Jewel is a stripper’s name.
By Eric Goldman
Note: We’re writing up separate reviews for all 13 Jessica Jones episodes, though for the purposes of binging brevity, some may be notably shorter than our usual reviews. Click here to see all of our Jessica Jones episode reviews.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
There has been some valid criticism in the past year that the Netflix “It’s like one big movie!” approach to a TV season can lead, in some cases, to shows that start out especially slow. After all, if you think of your 13-hour season as a movie, that means it’s several hours just to get through the set up/act one, which doesn’t always make for the most exciting and involving series.
Not so for Jessica Jones. We’re in hour five and things are barreling along, with an episode that had a notably tense and exciting scenario, as Jessica, Trish and Simpson teamed up to try and capture Kilgrave. Okay, given there are still 8 episodes left, it was highly unlikely things would go as planned, but still, this was incredibly tense – and heartbreaking to see their intricate, well-executed plan go to hell when that security team showed up and snatched Kilgrave away, even as Jessica and Simpson tried like hell to stop it from happening.
We want to hear it.
And certainly, it was also heartbreaking and demoralizing to see Jessica give in to Kilgrave’s demands and send him that photo at the end. Even if it’s just a temporary way to keep him happy (and keep Malcolm safe) until another plan can be made, it’s still horrible to see her have to give in like that. But this isn’t a show afraid to go to unhappy places .
The jam-packed episode also gave us flashbacks to Jessica’s history and her life as a (superpowered) office drone with some nice deductive skills that we know will serve her well later, who was toying with becoming an actual superhero. I never really expected to see her don the Jewel costume on this show, but it was appreciated to at lest see it and hear the name – along with her perfectly Jessica response, “if I wear that thing, you’ll have to call me Camel Toe.”
While it wouldn’t even really make much sense for Jessica to have the same superhero history here she has in the comics (where Marvel itself had a much longer, more dense and superhero-packed mythology than the MCU does yet), it did seem a bit odd just how limited her time trying to be a hero was. The way it played, after saving that little girl, her first time actively stopping a mugging (of Malcolm, no less) Kilgrave came across her and took her immediately. It felt like we should have at least gotten the idea she had done a bit more than that first.
That aside, this was a terrific episode. Seeing Kilgrave just steal Jessica away like that was chilling, giving David Tennant another chance to shine as a man who puts a happy, friendly face on his morally repugnant actions and can make a simple line, “You like Chinese food,” into a threat.
We want to hear it.
Malcolm, already a sympathetic character (Eka Darville, like the rest of the supporting cast, has been spot on) was also fleshed out more here as we learned just how quickly Kilgrave had ruined this young man’s life and turned him into an addict.
Meanwhile, even as Trish and Simpson are getting along, to say the least (hello, oral sex scene!), it seems like things could get really nasty between Simpson and Jessica at any moment. The tension between them was a strong through line in the episode, as she called him out on why he was let go from Spec Ops and, in a great moment, they silently told each other off from behind the glass in the room she locked him inside (“I’ve seen heroes. You’re not even close.”).
An especially exciting and tense episode, “AKA The Sandwich Saved Me” gave us insight into Jessica’s past (and to a lesser extent, Malcolm’s) while centering on a big mission to catch Kilgrave destined to go horribly wrong. Even while we only get a handful of scenes where we see him up close and personal, Kilgrave remains an especially clever, diabolical villain – underlined when we learned he’d been smart enough to hire a high-priced security firm to watch his back, rather than rely only on his powers.
