‘Jessica Jones’ Recap, Episode Eight: Home Creep Home

There’s a certain irony to “AKA WWJD?”, the title of Jessica Jones’s eighth episode. Asking “What would Jessica do?”, it then does something the series has consistently failed to do throughout the season so far: something (anything!) surprising. Often unpredictable, frequently subtle (at least by superhero standards), it’s the show’s best episode so far, by far.

The episode centers on Jessica during her multi-day sojourn to her childhood home, which Kilgrave has purchased and restored to a simulacrum of how it was the day her parents and brother died in the car crash that gave her her powers. The telepath-slash-psychopath proudly tells her how he spared no expense and considered every detail, from the oh-so-‘90s Nirvana/Red Hot Chili Peppers/Green Day posters on her bedroom wall to the Sears-Roebuck catalog furniture in the living room. “You shouldn’t have,” she deadpans. “I wanted to!” he replies. He may have astonishing mental powers, but “noticing sarcasm” isn’t one of them.

Slowly, and pretty compellingly, we learn the dynamics of their arrangement. Kilgrave has a paid security staff he isn’t compelling to provide their services, and a paid kitchen staff he’s compelling to kill themselves if Jessica gives him any serious trouble.

He won’t compel Jessica, though, nor will he dishonor the specific instructions she gives him in hopes of earning her love by “choice.” “I choose that you don’t touch me, EVER,” is one such command.

For her part, Jessica’s there to try to get a taped confession of Kilgrave’s involvement in Hope Schlotman’s murder of her parents—a fact he cottons to immediately, when one of his security goons confiscates her already-recording smartphone. And she’s serious enough about the confession that she prevents Officer Simpson, who’s infiltrated the house and planted a bomb, to call off the assassination attempt lest it screw up Hope’s case, stealing his phone in the process to use as a backup recorder.

But the more time she spends with her tormenter, the more a second mission appears to develop: making him see that he has done terrible things. Kilgrave clings to a narrow semantic definition of “murder” to avoid culpability for the crimes he commands—he never killed anyone personally, so he’s no killer at all, right? Jessica isn’t having this. Nor is she letting him weasel his way out of accepting that he raped her, repeatedly, simply because he did so in five-star hotels following dinners at fancy restaurants. These niceties, after all, were no more consensual than what happened afterwards. “That’s not what I was trying to do,” he protests. “It doesn’t matter what you were ‘trying’ to do,” she replies. No, it doesn’t.

Kilgrave’s response to this is the episode’s first curveball: “How am I supposed to know?” Obviously he’s giving voice to every patriarchally entitled creep who’s ever used “mixed signals” or “she led me on” as an excuse to force himself on someone. But to hear him tell it, he’s legitimately incapable of understanding not just run-of-the-mill consent issues, but whether or not he’s accidentally made consent impossible. “I have to painstakingly choose every word I say,” he explains with what seems to be genuine frustration. “I once told a man to ‘go screw himself.’ Can you even imagine?”

What follows this gruesomely funny image is just gruesome, without being funny in the slightest. Kilgrave implies to Jessica that “bad parenting” made these issues difficult for him. She, quite naturally, isn’t buying it. “My parents died,” she spits. “You don’t see me raping anyone.” (“I hate that word,” he says. I’ll bet.) So to prove his point to her, he produces the yellow thumbdrive he’d made her kill Reva Connors for—and reveals that it contains horrific footage of his parents conducting neurological experiments on him as a child, turning him into a superhuman, with sociopathy as a side effect.

It doesn’t excuse what Kilgrave has done, or make him any less the “psychotic, repulsive waste of a human being” Jessica calls him earlier in the episode. But it does explain him, not just in terms of his powers but of what he chooses to do with them. The scene elicits another fine bit of acting from Ritter, who reacts to the footage with dull horror. Simultaneously understanding what made the monster who raped her what he is, empathizing with him for it, and realizing this is absolutely no comfort to her at all, she is literally sadder but wiser.

Tennant, too, has a rare moment of nuance here, just a hint of lingering vulnerability and pain peaking out from under the layers of I-told-you-so arrogance. The shift goes unspoken, but it’s visible between the lines of physical cues like his slumped reclining posture when he retires to the living room to mindlessly watch TV afterwards. It’d be nice if the writing and performance gave the character that kind of room to breathe instead of shout elsewhere.

At any rate, it’s a change Jessica herself picks up on. “All this shit that you do is because no one ever taught you to be good?” she asks, largely rhetorically. So she takes it upon herself to try where no one else has. Dragging him along to a hostage situation that’s been on the news all day, she gets him to join forces with her to Jedi-mind-trick their way past the police, break into the locked house where a father is holding his family at gunpoint, and free the terrified mother and children before compelling the gunman to turn himself in.

It’s another strong sequence for Tennant, who’s much more convincing at being likeable than he is at being loathsome. His exasperation with the abusive father (“Oh, shut up, Chuck!”) is funny, his quick thinking with the fleeing family (“Don’t tell anyone we were here”) is impressive, and his kid-after-a-roller-coaster-ride “that was awesome!” demeanor after the fact shows just how stunted Kilgrave’s emotional and moral development really is. “I can’t be a hero without you,” he tells her when she says he could save lives on his own. “Oh my god, you���re right,” she sighs, realizing the truth of it.

The subsequent scenes, in which Jessica turns to Trish for advice on whether to “team up” with Kilgrave on a permanent basis to harness his powers for good, seem to set up exactly that. Surprise! Instead, Jessica gets the drop on her abuser by drugging his wait staff, injecting him with sufentanil, and leaping into the sky with him slung over her shoulders when Officer Simpson and his special-ops buddies intervene.

Considering the number of mass-murdering supervillains who are given clean-cut hero makeovers in superhero comics, the refusal to give into this fan-pleasing narrative on the show is pretty damn satisfying. So to is the sense that you can’t see where it’s headed from a mile away—a sense only enhanced when Jessica’s nosy neighbor, whom Kilgrave had previously humiliated for morbidly and falsely claiming to have had a premonition about her family’s car crash, shows up with Simpson’s bomb, blowing herself up and badly injuring him in the process. When you give your hero and villain more than one or two emotional settings, when you change up the plot structure instead of relying on the same basic drives and conflicts every single time, something explosive can happen.

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.