I take it all back. OBVIOUSLY Jessica is cheerful and friendly, with a smile that could light up Times Square.
Jessica Jones, an ostensible superhero, is a compulsive narcissist, a miserable bitch who spreads misery wherever she goes. The first season of this Netflix Marvel show tried to justify her miserable narcissism by blaming it on her dead family and her insanely-tragic-in-an-over-the-top-adolescent-way past history with a mind control psycho.
Fair enough.
The funniest thing about Season Two is that we find out that Jessica has ALWAYS been miserable, and always made everyone around her miserable. Her family dying in a wreck and her subsequent angsty backstory didn’t MAKE her miserable, it just allowed her to be as miserable as she already wanted to be.
This is NOT a hero. This is what an incompetent writer thinks a hero-with-a-tragic-backstory is.
NEWS BREAK: It ain’t.
Spider-Man has a proper tragic backstory, and he didn’t become a drunk and sit around all day making everyone around him suicidal and depressed. HELL TO THE NO! Because he’s a hero. He helps other people and does good.
Jessica is a narcissistic drunk, a narcissistic drunk with SUPERPOWERS, a narcissistic drunk who spends all her days crying about how hard it is being a smart, hot, ace detective with superpowers and insanely rich family and clients, plus her hot super, al of whom—for some inexplicable reason—put up with her whiny neurotic narcissism. Basically she’s one electric blue dye job and a mental illness haircut away from being a Socialist YouTube activist.
“I have superpowers, pouty lips, and legs for days! WOE IS ME!”
(Shut the hell up. People with real problems are talking.)
(Also, SPOILER ALERT IS NOW IN EFFECT!)
Miserable narcissism is, of course, SJW for “STRONG WOMYN WHAT DON’T NEED NO MAN!” Actually, none of the women do, the show suggests. The one good relationship in the show—Jessica’s adoptive sister is dating a world famous wealthy combat reporter who even Jessica can’t find any dirt on—is terminated when the sister picks career over having a family. (Boy, will she regret THAT decision in roughly 5-10 years.)
Added to this is the usual array of Leftist idiocies: illegal alien is pure and innocent, the white citizen is a scumbag; an ex-con man who orders Chick-fil-A; and—I SWEAR this is true—gay bashing jocks who are probably repressing latent homosexual tendencies. Because we had to hit ALL the cliches. (Also, they released this season on International Women’s Day. I SWEAR this is true.)
Now, all this makes it seem like I hated the show. Which is wrong—I didn’t HATE it. The politics aren’t on-the-offensive, like they were in 2016’s Ghostbusters de-make, they were stock, rote, and by-the-numbers. The attitude is less “PUNCH A NAZI!” and more “Do I HAVE to eat my broccoli? Alright…”, as if the writers themselves were as bored with their political schtick as I was. And, setting politics aside, the season isn’t TOTALLY bad:
The acting is pretty good, as is the casting. New York looks appropriately… ah… New York-y. And, as a piece of fiction, the season is much better constructed than most Marvel Netflix shows. It still has lots of padding, but the story flows better, and is moderately better written. Jessica Jones would almost be a good show…
If Jessica herself weren’t such a miserable bitch.
Jasyn Jones, better known as Daddy Warpig, is a host on the Geek Gab podcast, a regular on the Superversive SF livestreams, and blogs at Daddy Warpig’s House of Geekery. Check him out on Twitter.
I only watched the first two episodes and two thoughts kept running through my head as I watched them.
This is dull.
Jasyn Jones is not going to like this.
I ALMOST turned it off at “how very rapey of you” …but then I realized that chang was the real hero of the show, who actually ends up being the winner.
she’s an asshole but I was okay with it, because at the end she was the only one who didn’t get a happy ending, as she deserved.
You missed my favorite example of checking every box: forcing a vegetarian to eat meat.
Truth be told, having the fancy pants lawyer dumbly ask, “what’s that?” to the request for Chick-fil-A would be a funny joke…except for the fact that you would have had to been living under a rock to have missed the kerfuffle over Chick-fil-A from 2011/2012.
It’s over the top to the extent you can’t argue the show gives us perfect female characters. It isn’t quite right to say Trish chooses career over family, because her boyfriend in no way impeded her career. Quite the opposite! He encouraged her and served as a valuable mentor (her mother on the other hand…). Trish winds up be a deeply flawed but understandable character.
Jessica Jones is a pretty good example of how to and how not to do feminist fiction. Season 1 is every bit as feminist as Season 2–probably more–but is also far superior storytelling.
I give it:
-2 of 5 Stars
3 stars for season 2
-5 star for an egregious failure to include Rosario Dawson
You give the writer too little credit and not enough blame.
Her writing was NOT a mistake. She did not mess up when creating the backstory, it was not incompetently written. It was ENTIRELY INTENTIONAL.
Jessica is not a superhero because she isn’t supposed to be, and never was. Jessica Jones is an anti-superhero show, the superhero equivalent to “Frozen”. The thesis statement of “Jessica Jones” is stated by one of her clients: “With great power becomes great mental illness”.
Jessica starts off as a bitch, but she’s a bitch who tries. When she tries she is progressively beaten down and driven more and more insane by a universe that is trying to screw her over. She’s a bitch, but her bitchiness is a rational reaction to a cruel God.
The moral of “Jessica Jones” is that their is no point in being a good person because their is no hope and the universe is going to screw you over either way. And the backstory of Jessica is created specifically to support this point.
Jessica Jones’ backstory is not incompetently written. It’s just evil, and that’s far worse.
I see these reviews as a public service, because they have allowed me to avoid hours of dreck.
Thank you, Mr. Jones.
Someone recommended this one to me after I said I enjoyed Daredevil. One of my criticisms of Daredevil was that the violence was occasionally gratuitous. And he said this was even worse. I decided not to watch it based on that but it sounds like there’s a lot more to dislike.
I did watch The Punisher just recently which similarly gratuitously violent. It has some lefty boxes checked but overall, I thought did right by the character.
So in conclusion this show is nothing more than a pile of self-indulgent, nihilistic crap. I never finished season 1 and won’t bother with the rest.
Whoever the writer on the show is should make it a point to study classic Film Noir(which Jessica Jones is inspired by, at least the comics are); yes, there was always an air of pervasive doom but the characters, even though most of them were criminals or just plain nasty people, were so well written you couldn’t help but root for them to survive, even if you were aware of the fact that their fates were sealed.
That’s the main problem with Jessica Jones; not that she is a nasty person, but that she is an unlikeable one that never changes throughout the series, and such there is nothing about her that makes you hope for her survival.
There are other fundamental problem with the premise of the story itself, but this is the core one.
It was OK. Trish was the most interesting She wants to escape her Here’s Patsy character but she doesn’t know who Trish is.
She wants to be the Globe Trotting CNN type journalist but doesn’t have the talent. She want to be Jessica and do the Super Hero thing better but she has no powers.
I knew they’d turn her into Hellcat from the comics but was a bit disappointed if what happened in JJII is how they do it.
It’s easy to criticize, but someone will NEVER know the true impact being sexually abused over and over again and/or loosing your parents at a young age has on the psyche unless they’ve been through it. It’s impossible to know how someone will turn out after experiencing such abuse, and to be quite honest her character is quite a good turn-out for such history, most people would be junkies at some point having gone through that.
People wouldn’t know the strength it takes to get up every day and try to help people with such a history, and having been around my share of women who were sexually abused Jessica Jones one of the most positive personalities I know of from both fiction and reality alike. She’s a hero for those that have zero strength to get up day after day and do the best they’ve got, because most people with such a past don’t even like themselves much less anyone else.