‘Marvel’s Jessica Jones’ Betrayed Trish Walker

We need to talk about Trish Walker and what happened to her in Season 2 of Marvel’s Jessica Jones. And yes, there will be spoilers for all of Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2, so read on at your own peril.

In just the space of a 13-episode season, Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor) went from being one of the best friends in pop culture to one of the worst ones. In Season 1 of Marvel’s Jessica Jones, she was presented as a refreshing antidote to the superhero sidekick cliché. She wasn’t an annoying minor tagging along. She wasn’t goofy or needy or flashy. Most importantly, she wasn’t a damsel in distress. In fact, Trish was defined by her steadfast refusal to be a victim. After spending her childhood pimped out for stardom, Trish was now a put-together, pragmatic, martial arts-obsessed success story. Sure, she was a tabloid talk show host, but it was a living. She was emphatically a “grown up.”

Jessica Jones and Trish Walker’s friendship was so well-defined — and so tinged with some really nuanced meditations on female jealousy — that they reminded me of Marvel’s answer to Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. (Jessica is obviously the Lina and Trish was such a Lenu, not that I needed to tell you that, we’re all intimately familiar with the textual nuances of My Brilliant Friend.)

In Season 2, all that careful character development slipped away and Trish became the worst kind of side-kick. She began to hurt Jessica’s cause far more than helping it. She lied to Jessica, undermined her efforts, and even worked at cross purposes. While at first Trish used her connections to help Jessica, by the end it seemed the only reason she wanted to uncover the truth about IGH was to undergo a painful back alley procedure to become super herself. If that wasn’t bad enough, there was the moment where she just took it upon herself to murder Jessica’s troubled mother. When the dust settled on Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2, Trish Walker had transformed into both “Hellcat” and a lousy friend.

In reality, though, it was the show that betrayed Trish. Trish Walker deserved better in Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2 and she never got it.

From a narrative perspective, Trish’s arc in Season 2 is nonexistent. It’s just a bunch of false starts that ramp up to a confusing turn around for the character. Worse, there are seeds of interesting emotional storylines planted, but all of them are dropped for no explicable reason. Let’s look at some of these promising storylines, shall we?

• Really dealing with her child star past – we get glimpses of it, but never an excavation
• Finally confronting her abuser and the actual emotional fallout of that
• Her romance with Griffin, who was perfectly fine and who came out of nowhere and then puffed like smoke into the ether
• Her potential marriage to Griffin (In the words of my co-worker, Brett White, “You dangled ‘Jessica Jones as a bridesmaid’ in front of us and you took it away?!?!”)
• Her quest for cable news stardom
• The idea that she wishes she was “Griffin”
• Her tryst with Malcolm and what that means and where it could be going
• Her memories of Nuke and what it means that she is holding on to his duffle bag of terror
• What’s going on with her and her mom
• Did she ever win that VMA for “I Want Your Cray-Cray?”
• How much she loves burritos

There were a lot of different directions that Trish Walker’s story could have gone in Marvel’s Jessica Jones that didn’t involve her losing what seemed to be the core truth of her character: her sterling, steadfast devotion to Jessica. But instead, Trish’s envy takes over. She spends most of the season hiding things from Jessica and becoming super-powered herself becomes more important than helping her friend. It’s a strange bit of character development when you consider all the different directions Trish’s storyline could have gone (or that she could have been realistically torn between becoming powered, but at the cost of her hard-fought sobriety).

It’s been often written that Marvel’s Jessica Jones is a show about feminine rage. It’s about pain, trauma, abuse, and how we rise from it. Season 1 made it clear that sisterhood was a key part of this process of healing. By relying on our female friends, allies, and confidants, women are able to seek strength in numbers. We find comfort in one another’s empathy and discover our own hidden powers by lifting each other up. Trish Walker was presented as the personification of these values. In many ways, she was Jessica’s true super-strength: a caring friend who kept our heroine tethered to the real world.

But in Season 2, Trish Walker becomes a subversion of these values. She is more of a bitter rival than friend, and she is frenetically changing her goals as quickly as she changes outfits. Her whole arc just feels wrong. It’s sloppy, lazy, and it undermines the power of Season 1. It’s so frustrating that Season 2 of Marvel’s Jessica Jones chose to let Trish down in such a huge way because when you let Trish Walker down, you also let Jessica Jones down.

Stream Marvel's Jessica Jones on Netflix