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Marvel's Jessica Jones

How high can highlights take you? How much strength does a show require for its strong points to overpower its weak spots? How does the whole become more than the sum of even its most important parts? Jessica Jones, the hotly anticipated second series in Marvel & Netflix’s partnership, tells the story of a private eye, so perhaps it’s appropriate that it’s got me searching for answers myself. Its pilot episode, “AKA Ladies Night,” contains some of the most powerful moments and challenging themes in the entire Marvel oeuvre. I’m just not sure that’s enough to declare the case for its quality closed.

Jessica Jones is based on the groundbreaking (for Marvel Comics, anyway) mature-readers comic Alias, by the creative team of writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos. Launching in the early ‘00s, it was part of a tremendous creative hot streak that saw Bendis use his crime-comics background to give the high-flying superhero genre a down-and-dirty makeover; his contemporaneous run on Daredevil with artist Alex Maleev inspired much of the look and feel of the acclaimed Netflix series as well. In the case of Alias, Bendis infused bad language, booze, sex, and intimate, sometimes sexual violence into the story of a woman who became a P.I. when her short career as a superhero crashed and burned. It was a comic about people who’d fallen through the cracks of the Marvel Universe, a place where the presence of the supernatural and supervillainous made those cracks that much wider and deeper. For the publisher, at the time still recovering from a late-‘90s bankruptcy that’s all but unimaginable for the multi-billion-dollar business today, it was a radical and necessary aesthetic and moral experiment.

The TV show’s first episode keeps that tone largely intact. It follows Jessica—Breaking Bad and Don’t Trust the B star Krysten Ritter, who’s clearly thrilled to have a role like this to sink her teeth into—the sole proprietor of Alias Investigations, as she lies, drinks, argues, and fucks her way through several cases, from handling a client who doesn’t like the results of the marital-infidelity investigation he hired her for…

…to serving a lawsuit to a strip-club owner on behalf of high-powered attorney Jeryn Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss) by lifting up his car with her bare hands…

…to spying on fellow not-quite-a-superhero Luke Cage (as-yet-unnamed, but that’s who he is, folks; he’s played by Mike Colter, who will star as the character in his own solo series) in flagrante delicto for reasons unknown…

…to tracking down a missing Midwestern track star and NYU student. It’s here that things get interesting, and disturbing. Throughout the episode, Jessica is beset by purple-tinted PTSD flashbacks to a mysterious man who taunts her at every turn.

This, it turns out, is Killgrave (Doctor Who’s David Tennant, proof once again that Marvel’s casting department knows its Tumblr fandom), a powerful telepath who uses his powers to make everyday people like waiters and chefs cater to his every whim—and to kidnap and rape “gifted” women like Jessica and Hope, the missing student.

Realizing that Killgrave himself gave Hope’s parents the tip to hire her, she tracks the girl down to the same hotel room where she was once assaulted herself. The resulting sequence is genuinely harrowing, from the Vertigo shot of the hallway…

…to the strobe-light paranoia of Jessica’s approach to the room…

…to her discovery of Hope, in her underwear, pinned to the bed by Killgrave’s command not to move. Jessica is forced to physically move the young woman herself; watching her scream and fight to stay put, to obey the irresistible mental command of her abuser, is extremely difficult to endure.

Equally grim: the resolution to the storyline, in which the seemingly happy ending of Hope’s reunion with her parents is transformed into tragedy when Killgrave’s control reasserts itself, forcing the student to gun her mother and father down in Jessica’s apartment-building elevator.

The uncompromising brutality of the Killgrave/Hope plot is all the more surprising given that the episode is the studio’s most explicitly sexual, and arguably sexy, work to date. Besides the animalistic extramarital sex that opens the ep, there’s Hogarth’s clinch with her secretary (who is very much not her wife, played by Deadwood MVP Robin Weigert)…

…and Jessica’s multi-position hookup with Luke. Unlike virtually every other Marvel project, where sexuality is sublimated primarily in pin-up shots of the bodies of its stunning male stars, this is all about putting those bodies to good use: “I won’t break,” Jessica assures the guy. Indeed!

So. Complex lead character portrayed by a talented actor. An approach to sex that’s adult in every sense. The use of genre trappings to craft a truly horrendous criminal and offer a visceral metaphor for the dehumanization of women by sexual predators. The hotel scene alone. That’s a lot to recommend this episode.

But when you focus on the emotional, artistic, and thematic highs, a sort of peak distortion takes effect that obscures the long grey stretches in between. For all her talent, and for all of Jessica’s compelling backstory, Ritter is given little to do here but fume and glare. She does so while wandering around a bog-standard big-city environment, with a sax-heavy score that aims for retro cool but lands in cliché. Fight scenes, which are to superhero stories what singing is to opera, are entirely absent. Yes, its strong points are strong, its seriousness admirable, but in service of what? Without lively, surprising characters and visuals, not much. Not yet, anyway.