Jessica Jones - Three Lives and Counting

Is there no crime Jessica Jones won’t commit to get what she wants?

I’m trading banter with a delusion.

With all of Jessica’s plans, it is her friends that ultimately serve as her undoing. Karl’s compulsion to see “it through”, with Trish pushing the right buttons in order to get him to attempt to perfect his super experiments on her, it all goes to shit. Jessica just wanted Karl out of the picture, her mom in a prison where she needs to be, and Trish rehabbed from her addiction to the IGH drug. Malcolm, just wanting to work with Jessica to do something significant with their Alias Investigations, has inadvertently helped Trish undermine everything set up by the likes of Jeri and Jessica. At the end of the episode, the old warehouse where IGH was up to no good goes up in flames after multiple explosions, Karl is dead, and Trish is in a hospital ER recovering from needles injected into her back by the scientist she hoped would provide with her with powers similar to her “sister”. Jessica is in the visitors waiting wondering how it all went wrong, after coming to very disparaging words with Malcolm, seemingly ending their working and personal relationship. Alisa allowed from her cell to watch the television thanks to a better guard (female, with a daughter and far more sympathetic heart than the wholly unpleasant Holiday), seeing the news report of Karl’s death, and a picture taken of Trish in her car with him in the passenger’s seat, and eventually raging as a result, the conclusion just complicates matters for Jessica.

 

But the episode, Three Lives and Counting, is really about Jessica and her demons…well, demon in the form of Kilgrave. This allowed the return of David Tennant, and his welcome villainy, that arrogant, pesky, devious wit remains a hanger-on Jessica desperately tries and fails to shake until the very end. He is like the guilty conscience that not only remains a nag but tells her possible truths about herself Jessica just doesn’t want to hear. And through Kilgrave’s figment, Jessica even cleans up the crime scene involving her and the death of Holiday, setting up a false suicide that works in her favor. Alisa knows that it was her daughter responsible for Holiday no longer tormenting her, allowed by the new guard she can manipulate to call Jessica for details, coded and veiled within a recorded conversation as a date out. Kilgrave is such a nuisance that when Jessica goes to grab him by the throat, she is actually choking an innocent bystander on the street, halted from possibly killing him by Malcolm. Tennant is having too much fun in his return, as Jessica sees Kilgrave at her desk, on Karl’s bed, in multiple forms all speaking to her about following her “true killer self”. Just when Jessica believes he’s gone, Kilgrave pops up again. It is a constant fight all the way throughout the episode. Tennant fans will get their money’s worth, too.

Trish refusing to allow Malcolm or Jessica to ruin her plans, wanting so badly to be a superhero so she can make a difference, not being helpless as a normal human but capable; her tragic story continues down what seems to be a dark path. Karl’s death and Alisa breaking out of prison in a grief-stricken rage (the poor guard who has been nice to her is thrown across the cell into a crashing heap against the stone wall!) assures that the next episode will have the women in Jessica’s life coming into contact. It would seem Alisa is the one to truly get revenge as Trish looks worse for wear in the hospital while her mom wants answers and Jessica worried that Karl has done her best friend a disservice. [4/5]