Jessica Jones AKA Hero Pants

 There's a moment where Jessica stands in front of a mirror and she is fighting back tears. Wrestling with lots of emotions, holding those tears on the edges, Jessica straightens up. With as much strength as she can muster, Jessica builds her resistance. It's a moment where Ritter gives you the whole entire canvas of suffering Jessica endures. But Jessica won't truly break. I love Ritter forever in this role. She is always combative towards what she should feel...a little love, a little joy, a little sadness, a little ecstasy. It's the inability to let her have any normal human emotion she so rightfully deserves. I think a lot of us who love her want her to have this chance. She sure as fuck has earned it.

The episode has Jessica trying to dig herself out of a murder charge, determine if Erik is the one who killed the dirty cop, and Jessica learning of a truth that gobsmacks her at a funeral...and all the while Trish seems to act as if she didn't know who killed the cop, leaving Jessica oblivious. The twist at the end is really the ultimate betrayal...letting Jessica take the wrap for her!

She wasn't perfect... doesn't make it any easier to bury her.

Jessica and Trish are preparing Dorothy's funeral, while the police are investigating the murder of a very dirty cop who had a lot of victims he tormented and hurt. Erik is a too obvious suspect since he knew him, but Jessica soon researches his closet and finds files upon files on people, including newspaper clips and photographs. It seems his "evil telepathy headaches" superpower might be a ruse. But, at Dorothy's funeral of all places, during the eulogy, Jessica spotted a big bruise on Trish's arm...it is Trish who has devolved into just a murderer, foregoing the restraints of a true super. But the police have eyewitness and circumstantial evidence against Jessica and arrest her at the end while tailing Trish...it is Erik who finds Trish pummeling his latest dirtbag on file, a file Jessica provided Malcolm. Malcolm, though, has lost his job at Jeri's firm and called things off with the current girlfriend, allowing Erik's sister to crash at his apartment...and, sure enough, the sister, trying to reform from prostitution and the streets, engages with Malcolm in bedroom sex. And Jeri drops Salinger as a client, hands over Dorothy's will to Jessica, and organizes a path towards cleaning up a mess left to her former lover, Kith, by the suicide husband...once Kith agrees to let Jeri "color outside the edges".

The third season and the series is seemingly headed towards Trish's spiraling towards if not completely into the abyss. Clearly the super abilities she was given have done her more harm than good. It would seem she just can't hold back the rage....the irony that Trish shot Jessica's mom is not lost, since she, too, seems to be on that same trajectory. But how does Jessica convince the police she didn't kill the cop considering her alibi is shit?

I could see why this show, especially at the this point, might not entirely appeal to Marvel fans. It is more detective show with struggling city folks trying to keep their shit together, often quite unable to do so since bad people seem to be in the way. And I've never quite bought into Jessica and Erik as a couple. Erik is just too cold to me, especially in comparison to Luke Cage. But Jessica and Trish dealing with the loss of Dorothy is the meat of the episode, with Dorothy's phone ringing with a joyous client calling to tell her about winning a part as Jessica has to tell her the bad news, Jessica with a picture of feet (at a cheap theater when Dorothy took them accidentally to the wrong side of town) for the funeral memory wall, and Trish listening to clients at the funeral discussing tips that helped them in the industry.

It really paints quite a picture. Dorothy led a lot of vacuous, empty, shallow people towards success, kept trying to manage her own daughter's, with Jessica knowing that Dorothy abused her in time's past. It is this big wallop of emotions. Trish loving this mother who did some really bad things to her in the past, while Jessica has this one moment of clarity regarding a chair left to her by the woman who sort of raised her. 3.5/5