Last time on Jessica Jones, things
haven’t been going well for our superpowered detective. As her best friend and
adoptive sister Trish Walker looks into the mysterious IGH that gave Jessica
her powers, she was approached by a crazy man looking for protection. Said
crazy guy, Robert Frank aka The Whizzer, claims to be a speedster created by
IGH and was looking for Jessica’s help to protect him. It’s revealed that
Whizzer is if fact a speedster, and that someone was after him, as he was
killed by collapsing scaffolding. Not a great way to start a week, is it
Jessica?
We open on Jessica drowning her
sorrows in a bottle of whiskey. Apparently seeing the facility and remembering
some of the IGH experiments messed her up bad. After a few more shots, a failed
call to talk with Trish, and a less then satisfying rendezvous with a random
drunk, Jessica tries to get back to work. She calls Malcolm, who’d been on
research duty. The recovered druggy had discovered that the building was leased
to Dr. Kozlov, which comes as a shock to nobody. He’s given the new task of
finding Kozlov’s home address. While he does that, he’s texted by someone named
Annette. How odd.
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| Huh, searching a dead man's house during his funeral, I wonder if this is a career low for JJ? |
Jessica takes a taxi out to the
burbs. Using her superstrength to leap Kozlov’s fence, she slowly approaches
the house. Her guard is up because there are guys in black everywhere. Turns
out, there’s a reason for that, other than the obvious “hired muscle” scenario.
No, turns out, Kozlov died in a car accident and the men in black are mourners.
Well… crap. The funeral itself causes Trish to flashback to her family’s
funeral, and the crappy advice Dorothy Walker gave to her to at least act sad.
She also hears an amputee vet singing Kozlov’s praises. Apparently, when he’s
not kidnapping people to perform unethical performance enhancing experiments on
them, Doc Kozlov was a real swell guy, checking up on patients and the like.
Trish meanwhile is meeting up with
her soul sucking mother. Ms. Dorothy Walker is pretty much your former
starlet’s mother stereotype, in case that wasn’t clear. All bad advice,
judgmental snide comments about being a failure in acting, that sort of thing.
After getting through some niceties, Trish cuts to the quick and asks for the
home address of someone named Max. Her
mom makes it sound like he’s a guy that she had a small falling out with, keep
that in mind. Dorothy tries to deflect Trish’s intrest, but she isn’t deterred.
Trish demands mama Walker give it up. Dorothy relents, giving her daughter the
address and the ‘advice’ to get her boyfriend Griffin to put a ring on it
before her talk show hits the crapper. Got to love supportive mothers. When the
mother and daughter part ways, we’re shown that Simpson is in fact following
her. He takes a hit on an inhaler, which seems to clear up his bloody sclera…
for some reason.
Jessica snoops through Kozlov’s
office while the funeral is going on. She only sees a picture of Kozlov with an
old acquaintance of hers, Will Simpson and his old squad. (I mistakenly called
him Frank earlier, that’s the character he’s loosely based off of.) The amputee soldier from earlier, Isaiah,
rolls in and attacks her with a retractable baton. He didn’t bye her story
about knowing the doc. Jessica, being a bruiser, brushes it off and flips him
onto the ground. She wants to know what he knows about Kozlov. He keeps singing
Kozlov’s praises and claims that his killer was the traitor, Will Simpson. Well
isn’t that convenient?
After getting cleaned up back at
her place, Jessica starts doing some research of her own. She can’t seem to
find a connection between Will Simpson and Robert Frank, shocking the former
solider and conspiracy nutter didn’t cross paths very often. She gives up on an
internet search, and instead digs Frank’s keys from his bag and goes to check
out his house. She’s stopped by a pair of cops, who are looking into Robert
Frank’s death. Jessica claims she didn’t see anything, but the cops don’t seem
convinced. She takes them to see her Super, who’d seen the whole thing, but he
pleads ignorance. Dick. She moves onto Frank’s apartment. It looks like he was
prepping for the fricking apocalypse. Other then Frank’s precious mongoose, the
place is deserted. She find’s Frank’s tablet, and plays a video on it. He left
a video message to somebody. In it, he explains that he’d broken his back after
a stupid stunt when he was eighteen. After a stay with IGH, he was suddenly
superfast. The crappy thing is that his powers are physically painful, and
parodies Spider-Man’s catchphrase. With great powers comes great mental illness…
Where would he have heard that? Anyway, Jessica legs it with Frank’s tablet as
the cops show up.
Meanwhile, Trish tries to recruit
Malcolm to help her with a secret project. He’d been enjoying an evening with,
I assume, Annette, but because he’s a good guy he agrees to help. She disguises
him as a production assistant before going to confront Max. Turns out, Max is
the director. The two have a meeting in his trailer. He initially thinks she’s
looking to get back into movies, but instead she asks for his help. She wants
to use his clout with the hospital he donates to get a look at Jessica’s files
and anything else pertaining to IGH. Max refuses. When he does, Trish gives him
the ultimatum of “Help me, or I’ll reveal the fact you’re a predator.” He tries
to turn it around on her, ‘oh you came onto me’ type bs. Hey, Maxhole, it
doesn’t matter if she went full on Varsity
Blues (1999) on you, (ya’ll know what scene I’m talking about) IF an
underage girl hits on you, you say nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Sorry, that got really real for a second. She gives him some time to think it
over. Unbeknownst to Max, Malcolm was recording the whole thing from his
bathroom.
Sidenote, this is the guy that
Trish’s mother acted like they’d just had a falling out. The man that abused
her daughter. And she seems to know about it. If your immediate reaction in that
situation isn’t “Castrate the SOB with a pair of rusty sheers” you fail as a
parent.
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| Oh thank God, he hasn't gotten the face tattoo. That would NOT translate well to live action. |
At her apartment complex, Jessica
runs into and confronts her Super about him lying about what he saw at
Whizzer’s accident. He claims that he wants to stay out of it as it might
affect an ongoing custody battle he’s having with his ex. Jessica thinks he’s
just a powersist. You know, someone who is prejudiced against people with
superpowers. In her apartment, she goes over Whizzer’s tablet. She’s finds what
you might expect; comic book sites, Trish Talk, conspiracy sites… wait what was
that second one? Yeah, turns out he was reach out to Trish and was willing to talk
to her about IGH. Jessica realizes that if Whizzer was killed for reaching out
to Trish, then Trish is probably also on the hit list.
She first goes to Trish’s
apartment, but only finds a frantic Griffin. He’d started going through Trish’s
research, found she was looking into highly illegal experiments conducted by
shady corporate types, and since she’s not picking up her phone he’d starting
to freak out. Jessica tells him to head back home, not before he mention’s
Trish’s meeting with her mom, and let her search for Trish. She thumbs through
Trish’s research. She finds a bunch of disturbing stuff, chief of which being a
Death Certificate issued to Jessica Jones. Well that is probably one of the
weirder things to find on a case. She dials up Dorothy, who basically tells
Jessica to screw off. Well, her exact words were she’s “living in the present,
you should try it.” Which is funny because she’s sitting in a room surrounded
by memorabilia from her daughter’s TV show. From (minimum) 14 years ago.
Back at the lot, Malcolm goes to
confront Max. The little prick actually thinks Malcolm is trying to rob him.
He, instead, demands that Max admit to what he did to Trish. Max-hole tries to
brush it off, the old “oh you just heard her side of the story” method.
Malcolm, who is not a flipping idiot, get’s sick of the sleaze-ball’s
sleaze-ball-ness and breaks the heifer’s nose before running off. Nice. Though
I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s up for a little vigilante justice, I mean,
he works for Jessica and is a former Power Ranger. Seriously, look up Eka
Darville, Red Ranger for Power Rangers RPM. Trish, who’d been hiding in the
backlot to regain her composure, hears a noise and goes to investigate. She
find’s Simpson. She pulls a gun and shoots him when he tries to get near her,
but he doesn’t seem to notice. Superhero steroids are a hell of a drug.
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| Huh, not how I was expecting this to turn out. |
Jessica busts down Dorothy’s door,
threatens her, and then get’s Trish’s location. But not before Dorothy proves
once again to be an awful parent by saying she trusted her daughter’s former
abuser over Jessica. Like, seriously, Dorothy sit down and shut up. Jessica makes it to studio lot, and finds
Trish… holding Simpson hostage. Well, that took a turn. Will claims that he had
nothing to do with the murders, and that he’d been stalking Trish to protect
her from IGH’s wetworks specialist. (wetwork = assassinations) He claims that
he’d been drying out in an IGH facility for the last year, when he heard from
some of the scientists that they’re going to ‘handle’ Trish. He broke out,
stole an inhaler version of his old super pills, and started following her. Its
at this exact moment that the IGH wetworker cut the lights to the building they
were in. Simpson, once freed, takes Trish’s gun and says he’ll make sure they
escape.
They hear several shots fire as
they run, and then someone ran through and leaped over them to make for the
exit. Realizing that the IGH assassin was after Simpson, not Trish, they go
back to check on him. This thing was able to twist Simpson’s head a full 180
degrees. Not a pleasant way to go. Jessica muses that Simpson was right, it
takes a monster to fight a monster, he just wasn’t the right one.
Oh, and while this is going on,
Jeri Hogarth is spiraling a little after finding out she’s dying. She spends a
lot of money on drugs and hookers before Pryce Chang shows up and forces her to
refocus. Again, not shedding a tear.
Well, that was a jarring turn. I
totally expected Will “Nuke” Simpson to be a recurring antagonist throughout
this season. Was not expecting him to perform a heel face turn and then get
killed in the second episode. That’s a bit of wrestling terminology I picked up
over the years. A Face Wrestler is a good guy, A Heel is a bad guy, and a turn
is when they shift between the two. Classic example being the Rock going from
good to bad and back again. Sorry, bit of a tangent there. Simpson’s death was
shocking. But, might be fitting. If he was on much longer, folks might expect
him to get that American Flag Tattoo on his face that Nuke sports. I imagine
that would have fallen under “looked good in comics, looks bizarrely silly in
live action.” This IGH conspiracy plot is thickening. If they’re killing those
likely to expose them, seems odd that they’d taken out one of their best
scientists. I wonder if Kozlov was killed because he was going to expose
something or because he reactivated and lost Simpson. With an evil
organization, I could believe both. That all being said, having IGH’s Hound
kill Simpson, one of the physically toughest guys that Jessica has come up
against seemingly easily is a good way to up the ante. I’m intrigued to see how
this thing connects to IGH and how soon Jessica or Trish end up on it’s
hitlist. So yeah, a very good continuation.
Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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