Review: Jessica Jones S1

It's hard to write about Jessica Jones after you've spent one weekend watching all thirteen episodes.  Hell it'd be hard to write about any show, ignoring the fact that I wouldn't be able to actually do that for most shows.  There's not a lot of time for reflection, on how you feel about the show, and on how you feel about what the show accomplished.

Ultimately, I think Jessica Jones was a little more ambitious than the quality of the writing.  Make no mistake: Jessica Jones is a good show.  If you're reading this and you haven't seen it, I recommend it.  There weren't really any bad episodes, except one of them that strained credulity (which I hesitate to call bad - more on this episode later)  And as far as superhero properties, this has more than a few "Fuck yeah" moments, which really isn't that why we all watch them and continue watching them even when we are bludgeoned to death with the 50th iteration of a superhero.

The star of this vehicle and no doubt the reason it's as good as it is is Krysten Ritter, a pitch perfect casting choice.  If you've seen here in other things, you already knew this.  If you've read a review of this before, someone has already told you this.  But it's true.  She's an antagonistic, sarcastic alcoholic who nonetheless very much cares about what happens to other people despite her best wishes.  She's pretty much the ideal person to play a "don't give a fuck hardass who clearly gives a fuck."

Her casting also presents one of the necessary components of a good show, at least in my opinion: a sense of humor.  This show isn't all darkness, all of the time.  There are some funny moments sprinkled in and most of them come from Ritter's sarcasm.  But the show is very dark.  A brutal murder takes place at the end of the pilot that is hard to fathom.

The majority of Jessica Jones is Jones trying to prove the innocence of a young girl who was mind-controlled into doing something awful.  The only way to do this is to capture - and not kill - Killgrave, the aptly named season-long villain.  And after you capture him, you somehow have to get evidence of his powers or an admittance of guilt.  Making matters more interesting and removing the question of why the villain doesn't just kill her, he wants to torture her through the people around her.  There's more depth to him, but that would be a spoiler I will not spoil.

Pretty much the whole season revolves around Killgrave.  This is one of the examples of it being a "bit much."  The premise of this show - a hard-drinking private detective set in a noir setting - was barely utilized because of the intense focus on Killgrave.  That's kind of what sold me on the show, so it was a bit disappointing in that respect.  I hope in season two that there are more "case of the weeks" because I just want some good ole' private detective work, Veronica Mars or Magnum P.I. style.  I'm definitely not asking for it to become a procedural, although this is certainly the first time I understand the artistic reasoning for why it's useful to have a case of the week at times.  I think the show could benefit from that.

This show has a strong supporting cast, and my favorites aren't the obvious choices.  The heart of the show is the relationship between Jones and Trish Walker.  This isn't made evident for a little bit as they start off the series on somewhat rocky terms, but by the end, they are the heart.  Another stealthy heart of the show is Malcolm, the drug addict neighbor.  I am certain Walker will be there for season two, assuming there's a season two.  I'm more hopeful than certain about Malcolm.

Killgrave, as I'm certain anyone mildly interested in watching this show already knows, is played by David Tennant.  He plays him as an annoyed brat more than an overpowering supervillain.  He definitely succeeds at that.  You feel for him at times, and then he goes and tries to make someone kill themselves (I say tries like he isn't successful at it, but he very much is).  I could go into more depth, but again I'm trying to avoid spoilers.

Lastly - and lastly because I don't want to individually talk about every important character - there's Luke Cage, who I can't possibly go without mentioning.  Have no fears for his future TV show - he'll be up to the task.  I was probably least impressed with Mike Colter out of the leads, but he was charming and he was menacing.  I think he was less successful at playing righteous anger, but I appear to be mostly alone in that opinion.

Grade - B+

SPOILERS BELOW FOR EPISODES 9 AND 10

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SERIOUSLY STOP READING IF YOU PLAN TO WATCH THIS SHOW

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Ok I think that was a big enough warning

I had major problems with the tenth episode of the series, because it involved a ton of contrivances that basically seemed to exist so the writers could maneuver their characters from where they were to where they wanted them to be.  

The first one, which I could forgive if it was on its own, is Simpson, the rogue cop.  So in this episode, he decides to kill Lester Freamon (Let's face it; that's basically who his character is.  Might as well just call him what he was hired to play.) and burn down the building.  The show handwaved this away with the fact that he was on drugs and was willing to kill anybody who didn't want to kill Killgrave.  Lester in no way impeded his ability to kill Killgrave in the way Jessica did.  Killing him was stupid and so was burning the evidence.  It made no sense.  His further character detonation in the later episodes somewhat justifies this though.

Secondly, the support group is maybe the biggest contrivance of them all.  So Malcolm decides to confess about Ruben's murder.  Wouldn't happen.  For some reason, Robin follows him to his support group even though he's been on her side this whole time.  Ok fine she's crazy I guess.  Then this crazy lady somehow convinces this group of otherwise reasonable people to go to Jessica's house and turn violent basically out of nowhere.  Confront her?  Sure.  Start attacking her?  Why?  Then she gets taken down by Robin with a weapon she must have pulled out of her pocket because I sure as hell don't know how she got it.  It's kind of bullshit that she's so hard to take down and then fucking Robin gets to take her down so easily.

Lastly, WHY THE FUCK DID HOPE KILL HERSELF?  Ostensibly she kills herself to motivate Jessica to kill Killgrave, but that doesn't make any fucking sense.  She didn't kill Killgrave because she wanted Hope out of prison.  Mission accomplished.  Hope is no longer a reason not to kill Killgrave.  She kills herself because the writers went for shock value.

Oh yeah and there was that whole violent Jeri Hogarth subplot that seemed violent for violence's sake.  I mean here's an episode where a guy kills a cop, a scorned ex-lover cuts her ex with a knife multiple times, the "other woman" knocks her dead on a table, four people try to commit suicide by hanging, and a woman slits her own throat.  Seems excessive.

Rewind: Supernatural S2

WARNING: IT MAY SEEM OBVIOUS, BUT DON'T READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE SHOW.  SOMETIMES I CAN WALK AROUND SPOILERS, BUT I DEFINITELY CAN'T AVOID SPOILERS HERE.  SPOILERS IMMEDIATELY.

After I finished the excellent two-part finale of Supernatural, I just had to sit back and ask myself "Did that just happen?"  One of the two main characters of the show dies, the other sells his soul to the devil, and hell literally breaks loose releasing an uncountable number of demons.  That sounds like a cheesy B movie and yet it somehow makes it character-based and personal.  I don't think I have ever seen a show rewards its viewers that quickly for having invested all its time in its program.  And not make it seem like fan service somehow.

The other thing All Hell Breaks Loose manages to accomplish is make everything that happened before make sense.  I seriously doubt creator Eric Kripke had the entire two-seasons planned out before he started this show, but it couldn't have worked out better.  Why did the mother die?  She was in the way.  Why did Sam's girlfriend from the pilot die? She was in the way.  What previously seemed horribly contrived now was all a part of the master plan.  If all this demon had to do was get a human to unlock the gate, it's a little confusing why he doesn't just... do that instead of making a 23-year plan.  Whatever, it doesn't matter everything else works well.

To begin the season, Sam and Dean's father sells his soul and at the end Dean sells his soul.  Now, this I'm fairly certain was planned and it makes for a nice bookend to the season.  It also makes it interesting how against Dean was on bringing back things from the dead - surely more to do with his father being in hell for him than an actual moral reason - and how ultimately he does it anyway.  What makes this work is that never for a second would I doubt Dean would actually do it.  Supernatural also nicely set up Dean's eventual soul selling in "Crossroad Blues," an episode that didn't seem that important in future events, but certainly worked in establishing Dean's feelings about his father trading his life for Dean's.

This second season introduces and promptly destroys the Roadhouse, a place for fellow hunters.  I don't think the Roadhouse was a bad idea or that it failed in any particular way, but something tells me they had different plans for it that ultimately didn't pan out.  I like Jo and Ellen as characters so in that sense, it certainly worked.  But the fact that the show didn't do anything with the "fellow hunters" maybe influenced their decision to scrap it.

For a show that mostly works episode-to-episode with no need to have seen the particular episode, Supernatural is good at remembering past events.  In particular, Dean gets accused of murder and subsequently killed, but they use this to their advantage when both Sam and Dean end up holding up a bank and later getting themselves arrested.  Judging by the fact that they break out, and some seeds are planted in FBI agent Henriksen's mind that the brothers are possibly not that bad, this seems like a plot point they will return to.

I'm pretty sure this is the first season to feature outright comic episodes and they give us two of them.  I mean if you're wondering how to fill out a season and you have a couple empty spots, there's worse ideas that making a comic episode.  Both are pretty hilarious with "Tall Tales" using the brothers' exaggerated representations of themselves when telling the story to Bobby and "Hollywood Babylon" riffing on Hollywood and scary movies.  (In hindsight, yeah I should have seen that type of episode coming.)

In addition to the two-part finale, I thought "Roadkill" was an exceptional episode, thanks largely to the performance of Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer.  The episode helped establish the show's second season theme of "Maybe not all supernatural beings are bad" and had a pretty good twist.  Also helping that theme is Gordon, a man who clearly has no qualms about killing supernatural beings and certainly represents the extreme of what the brothers do.  If I had to guess, I would guess Sam killing Gordon will show Sam's deteriorating morality putting Dean's decision into question.  (Well it's definitely already in question, but you know...)

Another standout episode - really the whole back half of the second season is a step up - is "What Is and Should Never Be."  This is the alternate timeline if Sam and Dean's mother never died and it's depressing.  It's odd that that Jeffrey Dean Morgan couldn't come onto the show considering he briefly appears in the finale, but I guess the explanation for his disappearance is as good as any.  I'm probably not alone in thinking that despite how everything looks better in the alternate, Dean goes back because he's not friends with his brother at all.  (I kind of wish his alternate wife had more personality than "She really knows me man")

But for the time being, I'm genuinely surprised at how there's basically no useless or bad episodes.  Again, the show tries very hard to make sure every episode matters in some way - and when they don't appear to have any significance to the overarching plot, it's usually still a good episode.  In essence, there is a distinct lack of filler episodes.

Due to the show's willingness to completely uproot the show in a different direction, it's focus on character, and it's incredible two-part finale, I am almost scared that the show has peaked.  Of course, the finale also set up incredible potential and looks more serialized than its ever been.  The limited episode list does worry me as it could have been rushed due to the writer's strike, but otherwise I'm looking forward to that season.

Grade - A

Playlist
1. "Uptown Funk" - Bruno Mars (because of course)
2. "Banana Clipper" - Run the Jewels feat. Big Boi
3. "My Generation" - The Who
4. "Little Eyes" - Yo La Tengo
5. "Distortion to Static" - The Roots 

Rewind: Supernatural S1

Back in 2005, I remember when Supernatural first went on the air on what was then WB11.  I was a little kid then and I was much too scared of the potential to be scared.  I hated scary movies.  Still do.  That was probably the right decision.  Supernatural isn't exactly scary, but it employs enough of the horror movie tricks that I probably would not enjoy myself.

Now that I'm older, I can more easily watch these episodes.  Helping the matter is that this first season lacks in scares, for better or worse.  I'm not saying that as a bad thing either.  I'm not watching Supernatural to be scared.  The show did manage to have some freaky and unsettling moments though.

The first season shows enormous potential, but ultimately too many of the episodes have stock monsters.  Whenever the show managed to make an episode about the season-long arc or an extensive look into the character, it was a much better show.  To the show's credit, each episode contained something that contributed to the overall show past that episode.

The pilot episode was like nearly every other pilot: good and extremely rushed.  In 42 minutes of screen time, Sam and Dean's mother gets killed, their father disappears, and Sam's girlfriend gets killed.  One of the weaknesses to the season is that Sam understandably spends most of the first half of this season getting over Jess' death.  That's only a problem because Jess was a nothing character.  It wouldn't have made any difference if we never saw her on the show, because she had that much character development.

The only way I could think to fix that would be to have her appear in flashbacks in a few episodes following the pilot.  Flashbacks aren't that great, but it would help us care about his struggle.  Not only that, but it's not like the monster of the weeks were that compelling.  They could probably have easily shed 3-4 minutes and not suffered at all.  (Then again, I don't think Friday Night Light's Adrianne Palicki would be up for it anyway.  She's not that great of an actress.  There's like no chance she could have done what I want in 15 minutes of screen time spread across a couple episodes.)

The show took a little while to find its ground.  After the pilot episode, brothers Dean and Sam mostly just visited the monster of the week, probably bickered, and then defeated it.  The success of the episode largely depended on how good of actors the people they saved were.  In most cases, they weren't great.  Still, the show was finding out what worked and what didn't and all of them were still self-contained episodes.  This paragraph is harsher on the first eight episodes than I intend.  I mostly enjoyed them.

Then, creator Eric Kripke wrote "Home," his second episode after the pilot.  Kripke seems like a good showrunner to me.  He only wrote four episodes in the first season, and all of them were pretty important to mythology of the show.  He didn't seem too interested in writing stories that were simply standalone.  "Home" is technically standalone, but Sam gets his first vision.  Kripke was quoted as saying the standalone episodes were "hit-and-miss," which is pretty much correct.

The show was surprisingly quick to play with its formula.  In "Scarecrow," I was not expecting the show to actually separate the brothers for an extended period of time.  Plus, it introduced "Meg Masters," played by Nicki Aycox.  Aycox thankfully is very good in this role and provides a worthy opponent.  In "Faith," Dean basically is condemned to die, but they unknowingly use supernatural forces to cheat it.  Helping the show is the questions it raises about who deserves to die and casting Buffy's Julie Benz.

Other stand-out episodes include "Nightmare," where Sam gets a premonition of a man being killed.  Not only do we find out where Sam's powers may eventually be, but we get to see a scenario where they could have ended up if their father took a different route to parenting.  John Winchester isn't exactly the greatest parent, which he readily acknowledges later in the season, but things could have turned out worse.

I hope Supernatural continues its emphasis on season-long arcs, because it was easily the strongest part of the first season.  Sam gets the brunt of character development as he gets over Jess' death gradually throughout the season, learns to forgive his father, and discovers his powers.  "Provenance" does a good job of somewhat allowing Sam to get over Jess by having him date for the first time.  He's not completely over it, but it's a step.  Also, I admire the show's restraint as it's close to a year in the show's time when he does that.

I also liked how the father-son dynamic between Sam and John worked.  John opened up to Sam about his parenting, and Sam seemed to finally understand he's more like his father than he thought.  It was also a nice touch for Dean to question his father at the end, as he seemed more like a loyal soldier.  Sam helped him to not just blindly follow.  These characters were pretty well fleshed out by the end.  Other problems with the show aside, that's kind of my most important aspect of a TV show -character.

Lastly, I really liked the show's restraint with Sam's powers.  He only really telekinetically moved one thing and that was because he foresaw his brother's death.  In the finale, his "father" dares him to move the gun, but he can't.  I was fully expecting him to move it, and I applaud the misdirection as instead John is just that strong of a guy.

Pretty much the only way this show works is if the two leads have believable chemistry as brothers.  Boy, do Jensen Ackles and Jared Padelecki manage that.  Ackles probably IS Dean in real life, because he pretty immediately shines.  I had some issues with Padelicki to begin the series, but he got stronger as an actor as the series went along.  One thing I don't understand is that Dean seems to pretty much get any girl he wants - which is believable to a point - and yet Sam is virtually ignored.  Some of that has to do with will - Dean seeks out girls, while Sam does not.  But is Padelicki really that less attractive than Ackles?  I actually have no idea, but it was a bit distracting.  (I'm obviously more of an Ackles fan and it was still weirdly one-sided to me.)

And while I did have some problems with the guest stars - probably a budget issue - the important guest stars could act.  Jeffrey Dean Morgan is fantastic in very little screen time.  The aforementioned Aycox is basically the only recurring villain and justifies it.  I also liked appearances from Benz, Amy Acker, and Jim Beaver, who I'm thrilled is in many more episodes of this.

What I find interesting is that Supernatural is molded by X-Files veterans, yet does not in any way evoke that show.  The first two episodes are directed by David Nutter, who directed quite a few episodes of The X-Files in its first few seasons.  Kim Manner, who directed 52 episodes of The X-Files, directed five in this first season.  And it's not only the directing as writer John Shiban plays a prominent role in this season.  Shiban is one of only four writers who write more than two episodes n this season, with Kripke and the team of Sera Gamble and Raelle Tucker being the others.

I hope Kripke assembles a more consistent writing team in the second season and I don't even mean that as from episode to episode.  The first season features a TON of writers, some good and some not so good.  Less writers means a more consistent voice and hopefully a better season.

The first season has its problems, but there's no question I feel more confident in committing to this show than before I started.  The show nailed the important aspects that I care about - character development and a good story arc - and its weaknesses can definitely be improved.  I'm looking forward to the next season.

Grade - B+

Playlist
1. "Found a Job" - Talking Heads
2. "White Unicorn" - Wolfmother
3. "Bang Bang You're Dead" - Dirty Pretty Things
4. "Holiest" - Glass Animals feat. Tei Shi
5. "Weekend" - Priory