Krysten Ritter Is Too Good For The Doldrums Of ‘Marvel’s Jessica Jones’ Season 2

Season 2 of Marvel’s Jessica Jones is frustrating. While the first season punched its way into the zeitgeist with breathtaking candor about sex, abuse, and misogyny, season 2 struggles to find its footing or any sort of defining purpose. Star Krysten Ritter is incandescent as ever, but more often than not, the story fails to live up to the dynamite performance she’s giving. What makes this season all the more underwhelming is how often it tiptoes to the edge of being good. There are interesting conversations about grief, emotional abuse, sexual harassment, and anger management, but each of these gets dropped almost as soon as they’re picked up. Season 2 circles around some great ideas, but fails to successfully take off with any of them.

It’s hard not to love Jessica Jones, the character. Ritter plays the Marvel anti-heroine with sly wit, fiery attitude, and a deep well of bottled up pain. Jones gets to say what she wants, punch whom she wants, drink what she wants, and screw whom she wants. It’s a fantasy life for many women raised to beg, plead, and compromise their way to the middle of the pecking order. And though she’s constantly pushing people away, it’s Jessica’s profound empathy that makes her compelling as a hero. She doesn’t suffer fools, but she’ll walk through the fires of hell for the downtrodden innocent. But season 2 of Marvel’s Jessica Jones doesn’t do the character any justice.

The first season of Marvel’s Jessica Jones had very specific narrative goals. It wanted to introduce us to a new kind of heroine fighting a different kind of villain. David Tennant’s Kilgrave was a campy scene-stealer, but he also was an effective caricature of an abuser. Propelled by his own pain, he seeks to exert ultimate control over others. Jessica’s battle against Kilgrave was cathartic and dramatic; it shone a light on the psychological impact of abuse. Without delving into spoilers too much, the bad guy of season 2 seems to be a fun house mirror reflection of all that Jessica resents in herself. It’s almost as though Jessica is being forced to fight the worst version of who she is, and yet, the stakes seem lower this time around. Since there’s little to no emotional connection between Jessica and her new foe that means there’s little reason to care about the ultimate outcome. It’s a huge letdown from the dramatic fireworks of season 1. Not one new character makes for as compelling a foil to Jessica Jones as Kilgrave did.

Beyond that, season 2 is narratively muddled. This is a show that can’t decide what direction in wants to go. Because Jessica Jones is a hard-boiled, hard-drinking P.I., Marvel’s Jessica Jones is theoretically a detective drama. This season, the primary mystery is Jessica herself —Who made her this way? What haunts her? — but the story persistently stagnates. The first episode sets up what could have been a juicy framework for this overarching arc: someone is killing people who were given powers by IGH. Since IGH is the shadowy corporation behind Jessica’s super-strength, this includes her. She has a natural reason to finally dig into that part of her past. The problem is the show muddles this “murder mystery” with red herrings, early reveals, and a parade of distractions. Even worse, the series toys with the hallmarks of noir without ever fully surrendering to it.

A Marvel superhero show doesn’t have to be “fun,” but it ought to have some sort of forward momentum. By the end of the fourth episode, I realized that the show had given us little to no action whatsoever. The biggest emotional stakes had been shrugged aside (or involved Jess’s famous best friend Trish Walker’s love life). There had been no real sparks, let alone the thrilling storytelling explosions of Season 1’s first batch of episodes. You remember those, right? When Jessica hooked up with handsome bartender Luke Cage (Mike Colter) only to discover in a rowdy bar fight that he was super-powered, too? That was fun. That was exciting. It was full of verve and bite and sexiness. It helped hook you in. And Luke Cage, another Marvel Defender with his own series, was charismatic enough to match Ritter’s overwhelming star power. There’s been nothing nearly as engaging in season 2 as Ritter and Colter flirting in season 1.

As to be expected, Carrie-Anne Moss is once more pretty darn good as Jeri Hogarth. This season Jeri has to deal with multiple kinds of insurrections. She’s losing leverage at her law firm just as she’s facing a true battle in her personal life. Rachael Taylor and Eka Darville also shine a bit brighter this season as Trish Walker and Jessica’s neighbor/apprentice Malcolm. But it feels as though the show is leaning slightly too much on Jessica’s relationships with Trish and Malcolm this season in order to fill time.

Which brings me to what irritated me the most. Marvel shows typically get knocked for what’s known as “narrative bloat.” Meaning, they add a lot of fluff to stretch an 8-episode-long story into a 13-episode season. So far, all of Marvel’s Jessica Jones season 2 feels kind of bloated. Now I only got the first five episodes of the season, so it’s entirely possible that Marvel’s Jessica Jones is saving its fireworks for the back-half of the season — Spoiler alert: While David Tennant’s Kilgrave pops up in promos, he did not show up in any of the footage I saw — but this is turning into a big problem for Marvel’s shows. The more it happens, the less easy it is to forgive.

Season 2 of Marvel’s Jessica Jones is disappointing because it is so consumed with looking backwards. It’s one thing to hang a character’s arc on confronting their demons, but it’s another if the whole show seems stuck in reverse. Jessica Jones felt revolutionary in her first season, and now she just seems trapped in the past.

Season 2 of Marvel’s Jessica Jones premieres on Netflix on March 8.

Stream Marvel's Jessica Jones on Netflix