‘Jessica Jones’ Recap, Episode Six: Lost in the Weeds

“You are a hard-drinking, short-fused mess of a woman,” Luke Cage tells Jessica Jones. “But you are not a piece of shit.” Thesis statement! Yes, Luke has reason to reassess the latter part of that description later in the episode. But either way, this line from “AKA You’re a Winner!”, the season’s sixth episode, tidily sums up the show’s vision of its lead character: Sure, she’s an alcoholic asshole fuckup, but she’s got a heart of gold! If this is an interesting archetype for you, great, go with God. If not? You’re in for a slog.

The episode leans hard on audience tolerance for Jessica’s jerky one-dimensionality right from the start. After an opening scene in which Kilgrave uses his powers to win a high-stakes poker game (and force one of his opponents to bash his own head in), we cut to the private eye and her recently liberated neighbor Malcolm trying to plan their next move. At least, that’s what Malcolm wants to do. Jessica’s too busy nonsensically shutting him down. When he suggests they pool their information and profile the telepath, all she wants to know is possible locations to find him. “If you wanna discuss him,” she snaps, “fine, go to that survivor’s group. But if you wanna catch him, give me something I can use.” Isn’t that what he was trying to do? I get that pushing people away is one of the three or four personality traits she’s been given by the writers, but at a certain point you’d expect her desire to properly take down Kilgrave would trump her instinct to tell people with worthwhile ideas about that to shut up.

But her main case this go-round involves her ex, Luke Cage. He comes to as a hero for hire, needing help in tracking down the brother of a hospital administrator who’s promised him information proving his late wife Reva’s death was no accident. Jessica knows this only too well already, since she was the one who killed her, so after she finds out the nature of the case her goal is twofold: 1) find the kid and get him to the sister 2) before Luke can. There’s just one problem: By that point, she’s already slept with him again, rekindling a romance with a well-meaning dude who has no idea he’s fucking his wife’s mind-controlled murderer. Jessica and Luke have real chemistry, as do actors Krysten Ritter and Mike Colter, and the rematch is worth it for romantic moments like their initial handshake deal…

…watching Jessica strap her hands ’cross Luke’s engines as he takes her for a ride on his Harley…

…or the simple intimacy of the two of them the morning after, reclining sensually like figures out of the work of Egon Schiele, whose “Seated Woman with Bent Knee” graces her bedroom wall. But it’s hard to get that excited given the horrendous dishonesty involved. The more time we spend with the pair, the harder it is to think about what she’s keeping from him without wanting to shout at her, especially because he now knows about Kilgrave and will likely believe she’s not culpable. If she doesn’t want to tell him, fine, but she should also probably stop dating him.

Anyway, they work their way through the whole missing-brother maguffin—he was just holed up in a weed warehouse, trying to make enough money to pay off a loanshark. There’s the usual dudes-getting-thrown-across-tables Jessica Jones fight scene, which is really suffering from diminishing returns at this point, though at least there’s a shot of two Marvel superheroes admiring a gigantic room full of marijuana for our troubles.

But in the end they get their man, and despite Jessica’s best efforts to stop him, Luke gets his file. In it he learns not that his kinda-girlfriend punched his wife to death to cover up Kilgrave stealing some kind of computer file she had, but that the bus that hit her body had a drunk driver. This is his reaction:

Only now, when someone else’s life is at stake, does Jessica tell the truth. “You slept with me! You made me think I could get past it!” Luke says, near tears. “You let me be inside you, you touched me with the same hands that killed my wife, while you knew!” Declaring her a piece of shit, with ample justification, he walks off. Given the level of physicality involved in his confrontation of her, it’s an appropriately ugly scene, one of the few that gives Jessica’s hey-asshole personality any weight of real consequence.

I’ll say this for the episode, though: In between the perfunctory Jessica stuff and the pro forma “Kilgrave is a sneering monster” scenes (he buys Jessica’s childhood home in this one), it has just about the most straightforward, least moralistic and judgmental abortion storyline I’ve ever seen on TV. Hope, the Kilgrave victim Jessica is trying to exonerate, discovers while in jail for the murder of her parents that she’s pregnant with Kilgrave’s child. She refers to the fetus as growing “like a tumor”: “Every second it’s there, I get raped again and again. My parents are shot again and again.” When Jessica and her lawyer patron Jery Hogarth secure abortifacent medication for Hope, she downs it without thinking twice, and no one thinks any less of her for it. The show honors the feelings of the victim about what’s going on inside her own body, and allows her her right to choose what to do about them. I don’t know about the rest of it, but that’s heroic, for sure.

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.