Jessica Jones S02E10 Review: Prison Drama

Jessica Jones, Season 2, Episode 10: AKA Pork Chop

Well, that's an... interesting episode. It's nowhere quite as good as the previous two. After the shake-up that was Alisa's arrest at the end of the previous episode, this one jumps straight into having her in jail and negotiating deals with Jessica and the extremely-cooperative and newly-healed Hogarth (more on her later on, because this is actually a big episode for Hogarth). There's a bit of a back and forth on whether Alisa should give up Karl Malus, and Jessica's own attempts to find legal loopholes so that her mother can stay in a normal prison as opposed to the Raft, but also sneak Karl out of the country so that the police can't move against him. It does work, sort of, and Jessica makes it clear that she doesn't give a rat's ass about Karl, but cares enough for her mother to do it for her. And while we get some delaying tactics with Oscar making a fake passport and more negotiations, we get the revelation that Warden Dale is apparently an abusive fucker who electrocutes Alisa for daring to misbehave (although, to be fair, Alisa did choke Dale for merely suggesting she eat her protein).

And that's a part of the episode that didn't really work for me, because I think the introduction of the psycho-warden who abuses his victims so hard they commit suicide comes out of the left field, especially when Jessica poking around in his house reveals that the warden even collects scraps of his victims like some sort of sick trophy. A warden driven by an anti-metahuman bigotry or simply just out of hatred for Alisa's earlier disrespect, I think, would probably work better, but ultimately the whole warden story just falls short as it's just a way to introduce the Big Twist (tm) of this episode, which is that Jessica accidentally kills the warden in a struggle at their home when Jessica is digging for clues. It feels convoluted and honestly quite unnecessary. Yes, it thematically plays into the whole 'is Jessica a killer' storyline, and Warden Dale is another in a long list of abusive men... but it doesn't work as well in execution due to the rushed manner in the way he is introduced and subsequently dispatched.

Meanwhile, Trish goes on her own little investigation, with both Trish and Malcolm calling Jessica out (fairly, I would say) for leaving them out of the investigation of Alisa. Trish, meanwhile, sort of self-destructs as without the inhaler she just can't perform on stage and stammers through her big debut in ZCN. She ends up confessing to Malcolm about everything involving that drug, and finds out that, well, the effects of that drug can't be replicated. She confronts Alisa as well in this episode, and I completely forgot that Alisa was going after Trish because Trish started exposing things in IGH on her talk show -- really wished the show did more of this during the lull in episodes 3-7 to really sort of highlight just why Alisa is on the warpath.

Alisa also posits the theory that Trish is jealous of Jessica's powers, which... really is another thing that really feels like it comes out of nowhere, inhaler addiction notwithstanding. And at the end of the episode, Trish and Malcolm go after Karl Mallus by themselves, and Trish knocks out Malcolm and stuffs him in the trunk while he goes off to confront Karl. Her unstable emotions have been highlighted all season, I suppose, so I get why she does that. Poor, poor Malcolm, though.

Hogarth's story in this episode is perhaps one that I feel is pretty well-developed. I'm not sure where she's going to go from here, but Jessica quickly comes to the conclusion that Inez and Shane are a bunch of frauds, especially when he confirms with Karl Mallus that no healing-hands mutant ever existed as part of IGH's roster of metahumans. And as much as it hurts Jessica to see Hogarth an improved woman who's happy at her newfound lease in life (a stark contrast to the fatalistic, hedonistic nothing-to-live-for woman she was earlier this season), Jessica rips off that band-aid and tells Hogarth what she knows... and Carrie-Ann Moss delivers Hogarth's doubt and denial extremely well in her defensive replies to Jessica, and then her absolute breakdown when she returns home and finds it ransacked and emptied of valuables by Inez and Shane... it's pretty devastating. I've complained about Hogarth's B-plot earlier in this season, but god damn if this is an amazingly told emotional gut-punch. I'm curious just how Hogarth will develop in the final three episodes of the season, and how she'll relate to the bigger IGH storyline.