Marvel's Jessica Jones S03E10-11 Review: One Bad Day

Marvel's Jessica Jones, Season 3, Episode 10: Hero Pants; Episode 11: Hellcat

Episode 10: AKA Hero Pants

So it's interesting that the past 9 episodes of Jessica Jones can technically be broken up into little arcs, without any of them really standing alone. There's the 'Hellcat Rises' arc that just basically establishes the new Jessica/Trish dynamic. There's the initial Sallinger arc (where he gets captured at the end after holding Erik hostage) and the second Sallinger arc (where he outsmarts Jessica and Trish). And so it seems like after the relative downer ending of the ninth episode, this is basically starting the final arc where everything sort of comes to a head. And while I do see a lot of complaints about Gregory Salinger as a villain... at least they're trying to give him screentime, y'know? The actor is actually allowed to deliver an interesting psychopath that does exude a sense of menace, and comparing him to someone like the Pilgrim from the final season of The Punisher, or Jessica's mom in the previous season of Jessica Jones, Sallinger is at least an interesting love-to-hate antagonist. (And Sallinger, interestingly, is more or less absent in these two episodes, which is a nice breather) Sure, he's no Kingpin or Killgrave, but he's at least pretty interesting. Episode 9's big cliffhanger is that after Jessica wraps up the whole mess around Sallinger's blackmail, she ends up being accosted by a bunch of police officers investigating the death of Officer Nussbaumer, the asshole cop that Jessica and Erik blackmailed into letting them enter the police precinct. And, unfortunately, Jessica was the last person that Nussbaumer met before he switched of his police body-cam thing.

And "AKA Hero Pants" itself serves as a belated send-off to Dorothy Walker, and it's a very, very interesting episode. Dorothy's death was sudden and brutal, and I would still argue that it's done essentially just as shock value, but I do like that we basically spend the entire episode sort of seeing Jessica and Trish mourn Dorothy in their own way. Sure, Jessica's investigation over who actually killed Nussbaumer does take place in the background, and both Malcolm and Hogarth's respective storylines get more room to breathe beyond being irritating footnotes in previous episodes, but I feel like at least until the final parts of the episode, a good chunk of the episode ends up being an interesting character study about grief and mourning.

See, here's the thing. Dorothy Walker, as a person, has certainly improved in this season. She's clearly worried for her daughter Trish despite her control freak attitude. She's willing to 'scrub down' and tolerate the hero stuff, and even helped out with the whole publicity thing to help Trish and Jessica flush out Sallinger's victim. Hell, even in her own passive-aggressive "your costume sucks" marketing mentality, Dorothy is helping out in Trish's new career. And she most certainly didn't deserve to die scared, alone and butchered in her own house. But at the same time, it doesn't excuse all the terrible shit that Dorothy did in her life. "AKA Hellcat", the next episode, fleshes this out a lot better by actually showing us the scenes of Dorothy and young Trish, but Jessica describes Dorothy as the first villain that she ever faced, and I really love it that this abusive control freak of a parent isn't actually just 100% easy-to-hate. It would've been so easy to turn Dorothy into a card-carrying evil parent, and there's certainly no excusing the emotional and physical abuse she did to Trish. But the fact is, Dorothy still loved Trish and vice versa, and I do really like that the episode highlights what a gigantic control freak Dorothy Walker is (she has her own funeral arrangements all set up, right down to the playlist and that memory board), what a nice person Dorothy was to her other clients (abusers can appear very friendly to the world outside their own families) while also showing how hard the death has hit Trish and even Jessica.

The moment that I felt was the most effective was Jessica pinning a random terrible shot of their feet from an old camera because the camera accidentally took a shot of a particularly ruined thanksgiving parade where they missed the parade and ended up hanging out at a terrible theater or something, and yet it's the sort of poignant memory about your family that you'll end up remembering. As Erik and Jessica discuss, death is a final chapter that definitively shuts out any attempt at reconciliation, and while people like Dorothy or Erik's incest-pedophile dad are pretty terrible, it doesn't make it any easier for the children to bury them. Hell, we even get to see a bunch of nice moments from Dorothy post-mortem, when Jessica realizes that Dorothy leaves behind not only her liquor (which could be taken as a jab) but also an armchair that Jessica always sat in as a kid -- and when Dorothy moved the armchair into Jessica's room, she had always taken it as a sign that Dorothy is banishing her from the rest of the house, not realizing that it's an act of kindness.

And then there's also Jessica trying to power through the police investigation around Nussbaumer's death throughout the funerary arrangements. And we've seen that Jessica's the sort of person who's able to compartmentalize things and leave most of the emotional stuff until later (or dull it with alcohol), showcased particularly well last episode where she tells Trish to grieve while she took care of everything. And not being as close to Dorothy, it doesn't make it too hard for Jessica to multi-task and try to figure out if Erik has somehow ended up going off and killing Officer Nussbaumer. And throughout the episode, I did suspect that Erik was actually a villain all along, because that's honestly the sort of twist that these sort of shows would pull; Erik himself has been drifting in and out of the cast -- plus Erik has been suspiciously nice to Jessica. And there's the misleading bit of the files that Jessica found in Erik's apartment after canoodling with him. But I just fully thought that Erik was essentially Kilgrave Mark II. Maybe Jessica's cynicism and paranoia has rubbed off on me a little. Either Erik was the villain, or Sallinger's somehow done some wacky super-smart Hannibal Lecter thing to somehow frame Jessica for the murder of the officer (which wouldn't make sense, and thankfully wasn't the case).

Turns out, though, it was Trish that killed Nussbaumer, and unlike Dorothy's shocking death in episode 8, this one is a twist that felt earned. Trish wasn't conspicuously absent throughout the episode, but you would totally believe that she's basically secluded and emotionally shut down after both her mother's death and the loss of letting Sallinger escape. And throughout the episode we learn that Nussbaumer was beaten to death with knuckles (something that made Jessica suspicious to the cops in the first place), which ends up actually fitting with Trish also being a super-powered metahuman. The gears in Jessica's head as she figures it out is great, and the episode ends with Jessica stalking Trish but she ends up getting arrested by the detectives investigating Nussbaumer's death.

And when I watched this episode, a lot of it clicked into place even before booting up "AKA Hellcat", the next episode that is basically a recap of the events of episodes 9 and 10 from Trish's point of view, similar to the second episode of this season. Erik being morose and wracked by guilt makes sense from what we know about him, and Trish was already emotionally unstable throughout the season and she's always the sister that's more prone to impulsive, drastic actions. We don't quite get the huge scene of the speech set alongside the context, but Trish's speech about how Dorothy always valued talent and always feared that Trish would waste talent does encapsulate the sort of mentality that Trish had unfortunately gotten from Dorothy -- and while that sort of go-for-it attitude might be great in something like the show business, when applied to its extremes it can get ugly and result in a mother that emotionally abuses her daughter so she can be a superstar, or a vigilante that ends up resorting to beating a corrupt cop to his death.

The Hogarth storyline is something that I've expressed a lot of frustration about... mostly because it isn't anywhere as compelling as the show think it is, and this episode brings it back up in full force as Kith is desperate for anyone to help her out with one of her donors, Dmitri Patseras, who wants to sue her. Hogarth's clearly back in her manipulating game, showing a friendly face while also offering to help out pro bono, but we all know Hogarth's a scheming snake and despite all of her seemingly-nice things that she does here, she's got her own interests (i.e. 'getting' Kith as her woman) in mind. Also, being the lawyer that represents Trish, she's also trying to patch things up with Trish and it's tricky because Trish absolutely loathes Hogarth right now, and Jessica isn't fond of her either. And, sure, Hogarth finally made the decision to stop representing Sallinger, and she claims she's trying to fix her mistakes, but honestly Hogarth has became so unlikable that it's kind of interesting if this was the point that the show was trying to actually make -- that sometimes people do terrible things, like Dorothy and Hogarth (and even to a less obvious extent, Erik, Malcolm and Briana), and only when they are alive that they can actually try and change -- someone playing executioner would deny that chance. Or something along those lines. They don't at least try and justify that this is a reason to spare Sallinger, but at least the show is trying to argue for the fact that less-psychotically-villainous people can do change for the better. Or try to.

Malcolm... is kind of interesting? In the past couple of episodes he's sort of drifting in and out of focus, eventually settling in his own moral dilemma by deciding that, hey, the side that doesn't try to help a psychotic serial killer is the actual good guys. This episode has him break up with Zaya and, uh, basically sort of had to lie to her a bunch to not give up just how deep he is in with the vigilante stuff. I really don't care about Malcolm and Zaya's relationship, though it's nice that this didn't really take up a whole lot of time and it does give Malcolm's character some extra weight. Erik's sister Brianna also shows up and tries to basically start a new life, and tries to get a place to crash. Malcolm and Brianna end up fucking before the episode is over, but I honestly really don't give two shits about Malcolm's love life, so.

Anyway, a fantastic episode. The strongest part of Marvel's Jessica Jones has always been its mood and the powerfully subdued emotional acting that its cast members are able to do, which this episode and the next really explore in spades. The Sallinger stuff, while I did like parts of it, really does feel a lot rockier compared to this pair of very solid episodes.
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Episode 11: AKA Hellcat
This episode, as mentioned above, plays off similarly to "AKA You're Welcome", but where that episode is just essentially the reintroduction of Trish as a vigilante in this new season, "AKA Hellcat" does the double duty of explaining the behaviours of Trish, Erik and a bunch of other characters that ended up with Nussbaumer's murder between episode 9 and 10, as well as Trish and Erik's attempts at cover-up in episode 10. And while I do think that this season might've overdone it a bit with two 'what happened behind the scenes, boys and girls?' episodes, I feel like it's pretty effective, particularly with the duality between Jessica and Trish as one of the biggest themes of the season.

Just telling us how Trish went on a careless vigilante rampage isn't really enough weight for the episode, though, and I do appreciate the follow up from episode 10 of the episode showing just how actually terrible and demanding of a mother Dorothy is, since some of the scenes in this episode show a younger, aspiring-child-actor Jessica being emotionally abused with guilt-trips and being taught to manipulate adults around her and betray her friend to get the starring role of the show. Just because you're mourning her, doesn't mean that all of her past sins are automatically forgotten -- and as someone who has to write and give a speech about Dorothy at her funeral, I can totally see how Trish ends up remembering some of these terrible memories. And, again, I feel like, back-to-back, "AKA Hero Pants" and "AKA Hellcat" is a far, far better sendoff to Dorothy Walker as a character that sort of helps to end up giving the character a far, far better sendoff as far as the audience is concerned. Rebecca de Mornay is also absolutely fantastic in these scenes playing a terrible person doing terrible things 'for the good of my child'. And in-between moments of pressure telling her daughter about how she must perform perfectly or people working on the show will starve or cutting her off in her brutal tutoring of how to act, we get moments of genuine pride and love that a mother has for her daughter and it really ends up capturing the complex relationship between abusive mother and child.

And this mentality, from the aforementioned "don't waste your talent" and Dorothy telling young Trish that she needs to feel that "(she) got this" ends up being reflected in the night that Trish, seeing Dorothy's mangled body, decides that she 'got this' and ends up maiming Sallinger. We get some repeats of scenes we've seen in episode 9 -- but framed from Trish's point of view after seeing her mother die, we get to see just how much things are starting to pile on her from Hogarth's witch-hunt for Hellcat, the conversation with Malcolm, and how after Malcolm left, the seemingly-random detail of a dude arguing with his wife/girlfriend next door ended up with Trish going vigilante once more and beating the shit out of the abusive dude.

Apparently at some point during the timeline of episode 9, Trish even went into the hospital room where Sallinger is in, and we get to see some smarmy manipulation from Sallinger, who is protected by the police and also mocks Trish how if he killed Sallinger then and there, all the agonizing sacrifices Jessica had to made would be in vain. Sallinger then goes on a rant about how Trish killing is just a power trip, but Sallinger's own killing is a byproduct of his bizarre 'show the truth' nonsense. Yeah, dude's a lunatic. Interestingly, though, while the show doesn't really bring it up, Dorothy's own philosophy and motto about how she wants to share those with great talents (even if said talent had to be forced) needs to share the with the world does end up as an interesting foil to Sallinger's own philosophies.

And all it takes is just a little push, and I actually do like it that the push came from the random doorman in Dorothy's apartment, who gives one of those "evil wins when those of good heart stand idly by" quotes, which galvanizes Trish to do something. She ends up showing up at Erik's apartment and I do like that some of Trish's speech to Erik in trying to get him to help out ends up mirroring some of Dorothy's own speeches in the past about how those with talent have a duty and whatnot, which is an interesting way of showcasing just how much Dorothy's upbringing, for better or for worse, really ended up molding Trish Walker into the woman she ended up becoming. And as she ends up brutalizing Montero later in the episode, Trish repeats her mom's words almost as a mantra, that she could "make the world better with her talents".

And with Erik's connections and his files on the people he blackmailed before, Trish decides to go full-on vigilante on Officer Nussbaumer. Trish's plan, however, as most of her solo Hellcat act, is amateurish -- her plan is basically to vaguely beat up Nussbaumer into a confession, then release the video into public. And Nussbaumer is a scum that killed some troubled teenagers, and it's hard to really feel broken up that a child-killer is dead, but at the same time it's pretty disturbing when the death happened, and unlike Erik's bookie that Trish beat up earlier in the season, this 'accident' ended up with a death. A death that, unfortunately for the cast, implicates Jessica Jones, but something that Trish ends up actually feeling good about since it's a 'win', while Erik, being someone with plot-convenient powers, rants about how euphoric he feels now that his headache is gone... again, something that unintentionally fuels Trish's own ego, and her thinking that this is the exact make-the-world-better that her dead mom told her about.

We get to see the officers interrogating Trish from her POV, and while she's a good enough actor to shake them off, she feels bad that the officers are suspecting Jessica, and engineers the beatdown of a second mark, Jace Montero (he sets fires to buildings to claim insurance money, also a scum), at a time when Jessica's location is public, exonerating her. And I really do like this little argument of "should the superhero kill the villain?" because, well, it's a slippery slope. Sallinger is a scumbag who deserves to die for sure, particularly thanks to what he did to Dorothy. Nussbaumer is a corrupt cop who shot teenagers, he's also pretty scumbag. But Jace Montero claims that his pretty terrible crime of setting fires to buildings is an accident gone wrong, and while he certainly deserves to be arrested, I think the show makes its point very well  that Trish... doesn't know when to stop, and the sight of Montero being absolutely brutalized before Erik stops Trish is pretty horrific.

And what about someone like Jeri Hogarth? I've said throughout these episodes that Hogarth was definitely an unlikable, scummy bastard since around episode 7, and I would go so far that I would agree with Trish's assessment that she's indirectly responsible for escalating the situation and causing Dorothy's death indirectly. She's certainly the unintentional cause of death for Kith's husband for sure. But for Hogarth, we get to see more of her. We get to see that she's dying, that she's desperate to hold on to the few good things she has in life (her law firm, and, as twisted as it is, Kith) and no, that doesn't excuse any of her crimes, but does she deserve to get her throat crushed as Trish threatens to do? Again, it's a gray area, and I do like that "AKA Hellcat" manages to imply this without actually spelling it out.

That said, Trish isn't the most stable of vigilantes, and is apparently very, very easily swayed. Hogarth offers to drop the footage about Hellcat, but also wants Trish to help her out in stealing something from Dmitri Patseras, the man bothering Kith, in order to prove his tax evasion or whatever. And, sure, Kith hates Patseras, but is he really as evil as Kith (and ergo Hogarth) make it out to be? Trish's ever-slippery slope ends up basically being "is he a bad person?" which is a lot harder to quantify since the world is really in shades of grey. Sure, there are some truly bad eggs like Sallinger, but Trish's refusal to see anyone else in anything but black-and-white is actually shown pretty well here.

Ultimately, there are a lot of heavy questions being asked here. But this is less a discussion of morality and the validity of murdering villains or whatnot, and more of a deep character study of the skewed way that Trish Walker views the world after her mother's death. There are some parts of it that I admit felt a bit long and repetitive (Trish beating up Sallinger in full detail; Trish's conversation with Malcolm; the bit with Trish calling the cops on Jessica at the end of episode 10) but ultimately, I feel like episode 10 and 11 might be the highlight of this season. We still have two more episodes to wrap this season (and Netflix Marvel) up, and it's certainly interesting.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Young Trish had to dye her hair red to stand out for a role. Comics!Hellcat is a redhead.