Is Season 2 Of 'Jessica Jones' Any Good? Here's What The Reviews Say
Krysten Ritter's memorable turn as the titular detective made 2015's first season of "Jessica Jones" the crown jewel of Netflix's Marvel Universe offerings. Season 2 just dropped early as a marketing push on International Women's Day. If you're hesitant to dive right in, here's what reviewers who got the first 5 episodes early had to say about this Defender's comeback:
This Season Focuses On Unraveling Jessica's Past
After killing her tormenter Kilgrave (David Tennant) at the end of Season 1, Jessica seems to have come to terms with the fact that if she's going to move on with her life, she's going to need some answers when it comes to what led to her getting superpowers in the first place. But that doesn't mean she's comfortable with acknowledging that she's a killer, or that she's ready for those answers once she gets them.
In the aftermath of the childhood car crash that killed her family and left her with that whisky-glass-smashing superstrength, it turns out that there are 20 days missing from Jessica's life. It's not a surprise that she has control issues, given what happened in season one, but her mission this time is to find out who changed her life without her consent a long time before Kilgrave arrived.
Krysten Ritter Is Just As Good The Second Time Around
Thankfully, Krysten Ritter's still on top acerbic, deadpan form, and the (mostly female) writers' room is generous and proficient with its one-liners. When a cocksure alpha bro-dude struts into Jessica's office, announces he's another private eye who wants to buy her out and says he doesn't take no for an answer, Jessica retorts, "How rapey of you." So while the plotting feels like it's back-stepped towards the super-vigilante conventional, she at least remains the most textured and spikily interesting of the Defenders — one whose guilt, self-loathing and rage at least come served with a potent dose of wit.
[Empire]
Ritter has to sell a character that is an inherent ball of contradictions as a recognizable, appealing whole. She makes it a breeze, playing Jessica with a contained, slouching energy that belies her readiness to snap.
[Variety]
You Can Pretty Much Skip Past 'The Defenders,' It's Fine
While there are a few cameos from Marvel side-characters here and there, for the most part, Jessica Jones Season 2 starts out as if The Defenders never happened. That's just fine.
[Collider]
Thematically, 'Jessica Jones' Is Staying Relevant
And though Season 2 starts off most of its storytelling rather ungracefully — a spate of murders, Trish's ambitions, and Jessica's court-ordered anger management class set the plot spinning before the audience has time to reacquaint itself with the characters — its thematics are on point. Jessica is still a case study in trauma, and as the story widens beyond the first season's offering of how she experienced that trauma, it touches on many different women and the way they carry their fury in their own lives.
[Variety]
One of the great triumphs of the show's first season was how we watched her deal — or not deal — with her PTSD from the abuses of Kilgrave (David Tennant), an evil she defeated in the finale. The show is certainly missing him as a driving force, but there's still a lot for Jessica to process, going back to the death of her family as well as her abduction and torture during the illegal experiments that gave her powers.
[Collider]
If the first season was all about anxiety, this one is about anger. Jessica feels like she's losing control of herself and her morality, after a season of trying to wrest control of her own life from a genuine monster. "With great power," intones one character, in a line that I hope was at least a little tongue-in-cheek, "comes great mental illness."
[Polygon]
Trish's Storyline Has Shades Of #TimesUp/#MeToo
While Trish is dealing with some #TimesUp issues from her child-star past, the show has made the decision to build up her partnership with Jessica, which is turning out to be fun. It's like two Nancy Drews, if one of them had a serious drinking problem and depressive streak.
Now, aside from some post-Weinstein-relevant drama with a sleazy filmmaker from Trish's (Rachael Taylor) child-actor days, the show focuses more on the distrust and prejudice Jessica faces as an outed "super".
[Empire]
The Promises Of All-Female Directors And More For Eka Darville's Character To Do Are Encouraging…
Season 2's all-female directing staff, including Minkie Spiro and Deborah Chow, keeps the show's noir bent in place though doesn't push too hard into the realm of art — but the clean approach works, as does Ritter's always grounded and believable performance.
Australian actor Eka Darville has a standout performance as Malcolm Ducasse, who lives in Jones's building and, though a drug addict in Season 1, is now clean and Jones's right-hand man in her investigative business. Feeling in debt to Jones for saving his life, Ducasse — when he's not being a ladies' man — uses Jones's private-eye work as a way to keep his mind off drugs and pay Jones back for having faith in him. His importance to the story is surprising and enjoyable to watch.
… But Season 2 Suffers From Netflix Bloat Within The First Chunk Of Episodes
"Marvel's Jessica Jones" is never not a Marvel TV show, with all of what that implies — mushy plotting, convenient characterization, a slew of side characters with bizarrely complex biographies, and a preponderance of mysteriously vast and endlessly complex science-y conspiracies.
[Variety]
Ritter is so charismatic, and so good at toggling between sarcasm and outright pain, that a lot of this is more watchable than it should be, given the glacial pace at which the plot moves and the amount of time spent on lesser characters and filler stories.
[UPROXX]
The show is still too slow, with a minimal or non-existent score, scenes that go on for too long, and a limited number of edits that add up to everything feeling like it's happening in real time. It's not as bad as any other Marvel series on Netflix in this regard — not even close — but it's still a problem, and one that has unbelievably still not been addressed in terms of episode count (or shorter runtimes within episodes).
[Collider]
The Show Also Needs To Find A Villain Compelling Enough To Match Kilgrave
Even this feels weird to admit — that a show about a woman overcoming her abuser feels lost without him.
[Polygon]
The introduction of a new Big Bad works, and is exceptionally creepy (there are many aspects of Season 2 that feel like it's leaning into horror, which is a good choice). Jessica learns "it takes a monster to stop a monster," right alongside her own fears that she herself is turning into a killer. But what this real monster shows her is that that is not her — it's stronger, meaner, angrier, and it holds a mirror up to how Jessica views herself in that context.
[Collider]
While [Janet McTeer] has potential as a foil, there's not enough of her to keep us hooked, not to mention the lack of the emotional hook that we had with Kilgrave in Season 1. It should be an emotional journey on something like an equal level, given that both storylines feature some form of violation for Jessica. Unfortunately, the path remains a bit too meandering.
It's one thing to say other parts of her past are as important as Kilgrave, and another thing to show it, and the early parts of season two mostly fall down on that part. It's a more meandering stretch of episodes, resembling parts of Daredevil's second season (which also struggled to move beyond a debut arc involving that character's archenemy), slowly — verrrrry slowly — unraveling the mystery of what happened while Jessica was in the coma and why other people with powers are turning up dead
[UPROXX]
TL;DR
One thing remains unchanged — her story is singularly hers, uncompromising and unapologetically all about what we've come to love about this character. The point of Jessica Jones isn't that she's a hero, but that she's still standing despite everything that's happened to her, and everything she is. So even if her story takes its sweet time to get going, we're still glad to be on the journey with her.
Watch The Trailer
