Jessica Jones, Season 1, Episode 9: AKA Sin Bin
After the excellent episode 8 where we see Kilgrave and Jessica interact all trying to be buddy-buddy with Kilgrave firmly in control and Jessica trying to work his way out, we see the exact opposite here, with Jessica in control and Kilgrave in a hermetically sealed glass room... and they are definitely not buddy-buddy-ing. It's decidedly less funny, and involves Jessica nearly crossing the line several times. Arguably she did -- she tortured Kilgrave for what seems to be hours with videos of his fucked-up childhood, beat Kilgrave up so brutally that Jeri walked out of the room and Trish electroshocked her, manipulated that poor policeman dude and used Kilgrave's parents as what amounts to bait, causing the death of one.
Meanwhile, Simpson is apparently on his way to becoming a metahuman by taking multi-coloured drugs, Jessica is immune to Kilgrave's powers, and Jeri Hogarth struggles all throughout this episode with whether to take the sweet bargain that Kilgrave made. And, in a nice little refreshing subversion despite all the buildup that Hogarth is absolutely disgusted with Jessica torturing Kilgrave and being far more occupied and distressed with her divorce, ends up not succumbing to temptation.
Or did she? After all, someone must've cut those wires and who better than Hogarth? It's left pretty ambiguous at the moment, though.
It's definitely a great, content-packed episode, and it leads to an absolutely tense final act where I literally have no idea what's going to happen as more and more characters gather. We've got Jessica and her basically starting to go more violent and desperate. We've got Trish, who's probably the only thing stopping Jessica from killing Kilgrave. We've got Hogarth, who as I mentioned before has had some absolutely blatant hints that she's considering taking whatever offer Kilgrave undoubtedly made in that offscreen moment where the two are left alone. We've got that poor black policeman whose name I forgot (EDIT: Clemons) who gets dragged along. We've got the scientist parents who apparently tried to cure Kilgrave -- er, Kevin -- of some mysterious irreversible disease and ended up giving him mind-control powers and have been running for the past thirty or so years. Hell, I honestly half-expected Simpson to burst in with his newly-acquired superpowers.
So, yeah, Kilgrave is a made-up name that he gave himself, and Jessica pretty funnily calls little 'Kevin' out on it.
It truly comes to a head as all Jessica wants is to get Kilgrave to demonstrate his abilities on-camera, even volunteering herself to be mind-controlled by Kilgrave and stepping into the room to antagonize him and get a reaction out of him. Granted, this ends up being pointless what with the revelation at the end of the episode, but still it's a pretty emotional scene, as Kilgrave's desperate begging start to waver between earnest distress or just staging an act.
Kilgrave's grand in this episode, isn't he? Both Kilgrave and Jessica. They're just displaying all kinds of spectrum, but Kilgrave's particular brand of sociopathy as he's definitely disturbed by all the videos, as he begs for forgiveness from Jessica at one point, as he snarks it up... it's brilliant how it's so ambiguous which lines are earnest and which lines are just blatant well-acted lies.
Of course, the big deadline of Hope being given a 48-hour window to take a deal which both Hogarth and Hope are totally behind makes Jessica even more desperate. The audience gets some additional tension what with Hogarth not being supportive at all, complaining how Jessica doesn't even help her, how Pam is withholding sweet sweet sex from her until she displays her lawyer scariness and beats her ex-wife in court, and how she was left alone with Kilgrave and all the hints point that she's absolutely interested in finding an easy way out for the Wendy problem.
We get Jessica doing some PI stuff and while it's the weak link in the episode, the payoff was certainly worth it. We get some explanation to Kilgrave's past -- his parents, while definitely not nice people themselves for what they put their son and by proxy every single one of his victims through (and daddy Kilgrave definitely wants to run the hell away) at least have some kind of an excuse to experiment on Kilgrave, to treat some incurable disease or somesuch, but they went too far. And, well, even as a kid Kilgrave is insane, and the lack of proper parenting isn't the cause of his insanity. It's good. It gives gives Kilgrave somewhat of a semblance of humanity, yet the audience doesn't fully sympathize with him.
And for a moment it seemed that mommy was actually apologizing, actually sorry at Kilgrave... and then come the scissors. I'm honestly not sure whether that's a spontaneous decision on part of mommy Kilgrave, or Jessica actually wanting to stage Kilgrave's mother stabbing herself and relying on the electricity to knock everyone out. Either way, though, Kilgrave's line telling his mother to stab herself once for every year she left him alone... and his subsequent lines of telling his father to cut his heart out, and telling Trish to put a bullet in her head... yeah, good thing that gun is inexplicably unloaded. And poor Clemons' hand totally broke a couple of bones as he forcibly squeezed it through the handcuffs to obey Kilgrave's orders. Definitely a tense scene.
Also, Jessica's totally immune to Kilgrave's powers, which we actually got hints on and I picked up on it during the police escape scene. Plus hinted on as early as the third or fourth episode when she walked away from Kilgrave after killing Luke's wife.
While I absolutely love Jessica's desperation and her interactions with Kilgrave, her game plan really kind of feels faulty. It's probably supposed to be a representation of Jessica's own mental state, all frazzled up by all the contact with Kilgrave. But it's still kinda dumb and Hogarth even notes it. Hope gets a pretty good deal with less than 20 years in jail, and only has a limited window of time to take it, while Jessica's just hellbent on producing a video of Kilgrave showing his ability... and unless she's counting on Kilgrave's mother stabbing herself to death on camera, like Hogarth said basically anything that happens in that room can be dismissed as staged. If it was just Kilgrave's mother pointing a pair of scissors at herself I don't think that would be great evidence.
Furthermore the way Jessica gets her evidence won't fly in court, I think. Abduction, electroshock torture, chaining a police officer and pointing a gun to his head... yeah, Jessica's definitely not doing this the right way.
Meanwhile, Simpson ended up making it and keep asking for a certain dr. Kozlov or however the hell you type his name. And it all seems to be some good ol' fashioned superhero-style mysterious military organization scientists who fixed Simpson up good as new, and gives him some mysterious pills. A quick lookup confirms to me that, yes, Will Simpson is the MCU's version of the character Nuke (who apparently has the catchphrase "give me a red" like he said here), albeit with his first name changed from Frank to Will, who is a... Daredevil supervillain? Huh, that's interesting! Curious to see how this will pan out, or if we'll even have a resolution in this season. Is this how all of you less-versed-with-DC-lore people react when watching The Flash? I definitely like this, finding out that these seemingly disposable characters who grow into a role and ended up being adaptations of superheroes and supervillains...
Absolutely thrilling. It's tense throughout the episode and while there are several weak points, like Jessica's little too-conveniently-fast PI-clue-search leading to finding the university and the names of the parents and Marcus' survivor group and the parents themselves... that felt a bit like a fumble, but as I said before the payoff with Kilgrave confronting his parents is definitely worth it. And, y'know, my earlier rant about the sensibility of Jessica's course of actions. But hey. She's not in the most stable of minds herself. It's pretty tense, and while some character decisions may be questionable -- and honestly I'm a bit tired of the whole divorce subplot myself -- it's still a pretty good watch and easily one of the stronger episodes so far.
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