*Obviously, spoilers ahead. As in, I don’t even know how you got to this page without knowing that already.
[A note before I begin: apparently I reacted to this season (really the first five episodes) quite differently from other reviewers, so until I have a chance to go back and re-watch this season without two years of withdrawal-fueled bingeing on my mind, this is how my reaction stands.]
If you’ve read my “About” section, you know that Jessica Jones is one of my three favorite shows. I, like other fans, spent the past two+ years pining for a second season. I was so looking forward to it. And those years of expectation, of anticipation, led me down a path that ill-prepared me for the less thrilling, more introspective season 2.
Allow me to start at the beginning. (Sorry, had to). Season 2 was not bad. In fact, I greatly enjoyed the first half of the season (unlike seemingly every other reviewer*). Jessica’s sardonic one-liners were flying, our favorite team had cracked open another case involving our heroine’s past, and everyone seemed to have their lives back on track. I flew through those first five episodes, easily abating the sleep that should have clouded my late-night brain.
And then came the big reveal. That the mysterious, murderous supervillain, the one that had me worried and curious and excited, was… Jessica’s mom?
As I entered the back half of the season, I couldn’t really tell what had gone wrong—why my excitement for each episode had ebbed. But the longer we stayed with this plot twist, the clearer the reason became: Jessica’s narrative momentum, her relationships and her investigation and her very thoughts, got knocked way the hell off course (even if her “identity quest” theme stayed the same). Given her (understandable) consternation over her mother’s appearance/aliveness, Jessica’s—and by extension, the show’s—whole world changed, with all thoughts and feelings revolving around Alisa. (And not in the fun, villain-controlling-our-protagonist’s-thoughts-and-actions way of season 1’s Kilgrave). As it turned out, all the fun sleuthing and shenanigans of the first five episodes were essentially MacGuffins or red herrings: Whizzer, Leslie Hanson, Will Simpson, Griffin, film producer Max, the “goddamn mongoose”—all paths led to Alisa Jones. (Well, not Griffin, but he was just as meaningless and forgettable in his own way).
My two main gripes about the season as a whole are as follows:
Gripe #1: Hello, goodbye, and good riddance, Alisa Jones (AKA ghost of mother past)
I can’t quite decide whether Alisa had too much screentime, or not enough, but what I do know is that I was painfully aware of her “important figure from protagonist’s past meant to impart a lesson and then die” fate from the time she identified herself as Jessica’s mother. I also begrudge her of the momentum she stole from Jessica’s investigation and overall narrative. To start, I don’t know why Netflix shows have begun to include late-season, full-flashback episodes (e.g., Ozark ep 8, equally as extraneous as Stranger Things 2 ep 7), but for some reason, right after we meet her in episode 6, post-accident Alisa gets a full backstory courtesy of the hour of my life spent watching episode 7.
In it, we just see a lot of plot points re-hashed from season 1 (or downright retconned to fit this new narrative). There’s the repetition from what season 1 told us of our characters’ pasts—Jessica wasn’t always so surly or ashamed of her powers, while Trish had always had a drug problem—as well as from what season 2’s nurse Inez had already told us about Alisa—specifically, her violent escape and her general tendency towards rage. Even what we didn’t explicitly know didn’t come as much of a surprise: we watch as Alisa escapes from her medical prison, tries to reconnect with/protect her daughter, then predictably screws up (AKA commits murder) and decides her daughter’s better off without her. (Honestly, the most interesting thing about the episode to me was the origin of Jessica’s leather jacket and her business name, Alias…though if you ask me, neither ever really needed much explanation.) I’m all for “show, don’t tell,” but at the very least, I think a series of shorter, more focused flashbacks would have been the way to go. (Or hey, make Jessica do some investigating?)
For the remainder of the season, Alisa was a wall past which neither Jessica nor her narrative could jump. Obviously, a back-from-the-dead mother is not something I’d expect Jessica to take in stride, and her presence had a lot of good elements that I’ll get to later, but I’m not happy that Jess’s daily prison visits left almost no room for other events or interactions in her life; Jessica became anchored to that one place, person, and concern. (By the way, did Jessica ever get answers to the medical experimentation questions she’d set out to find? Her super-origins still seem a little hazy to me.)
In addition to completely changing Jessica’s priorities, this path-crossing with Alisa caused Jessica to become isolated from pretty much everyone. Obviously, Jess isn’t one to play well with others, especially when those others are trying to help her, but Jess is the type of character who needs her friends in order to be pressured to vocalize her thoughts and feelings, however mired in sarcasm they may be. Without them, she turns into the strong, silent type, and all we get from her are the occasional poetic voiceovers.
Meanwhile, with Jessica’s "catching a criminal" narrative stopped short so as to deal with the Alisa bombshell, other characters’ stories sped onward, laying the groundwork for season 3. Of the main three, we watch as Trish continues on her path to addiction and wannabe-superherodom; her annoyingly self-righteous quest for justice, involving increasing amounts of body-enhancing drugs, basically just makes her the new Simpson—erratic and eye roll inducing. (Or, as actress Rachael Taylor puts it in an interview with Den of Geek, she knows her character won’t be well-liked, but this season is about revealing the cause of Trish’s “sense of lack… on the surface Trish looks like the character in the show that has it all. She has everything. You would think that she would be satisfied, but yet she has this gaping hole in her that creates this desire for more." All I can say is those not-so-deserved superpowers better make her an interesting foil for Jessica’s more reluctant heroism next season.) Hogarth, meanwhile, seems to have learned nothing from season 1’s “thousand cuts” mishap (AKA murder of spouse), and again spins Jessica’s request for help into a chance for personal gain—and, again, gets betrayed and left in a worse state than before (at least initially). Then there’s Malcolm, who I can’t really hold anything against, since he’s come so far and still has to undeservedly take so much of Jessica’s shit, but I resent him all the same... maybe the random romance with Trish was to blame? Oh, and let’s not forget about the new-superintendent-whose-only-purpose-is-to-forge-documents guy.
All in all, with Jessica consumed by her mother’s alternating threats and advice, and her friends, well, having their own lives, Jessica is more isolated than usual in the back half of the season. No one is rallying to her aid, counseling her to have the strength to do what she must. And vice versa, Jessica isn’t available to help Trish before she goes off the deep end, or to help Malcolm as he struggles with a new form of addiction. Instead, we have a bunch of disparate, loosely connected subplots (involving another PI, a super-hating superintendent, and Trish’s not-fiancé). I mean, this season couldn’t make time to explore Jessica’s childhood relationship with her mother, but manages to squeeze in some PI dirt-finding mission against Hogarth’s partners? Come on, now.
Simply put, Alisa Jones hijacked her daughter’s story, and with it, the show. This would have been fine had she (like Kilgrave) turned out to be a good villain or just, you know, a more compelling character, but her arc mainly served to fuel Jessica’s mental anguish over whether she’s “a killer” (since now nature, as well as nurture, seem to be leading her there). Once Alisa revealed herself to be repentant, a tragic figure who has her daughter’s best interests at heart, I was never really scared for Jessica—which I wanted to be. First of all, Alisa’s prison break had nothing on Kilgrave’s escape and ensuing murder spree. And physical threat aside, I wasn’t even that concerned for Jessica’s mental wellbeing; she hit some seriously dark moments, but the very fact that she was so distressed by her actions proved her good heart and morality would win out in the end. So though the writers were clearly intending to set up a foil with Kilgrave’s kidnap-and-blackmail actions (Jessica actually says to her mother, in the van, “You’re not the first psychopath who wanted to team up with me. Last time, one of us ended up dead.”), doing so without the threatening undertones made the tension fade away, and really only served to highlight the lack of a compelling antagonist. Which brings me to my next complaint:
Gripe #2: It wasn't season 1
Not fair, I know. But even in its trade of outward thrills for inward insight, of "person vs person" for "person vs self," this season didn’t manage to match the sustained emotional depths—the guilt, the shame, the self-doubt—of season 1.
Nevertheless, I must admit a large part of my overall disappointment with this season was simply that it didn’t meet my expectations. I had wanted another deliberate and tense mystery, ramping up to a terrifying and riveting villain takedown, but the creator had something different in mind. As showrunner Melissa Rosenberg said to EW, “The bar was set very high with Kilgrave. But you don’t want to repeat yourself, so you just turn around and set a bar somewhere else.” To her, it seems, season 2 was about more directly addressing Jessica’s inner battles, the classic “hero must deal with her past to have a future” theme.
And with that purpose in mind, I must admit she was successful.
To be clear, I did not expect season 2 to usurp season 1. I don’t even think it’s possible to beat the creepy yet charismatic unpredictability of Kilgrave (who, no offense to cast members who had 90% more screen time, may still have been the best part of season 2). Season 1 was basically a steady rise up to maximum tension and satisfaction, focusing on a physical and emotional threat to our heroine’s wellbeing, and is possibly my favorite takedown of a villain, ever. Season 2, though not lacking in violent outbursts, was pretty tame in comparison.
For, as it turns out, Jessica’s triumph over Kilgrave didn’t leave her felling, well, triumphant. She still had significant healing to do (plus the new pressure of having knowingly killed someone, deservedly or not). And to be fair, as this season constantly reminded us, the most traumatic event in Jessica’s life happened long before Kilgrave entered the picture. So though Jessica dealing with inner struggle isn’t the most compelling story, it is realistic. (And, I’ll admit, not a bad choice for a season 2 through-line.) After all, I never expected Jessica to just “get over” her PTSD or numerous past tragedies. I love this show because of its willingness to portray a traumatized yet powerful survivor, in all her messed-up and dark-humor-shielded glory. So though a big part of me is disappointed by the lack of season 1’s wish-fulfillment, good-over-evil victory, I’m trying to respect the more somber, more introspective place where season 2 took us.
And despite my complaining about Alisa, her character was paramount in resolving Jessica’s identity crisis. Jessica’s mom councils her to let go of her guilt from the car accident that she believes ruined her life (turns out her dad was just a crap driver), embodies the real downside of being experimented on (rage monster much?), and most importantly, informs Jessica (and us) that she’d always been a loner—that Jessica can’t blame the accident or anything that came after for her misanthropic tendencies. And it is that lesson, along with her mother’s untimely yet unsurprising demise, that brings Jessica to an unthinkable place: self-actualization (or something like it). After a season of watching Jessica tormented by inner and outer forces as she more and more forcefully reiterates her “I’m not a killer” mantra (until she herself finally believes it), Jess’s final act of the season is to engage her desire to be “tethered,” to be part of the world, to live, really for the first time in her life. (Which is good, because she’s more than ever alienated from everyone, as Trish, Malcolm, and even Jeri have moved on. But I guess she has Oscar and Vido now?)
While this season may not have left us with a fist-pumping feeling of victory, it does confirm once again that Jessica inspires people to do better, and that she has all the potential to be better. She may loudly assert that she’s not a hero, but that’s clearly not how those who know her see her—nor, it seems, how she now sees herself. Last season ended with the words “Maybe it’s enough that the world thinks I’m a hero…maybe if I work long and hard, maybe I could fool myself.” This time around, there’s no fooling anyone.
Oh, and equally exciting news? There are no more bogeymen or -women from Jessica’s past to hijack the next season (as far as I know). Consider her past fully mined!
*From lack of a compelling villain and thematic and narrative cohesion, to dead-end tangents and tired reexamination of season 1 themes, critics agreed this season didn’t match up to the magnificence of season 1. For those interested in reading more about this, I highly recommend the episode-by-episode reviews by Caroline Siede, who makes a very strong case for why I am wrong about the better half of season 2 (especially in her reviews of episodes 6, 8, and 13), not to mention her excellent points on some of this season’s major themes—female anger, accepting vulnerability, and the portrayal of a complex mother/daughter relationship... as well as her hilarious befuddlement over the existence of Griffin.
Oh, and this Verge article sheds some light on showrunner Rosenberg’s thoughts on the midseason narrative shift: “We really approached it as a 13-hour movie. So the first five episodes are like watching the first 35 minutes of a movie. Then you launch into the second act, and there’s a lot more coming.” I'll say! And Ritter's take? Per EW: "If season 1 was in her head and in her mind, then this season will be more in her heart. It's still a psychological thriller, but it's more of an emotional thriller this time."