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There are eight million stories in the naked city. Pretty much all of them now involve surviving an alien invasion.

Like Daredevil before it, Jessica Jones excels at filling in the margins of life in a superheroic universe. Though the reactions of normal people to the extraordinary events of big superhero movies are often included, it’s usually done in perfunctory, vox populi fashion—an angry mob hoists “MUTANTS GO HOME” placards, today’s answer to Frankenstein’s pitchforks and torches; an adoring crowd cheers for the saviors of the city; a towheaded child cries until a demigod swoops down to save him; a central-casting cabbie with a Noo Yawk accent yells at Doctor Octopus for screwing up traffic, etc.

The Marvel/Netflix shows’ approach has been more complex and clever. Naturally, an extraterrestrial incursion led by a mythological Satan figure and repelled by a team of freaks and supersoldiers would send out shockwaves long after the punches stopped flying. So to Wilson Fisk’s shock-doctrine exploitation of a real-estate market full of rubble, this episode, “AKA 99 Friends,” adds Audrey Eastman (played by Krysten Ritter’s fellow Breaking Bad vet Jessica Hecht), a traumatized civilian driven to vigilante strikes against “gifted” individuals to the unintended fallout of the wars of the gods.

If you’re not particularly interested in the minutiae of the superhero genre you might be saying “Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care,” and I don’t blame you, but it’s nice to see the milieu explored beyond the Donner/Singer/Raimi/Whedon-established boundaries. (I’d add the de rigeur “You don’t need to have seen the rest of the Marvel movies and shows to understand this one,” but that’s praise so faint that I may as well be singing the series out for the use of moving pictures.)

And while we’re making connections between Marvel’s two street-level superhero shows, both of them have taken a pretty unusual approach to urban policing. Daredevil and Jessica Jones each portray the NYPD less as an organization than as a force of nature—a power that’s morally neutral at best, and can be harnessed for good or, more often, for ill. The police in DD were so corrupt they functioned as an additional gang for Wilson Fisk to control; when crooked cops died during their dirty deeds, Fisk used the press to demagogue against Daredevil off their deaths, which is certainly familiar. Here, Officer Wilson is a fundamentally decent dude, but his Kilgrave-induced assault on Trish Walker serves as a metaphor for how people who go into the force to serve and protect can find themselves doing quite the opposite. When he makes amends by providing Trish with a gun for self-defense and giving Jessica access to the Department’s extensive surveillance network to track down the man who’s been spying on her, the gestures read as both noble and chilling at the same time. After all, BIG BROTHER IS HELPING YOU is hardly an improvement on the original. Even at its best, the treatment of cops here is a far cry from the borderline idolatrous worship of police everywhere from Spider-Man to The Dark Knight Rises.

Also in the plus column, we’re getting a sharper view Kilgrave now, or at least one that fleshes out his unique psychopathic tendencies. Specifically, he seems to get off on abusing children, forcing one poor little girl to abandon her mommy to deliver Jessica a message…

…and making a man in Jessica’s ersatz support group leave his crying son on the curb before driving off as the telepath’s enslaved chauffeur. I’d been skeptical of the value of the scene a couple episodes back in which a child urinates as a result of Kilgrave’s abuse, concerned that this was just a throwaway “this guy’s a real monster, right, gang?” moment. But it seems the show is as serious about his treatment of kids as it is about his contempt for women, which is good. If you’re going to go down that disturbing road, you either earn it, or exploit it.

But the title character herself is not getting any more interesting. While the handling of abuse and trauma is as incisive as ever, so too does Jessica remain a glowering hardass stereotype in every other respect. Some of this is down to the writing, which sets her up in cliched scenarios like the ol’ sad shower scene (I don’t know about you, but I’m rarely sad in the shower—my bouts with melancholy usually take place on the couch) and forces her to deliver wooden lines like “Not tonight, Hogarth. Not tonight.” But, and I hate to say this, some of it is Krysten Ritter, who seems more and more miscast as the series continues. As good as she was in Breaking Bad, investing a supporting character with a mainline dose of audience empathy, she’s doing very little with this part beyond glaring, sneering, and occasionally sitting in silence. Sure, they can have her do a Pete Venkman twirl on a street corner…

…or cry a single Frodo Baggins tear when she discovers her junkie neighbor Malcolm has been Kilgraved…

…but like when she trashes the room she’s been lured to by her anti-gifted client for an assassination attempt, the emotional displays feel forced since her affect is otherwise so stonefaced. If this show is ever gonna soar, something’s gotta break.

[Watch the “AKA 99 Friends” episode of Jessica Jones on Netflix]
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island. He also recaps Showtime’s The Affair and HBO’s The Leftovers for Decider.