I'm sorry Tien, but I must go all out.
Alisa was extremely compelling. She was a reflection of Jessica herself, but more extreme in every way. Her anger outbursts were much more violent, but she was also more sincerely heroic than Jessica. At no point in the season was her love for her daughter in question. I'm not excusing her actions, she did premeditate a bunch of murders, but that level of depth made her a very compelling antagonist.
Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Jul 26th 2018 at 10:13:18 AM
Serial Procrastinator
How is she more sincerely heroic? Because she helps one or two people? She's sincerely arrogant. When your first conversation with your daughter when she thought you were dead is to say "by the way your dead father was a shit person and never respected how awesome I was" and your version of survivor's guilt is to go "everything would have been fine if I was driving, I was the better driver by far", and your first response to saving people is to go "we're the two strongest women in the world, we're destined for greatness"...
Alisha is completely at the mercy of her own gigantic ego, wherever it takes her. This is repeatedly apparent, but the show doesn't notice that.
I'll give you that she reflects Jessica's anger, but since the show seemed fine with having Jessica walk out of an anger management class and basically didn't properly address her anger since it was too busy having her slut-shame Malcolm and having Trish go around sticking needles in her own spine, that reflection didn't ultimately matter.
"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"
Foreign Troper
You do realize that she was obviously coping with these statements, right?
Besides, as Karl Malus explained, she is genuinely mentally ill. She sincerely believes that what she does is the right
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Keep in mind that Jess didn’t just beat him up for no reason, she beat him up when he kept threatening her and getting in her face at his office. Not to mention he himself resorts to extra legal means against Jessica, like sending his friend to steal stuff from her office and trying to kill her and her mom.
Well, Jess has many flaws. Why wouldn’t hypocrisy be one of them? I don’t think that scene was meant to be a judgment on Malcolm but just Jess being an ass.
Serial Procrastinator
Not only is Malus not a psychiatrist - heck, he's barely a doctor - he's her boyfriend. He is in no way qualified to assess her mental health, and while it's clear that she has some very serious issues with managing her anger a lot of the worst things she says or does come from when she is in control of herself.
"Keep in mind that Jess didn’t just beat him up for no reason, she beat him up when he kept threatening her and getting in her face at his office. Not to mention he himself resorts to extra legal means against Jessica, like sending his friend to steal stuff from her office and trying to kill her and her mom."
I'm not saying he's not an asshole, just that nothing he did at that point or afterwards hinted that his motives were even remotely connected to sexism which is what Jeri is criticising him for.
Heck, not only does he only resort to breaking and entering after Jeri breaks attorney/client privilege by refusing to file his suit for personal reasons, by the time he tries to kill Jessica's mother it's stopped being about personal profit and has become about revenge for the death of his friend.
Also, while I don't buy his claim that he was only trying to assassinate Alisha so that police wouldn't die I do think that his claim that he was only trying to kill her holds some merit.
Edited by Sigilbreaker26 on Jul 26th 2018 at 5:36:18 PM
"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"
How in control she is of herself is highly questionable.
Serial Procrastinator
Quite apart from the fact that her and Malus are unwilling to give a killer to the police so she can get actual help and instead resort to chaining her in his basement like a werewolf (even when that clearly isn't working), some of her murders are extremely precise (notably she kills Whizzer by dropping a bunch of scaffolding on him, and makes the death of the other scientist look like an accident.)
Even if she's not in control during those rages she never does anything to make sure that they don't happen again. She doesn't get proper psychiatric help. She doesn't turn herself into the police. Instead she just ignores what she has done and keeps on going with her fantasy of a normal life.
Edited by Sigilbreaker26 on Jul 26th 2018 at 5:39:13 PM
"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"
I still am hoping for a very quick reconciliation in season 3 between Jessica and Trish. I think they cannot complete season 3 without them forgiving each other. Trish as a villain would never work. Trish and Jessica care for each other too much that they won't kill or hurt each other in a really bad way. And having Trish as a villain would mirror Season 2 too much, with a lot of the conflict stemming from family. I think that whatever the threat is in season 3, it would make more sense to have Jessica and Trish both going after it and thwarting each other as they butt heads, with the impetus being a mix of Jessica still not being able to look at Trish because of her choices as well as her judging Trish's techniques as a newbie hero without yet understanding the responsibility that comes with her abilities and how it could lead her to become no better than the bad guys. This could come to a head where Trish finally gets it and tries to get Jessica to take her on as a peer/sidekick to teach her, which will be a long road of refusals that ultimately ends in concession and Jessica forgiving Trish, due to the nature of the threat they are up against.
With Malcolm, he'll likely come back to work for Jessica once he begins to take issue with the sorts of things that Cheng tasks him with doing, and will come to realize he misses working with Jessica and thus go back to her.
Edited by dmcreif on Aug 14th 2018 at 2:28:12 PM
The cold never bothered me anyway
Who knows. Honestly, it was a mistake to go for the big break up finale in the first place. It was just BS. But having it all reversed wouldn't feel right either, not regarding Malcolm. Trish is another matter. I think when push comes to shove, those two will always cling to each other.
Too much of it was kinda rehashing the breakup stuff from Daredevil season 2.
You know, I only realized it now, but each of the sophomore seasons has the unintentional side effect of the main character sometimes feeling overshadowed.
In Daredevil season 2, Matt was kinda overshadowed by the Punisher and by Elektra. (I feel the Punisher kinda overstayed his welcome and should've been written out of the show as soon as he got out of prison. I feel like he's just floating around in the late episodes for no other reason than to give Karen something to do, something that's kind of off-topic but the end stuff of the Punisher arc in season 2 should've been in Frank's solo show and probably would've made The Punisher better and more exciting as a result. Likewise, whenever Elektra appears, I feel that she really overshadows the story at the expense of other characters or Matt is desperate to be with her which I really don't want to see again after what happened in The Defenders. The handling of basically everything related to Matt/Karen/Foggy/Elektra/Hand became messy and contrived to the point that I feel it made Matt come off as dumber by proxy.)
With Jessica Jones season 2, it's much the same thing where Trish was kinda driving the plot a lot more than Jessica was. Not to mention that the "back from the dead" trope has kinda run its course.note And Jeri's story, which was probably the strongest of the stories, doesn't really affect the overall plot in any major way (it's more like the main plot is used as a launching pad for her subplot). I'm not dissing on Jeri here, but the strength of the writing in her story arc does make the main plot points look a bit weaker by comparison.
This is even the case with Luke Cage season 2, which I think is the best of the sophomore seasons to date. There are times where Luke seems to be strangely absent or overshadowed. I mean, sure, he's there, but his actions and motivations felt less important than characters like Misty and Mariah and Bushmaster. It's like Luke was the muscle and they were the characters. Hell, the main conflict stems from things in Mariah's story, not from stuff in Luke's story.
The cold never bothered me anyway
So uhhh...
Jessica Jones Showrunner Melissa Rosenberg will step down after Season 3
I'm okay with this.
A showrunner stepping down because they want to work on other things is far preferable to them getting kicked out by controversy or lack of talent. And she'll at least get to complete her vision with season 3 and let a new generation take over.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
Queen of Good Things, Honest
Just finished watching the second season and I agree with the assessment that the second half lost the plot. By the end of season 1, Jessica was forced to take a human life in order to stop a threat that had demonstrated over and over that it couldn't reasonably be contained. By the end of season 2, Jessica is a murderer.
They try to whitewash over her murder by the fact that the guy she killed is an Asshole Victim who started the fight, but he started the fight against a home intruder; legally, he has every right to defend himself and his property. Jessica broke into a man's home and beat him to death. Her karmic retribution for this is to give David Tennant a paycheck for an episode and then get over it.
Which would be okay if it was meant to be sort of a line crossed that pulls her back from the edge and shows her how far she could fall if she goes along with her batshit evil mother, but it's not. Jessica ultimately gives in and embraces the idea of aiding and abetting a serial killer. She never overcomes it. She's only forced back to her life by events beyond her control. What she really wants is to help Alisa escape custody for her many, many murders.
By the end of the season, Jessica has the same Protagonist-Centered Morality problem as Danny Rand in Iron Fist: there is no real answer at show's end as to why we should even continue to support this horrible person. Any and all redeeming qualities are sucked out of her by the final episode, when she makes a conscious choice to help a serial killer and never recants the decision.
I have zero sympathy for Alisa. My best friend who I live with is a paranoid schizophrenic. I understand better than most how hard it can be to cope with mental illness. But that doesn't excuse murder. "It's okay to kill a bunch of people because I'm mentally ill," is not a reasonable argument. It's a bullshit excuse. Alisa needed treatment by actual medical professionals. Now, she just needs to be in prison. Well, now she's dead, but y'know what I mean.
Alisa's rights end where another person's begin. She has my sympathy for her uncontrollable bouts of murder-frenzy. But they are uncontrollable bouts of murder-frenzy, and that makes her unfit to be around other people. The moment she started killing people, she became a murderer, no different than a person of sound mind and body would be if they started killing people. Belligerently untreated mental illness is not an acceptable excuse to be terrible.
Malcolm's cool. I really liked his arc and I'm glad he got out of this shithole by the end of it. I hope he never comes back and instead gets to be a cool rival and occasional Enemy Mine rather than Jessica's whipping boy.
I liked Trish's arc right up until the final episode. I kept waiting for her to realize that her mother was still trying to sell her as a brand even when she was hospitalized and tell her mom to f*ck off, but that payoff never happened. Presumably because Dorothy, like Alisa, was the focal point for the season's toxic theme: "Blood relation is the MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE UNIVERSE. There is NOTHING, not the law, not morality, not escaping an abusive relationship, and certainly not adopted family, that is more important than YOUR BIOLOGICAL MOTHER."
Dorothy is still every bit as horrible as she was in the first season, but it's fine and she gets to reunite with Trish anyway because being Trish's mom is the only thing that truly matters. BLEGH.
As for Trish's addiction, I really don't like how that subplot ended. I was fine with it up until the epilogue. Here's the thing: they spend the season directly relating her effort to gain superpowers as relapsing into drug addiction. They make that parallel themselves over and over again. And they have Trish do some pretty shitty things to try and achieve that goal - although, unlike Jess and Hogarth who I'll get to, she is NOT a remorseless murderer, so that's something.
Rewarding that character arc by having her get everything she wanted out of it and walk away with cool new superpowers is a terrible writing decision. It completely undermines the awful actions she did by making them all worthwhile. Trish won. She screwed over the investigation, she abused dangerous mind-altering substanecs, she manipulated and assaulted Malcolm, and she walked away with a cool prize for her trouble.
The only thing Trish gets punished for is shooting Alisa. Which is fair; she withheld information from the police so that she could go out and get some Punisher-style blood justice and satisfy her hero-obsession. She should face some consequences for that. But it still doesn't sit right with me that the consequence is that Jessica hates her now, because of how it ties right into the whole thing about Jessica being 100% onboard with Murder-Mom by season's end.
I read earlier in the thread that Hogarth was not any worse here than she was in season 1. I disagree with that assessment. The worst thing she did in the first season, IIRC, was trying to use Kilgrave's power for her own benefit. She wanted Kilgrave to make her ex-wife sign divorce papers.
This resulted in Hogarth murdering the ex-wife under Kilgrave's control, but that's not what she'd actually been trying to do. By comparison, the premeditated murder of one person and ruining of another's life she arranges here is a step far beyond. Once again, the show uses the Asshole Victim trope to try and downplay the fact that Hogarth is 100% a villain at this point.
She was an asshole who'd made terrible decisions at the end of season 1. She's a cold-blooded murderer who belongs in prison at the end of season 2.
The second half of this season was bad. Really, really bad. Given the exceptional quality of the first season, I expected a lot better.
My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.
I get a kick out of how the serial-killer prison guard seems absolutely delighted to find Jessica invading his home. Like one of those people who buy a gun to defend their home with and then secretly hope somebody breaks in just so they have an excuse to legally shoot someone with it.
"Self-defense!!"
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
Edited by alliterator on Sep 27th 2018 at 11:34:57 AM
That's not how it works. "Defending" yourself in the process of committing a felony isn't legally considered self-defense, it's called felony murder.
Jess is legally at best a second-degree murderer and could be put away for a very long time if she were found out no matter how much of an asshole Dale was. She's probably not going to be found out because the guy she murdered was, again, an asshole who nobody will miss or investigate too deeply into the death of, but that's just serendipity.
Edited by Anomalocaris20 on Sep 27th 2018 at 2:52:00 PM
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
Foreign Troper
While I disagree with much of the above, I definitely agree with Jeri being a villain right now. Well, she kinda was already in Season 1, it was the other shows that whitewashed her.
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian
You could say that his attack on her wasn't "unlawful," since she had broken into his home, but there is also the Rule of Retreat — even if someone else attacks you, as soon as they back away from their attack and attempt to retreat, you have to stop your attack or you are violating the Rule of Self Defense. Jessica was clearly trying to retreat, was not attacking him, and was in imminent danger.
Now, she might not get away with "self defense," but she could certainly be convicted of something lesser than "felony murder," probably "involuntary manslaughter."
New York's penal code states "A person in possession or control of, or licensed or privileged to be in, a dwelling or an occupied building, who reasonably believes that another person is committing or attempting to commit a burglary of such dwelling or building, may use deadly physical force upon such other person when he or she reasonably believes such to be necessary to prevent or terminate the commission or attempted commission of such burglary."[1]
Duty to Retreat is not part of New York's Castle Doctrine.
Dale's attack on Jessica in the confines of his own house was legally sound (regardless of morality), therefore Jessica would have been tried with felony murder if she had been caught. She committed a felony, and in the process of committing it killed an individual who was rightfully protecting their property from an intruder.
Edited by Anomalocaris20 on Sep 27th 2018 at 7:49:43 AM
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
Considering the abundance of evidence that he was a serial killer, I highly doubt that they would try her for felony murder. It's not about whether or not she committed felony murder, it's about whether or not a jury would convict her. The law isn't black and white like that.
Well, yes. Obviously no jury is gonna ignore Dale being a serial killer. But jury verdict aside she did commit felony murder.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
I'd like to point out that legality has hardly ever stopped audiences for liking characters or at least following their adventures.
Dexter and Breaking Bad being examples.
I'm sorry Tien, but I must go all out.
Jessica is a PI and was in the home of an unknown serial killer. She discovered that he was a serial killer, then he attacked her and she killed him in self-defense. Just with that basic information, Jessica Jones would be seen as a hero.
Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Sep 27th 2018 at 5:47:16 AM
I'd also like to point out that while in the eyes of the law, it would be felony murder, in the eyes of the audience, it is quite clearly self defense.
Also: man, that "felony murder" thing is ripe for loopholes. So if you find someone on your property, you can kill them with impunity? That sounds more like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law.
Also, I'll point out two really odd scenarios of the show trying to make a point and the context causing it to not really work.
The first is when Jeri says to Pryce that he hates Jessica because he's scared that a woman is stronger than him; but, she knows why he's trying to sue Jessica. She's a business rival he's trying to push out of the market and she also beat the crap out of him. It's basically borderline insulting to suggest that the only reason a guy who gets beaten by a girl would use legal avenues to respond is because their ego is bruised.
The second is when Jessica calls Malcolm out on him sleeping around. Not only does it seem pretty apparent that these encounters are both consensual and that both sides know it's just a hookup and not anything deeper, even if it is unhealthy Malcolm's definitely far more functional in his sex addiction than Jessica is in her alcoholism and it seemed really wierd that she would go off on one so much about it. It really made her look like a hypocrite (and not the only time).
Compared to the much more aware writing in the first season it's really weird.
Edited by Sigilbreaker26 on Jul 26th 2018 at 5:05:39 PM
"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"