jessica Jones, season 3—a review (spoilers)
The final episode of season three of Jessica Jones on
Netflix presumably marks the ending of the Great Marvel on Netflix Streaming TV
experiment. The process included the three seasons of Jessica Jones and
Daredevil, plus the two seasons of Luke Cage and Iron Fist (The Punisher was
also involved but I never watched it). The results were vaguely
disappointing, but not as disappointing as the series all being cancelled not
for poor ratings, but because the corporate overlords at Disney that now owns
Marvel don’t want their product on a network owned by someone else, even if
they have no plans to show them on their streaming service. That said, I
actually liked the Daredevil/Jessica Jones/Luke Cage/Iron Fish mashup The
Defenders a lot. Just saying.
Season one of Jessica Jones was a thrill, even if there were
some flaws in the overall structure. Season two was largely seen as a
disappointment, one that featured Krysten Ritter’s excellent work as the deeply
flawed hero Jessica Jones but struggled to find anything worthy for her to use
her superpowers on. Season 3 is an improvement, but not as successful as
season one. If I were to indict season three for one thing, it would be
its insistence on maintaining a season-long arc format while producing what turns
out to be 13 individually produced episodes with no attempt at
continuity whatsoever.
I could give half dozen examples of plot points emphasized
in early episodes that are subsequently forgotten, but I’ll just give one minor
one. In the second episode, Jessica is recovering from an attack at the
end of the first episode and is told by her doctor that her spleen has been
removed (the title of the episode in “AKA I Have No Spleen,” so this is not
exactly a spoiler). She is told that this will have a significant impact
on her life, and that she’ll need to be on an anti-biotic regimen for the rest
of her life. She subsequently collapses from the injury later in that
episode, but she never has any ill effects in any subsequent episode. Is
one of her superpowers growing a new spleen? Or did the writers just
forget she was injured? I don’t want every episode to come to a halt and
have Jessica say, “Oh wait, I have to take my antibiotics,” but would it kill
her to every so often roll her eyes, pop a pill, and wash it down with a slug
of bourbon?
You can’t treat a 13-episode show order like a game of
Telephone where one person starts a message and each subsequent writer is free
to make changes before passing it on to the next writer. Several times
Jessica is shown carefully preserving evidence that is never brought up again;
given that she is supposedly battling a genius serial killer who never leaves
behind any evidence, you’d think some of this would find its way to the police.
Which brings me to the second problem with Jessica Jones
Season Three, the Big Bad. Jessica spends much of the season trying to
get the goods on the sort of villain who only exists in fiction, the
hyper-intelligent sociopath who has the excess time on his hands to commit
murders so carefully planned that the police don’t even know he exists.
We are told repeatedly that the killer is a genius, but this is an example of
writers telling, not showing. He does absolutely nothing that indicates
he’s of even average intelligence, yet he has five or six advanced degrees in
disparate fields like law, engineering, and chemistry. His job?
He’s a wrestling coach! Yes, a man smart enough to earn multiple advance
degrees works as a wrestling coach (which hardly explains how he can afford an
apartment in New York City, but that’s a TV trope for another day). He is
so stupid that he challenges Jessica Jones, whom he knows is superpowered, to a
wrestling match, somehow thinking that his training will allow him to defeat an
opponent who can pick him up with one hand.
The season also suffers from an excess of Trish Walker
(Rachel Taylor), one of the most annoying characters ever to grace a TV
screen. Jessica’s adopted sister is constantly coming up with simplistic,
ill-thought out plans, and when Jessica points out their inadequacy Trish's inevitable response is that Jessica never believed in her. Two of the 13
episodes are “Trish-centric,” and she is perpetually inserting herself into
Jessica’s investigations in the other 11.
The plus side? There is, as always, Krysten Ritter’s
performance as Jessica Jones. Other actresses might lobby to make Jessica
more attractive, more feminine, or more likable, but Ritter embraces the
concept of Jessica Jones that she doesn’t care what she looks like or what
anybody else thinks of her. Carrie-Anne Moss is back as Jeri Hogarth, the
hot shot lawyer who was Jessica’s boss and is now an adversary. Moss also
embraces the negative aspects of her character, someone whose efforts to
control everything around her inevitably blow up in her face. The show
makes good use of minor characters to make this fictional world feel lived in,
but at the cost of making it less tidy than good fiction should be.
It is a shame that this is the end of the line for Jessica
Jones, unless she somehow makes a comeback in a couple of years on Disney+
streaming. But maybe three seasons is enough? In the modern
television landscape, shows either run forever (Survivor, Law & Order SVU)
or go away after a couple of seasons, at most. All of the Marvel
properties at Netflix started off good (except Iron Fist) and then were unable
to re-find that magic.
Season Three of Jessica Jones is worth a look, especially if
you don’t find Trish that annoying (really?) and you didn’t want to pull the
plug after Season Two. As I understand it, word that the series was
finished came down during production, so the producers were able to fashion
what they knew would be a series finale. My only question is, did they go
back and consult the previous episodes before making up the grand finale?
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