Jessica Jones: AKA Pork Chop
March 11, 2018 10:06 AM - Season 2, Episode 10 - Subscribe
Jeri finagles a deal for her new client in exchange for Karl's location. Trish forges ahead with her own investigation. A prison guard crosses a line.
*AV Club - Carrie-Anne Moss shines in an otherwise weak episode of Jessica Jones
*Hogarth and Jessica present a shackled Alisa with the DA's deal -- life in a prison with visitation rights if she gives a full confession including Karl's location, versus a life sentence on The Raft. Alias refuses to give up Karl.
*Trish has her audition at ZCN and blows it. Afterwards, she overhears someone getting a tip about The Killer's capture.
*Back at the office, Jessica tells Trish and Malcolm the truth about Alisa, and Trish tells Jessica about having used up Simpson's inhaler. Everyone is upset with everyone. Malcolm doesn't put the blame on Trish for messing up his sobriety, but doesn't think they're good for each other. Oscar calls Jessica to see how she's holding up, and she spends the night with him.
*Trish gets an analysis of the inhaler residue, originally because she hoped to replicate it, but now claiming she just wants to catch the manufacturers. The technician says it's unreplicatable, and if she could figure out who made it she'd turn them in herself since the residue shows it's highly toxic and likely to cause liver & brain damage in the user.
*At Hogarth's, Jessica asks her to delay her mother's transfer. Hogarth introduces her to Shane.
*Back at the prison, Jessica hints to her mother that she'll get Karl to a non-extradition country for her if she'll take the deal, and Alisa reminisces about their family vacations at the seaside 'love motel' and how she loved to rent the Paradise Suite. Back in her cell, Dale the prison guard hassles Alisa about not eating her meat to the point where she snaps her shackles in frustration but lets him leave the cell uninjured.
*Jessica finds Karl in the Paradise suite and tells him about the deal, and that she'll get him the papers to get to a non-extradition country. She mentions Shane the healer and Karl says he never heard of him, and never created a healer.
*Trish visits Alisa, and tries to get Karl's location from her. Alisa says everything is Trish's fault, and that she's just jealous of Jessica for having powers, and that Jessica will always choose Alisa over Trish. Trish tracks down Jessica at Oscar's and tries to get her to help her find Karl before she realizes Jessica is helping him escape. She goes to Malcolm's and they end up in bed again.
*At the prison, Dale takes revenge on Alisa, giving her shocks through her manacles, threatening to end her visitation rights forever, trashes her cell, tears up her family photo, and forcing her to eat meat.
*In the morning at Oscar's, the forgery job is nearly done. At prison, Hogarth tells Jessica that Alisa has signed the deal and should be making her confession in 24 hours once the deal is filed. Jessica tells Hogarth that Shane the healer is a fraud but Hogarth doesn't want to believe it. During visitation, Jessica notices the electricity burns on Alisa's wrists, and spots Dale as the culprit, but Alisa says to let her handle it.
*Hogarth comes home to find that Inez and Shane have robbed her and split.
*Trish convinces Malcolm to help her find Karl. He locates Jessica's fake-ID photos in the cloud, and the 'Love By the Sea' motel from the location data. They go on stakeout, and spot Karl looking out his room door, but Trish doesn't want Malcolm to call the cops, and she knocks him out and stuffs him in the trunk of the car to go pursue Karl alone.
*Jessica learns that Dale was fired from a previous job over prisoner suicides. She follows him home and finds he has hidden prisoner uniform badges inside a hunting trophy. Dale returns (she set off the motion detector silent alarm) and maces her and starts trying to beat her to death, and she flails out and clocks him in the head, apparently fatally.
*AV Club - Carrie-Anne Moss shines in an otherwise weak episode of Jessica Jones
*Hogarth and Jessica present a shackled Alisa with the DA's deal -- life in a prison with visitation rights if she gives a full confession including Karl's location, versus a life sentence on The Raft. Alias refuses to give up Karl.
*Trish has her audition at ZCN and blows it. Afterwards, she overhears someone getting a tip about The Killer's capture.
*Back at the office, Jessica tells Trish and Malcolm the truth about Alisa, and Trish tells Jessica about having used up Simpson's inhaler. Everyone is upset with everyone. Malcolm doesn't put the blame on Trish for messing up his sobriety, but doesn't think they're good for each other. Oscar calls Jessica to see how she's holding up, and she spends the night with him.
*Trish gets an analysis of the inhaler residue, originally because she hoped to replicate it, but now claiming she just wants to catch the manufacturers. The technician says it's unreplicatable, and if she could figure out who made it she'd turn them in herself since the residue shows it's highly toxic and likely to cause liver & brain damage in the user.
*At Hogarth's, Jessica asks her to delay her mother's transfer. Hogarth introduces her to Shane.
*Back at the prison, Jessica hints to her mother that she'll get Karl to a non-extradition country for her if she'll take the deal, and Alisa reminisces about their family vacations at the seaside 'love motel' and how she loved to rent the Paradise Suite. Back in her cell, Dale the prison guard hassles Alisa about not eating her meat to the point where she snaps her shackles in frustration but lets him leave the cell uninjured.
*Jessica finds Karl in the Paradise suite and tells him about the deal, and that she'll get him the papers to get to a non-extradition country. She mentions Shane the healer and Karl says he never heard of him, and never created a healer.
*Trish visits Alisa, and tries to get Karl's location from her. Alisa says everything is Trish's fault, and that she's just jealous of Jessica for having powers, and that Jessica will always choose Alisa over Trish. Trish tracks down Jessica at Oscar's and tries to get her to help her find Karl before she realizes Jessica is helping him escape. She goes to Malcolm's and they end up in bed again.
*At the prison, Dale takes revenge on Alisa, giving her shocks through her manacles, threatening to end her visitation rights forever, trashes her cell, tears up her family photo, and forcing her to eat meat.
*In the morning at Oscar's, the forgery job is nearly done. At prison, Hogarth tells Jessica that Alisa has signed the deal and should be making her confession in 24 hours once the deal is filed. Jessica tells Hogarth that Shane the healer is a fraud but Hogarth doesn't want to believe it. During visitation, Jessica notices the electricity burns on Alisa's wrists, and spots Dale as the culprit, but Alisa says to let her handle it.
*Hogarth comes home to find that Inez and Shane have robbed her and split.
*Trish convinces Malcolm to help her find Karl. He locates Jessica's fake-ID photos in the cloud, and the 'Love By the Sea' motel from the location data. They go on stakeout, and spot Karl looking out his room door, but Trish doesn't want Malcolm to call the cops, and she knocks him out and stuffs him in the trunk of the car to go pursue Karl alone.
*Jessica learns that Dale was fired from a previous job over prisoner suicides. She follows him home and finds he has hidden prisoner uniform badges inside a hunting trophy. Dale returns (she set off the motion detector silent alarm) and maces her and starts trying to beat her to death, and she flails out and clocks him in the head, apparently fatally.
Trish is just such a hot mess this season, even without the drug side effects, she's just the worst friend to everybody.I think what they've done with Trish's character is made of fail. I have no problem with the idea that drug addict friends/sisters can be selfish and toxic, and from that point of view Trish is well-written. She's a user. But there was practically no hint of this proximal toxicity last season. Some of her behavior was certainly obsessive (private krav maga, gun ownership, questionable relationship decisions) but she was pretty self-destructive, not so much an emotional vampire.
This season she almost immediately blindsides Jessica with an emotional atom bomb in order to further her own career. That's quite a leap into seething toxicity before she even starts using her ex's inhaler.
The thing I find annoying about all this is that Jeri Hogarth's arc is freaking amazing--she's got depth and complexity despite her hatability. So the writers are capable. But somehow Trish went from being a character with hidden depths in season 1 to being a character where all the ugly is hanging out, and there's nothing left to really like or find redeeming.
posted by xyzzy at 4:17 PM on March 11, 2018 [5 favorites]
I dunno. I'm a bit more sympathetic to Trish. It makes a lot of sense that she'd want some sense of power, of being able to make a difference, and that everything that she does to try to make things better just makes them worse. And now, of course, she's going to Dr. Powerstein; I wonder why? Oh, Trish. Superdrugs: not even once.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:14 PM on March 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:14 PM on March 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
S1 lays a plausible foundation for S2 Trish for me. The background is there -- addict past, childhood star issues, both suffering from and schooled in manipulation by a manipulative mother, powerful in one world, less powerful compared to her superpowered adopted sister (or news reporter boyfriend)... and she gets a *taste* of being powered up, married to a probably physiologically addictive substance.
S1 Trish was a past and potential future mess that got a little taste of a catalyst. S2 Trish gets a hold of a refined form of that catalyst and the taste becomes a habit. Combine her inherent issues with the mind-altering effects of the substance itself -- which we already saw drive Simpson well over any sensible moral line -- and it's pretty consistent.
This isn't to say I like it. It's miserable to watch her rage-quit her job, fail at her dream interview... and then cross some serious lines herself. She's not as far gone as Simpson was, but stone-cold manipulating Malcolm into betraying Jessica and then violently assaulting him is pretty bad. I can't like Trish right now, and I don't like that.
But discomfort with protagonists and antagonists is obviously intentionally trodden territory for this season. I think the show is making some interesting explorations about self-control and power, and they get more interesting to me if I examine them under the light of recent progressive political thinking. There's a push for cultural access for women to behavior, character, and status that are traditionally associated with masculinity, but there's also a consideration of the problems of toxic masculinity. Don't those together mean women will increasingly face situations where they have to confront similar toxicity internally? Jessica's mother could be any number of physically strong men who haven't managed their anger and are therefore constantly loose-cannon threats to those around them. Trish could be any number of men whose status has always functioned as a palliative for a certain emptiness and means they're always looking for more status to fill it. But they're women, inhabiting both power and problems together that have perhaps been seen as male.
posted by wildblueyonder at 11:23 PM on March 12, 2018 [7 favorites]
S1 Trish was a past and potential future mess that got a little taste of a catalyst. S2 Trish gets a hold of a refined form of that catalyst and the taste becomes a habit. Combine her inherent issues with the mind-altering effects of the substance itself -- which we already saw drive Simpson well over any sensible moral line -- and it's pretty consistent.
This isn't to say I like it. It's miserable to watch her rage-quit her job, fail at her dream interview... and then cross some serious lines herself. She's not as far gone as Simpson was, but stone-cold manipulating Malcolm into betraying Jessica and then violently assaulting him is pretty bad. I can't like Trish right now, and I don't like that.
But discomfort with protagonists and antagonists is obviously intentionally trodden territory for this season. I think the show is making some interesting explorations about self-control and power, and they get more interesting to me if I examine them under the light of recent progressive political thinking. There's a push for cultural access for women to behavior, character, and status that are traditionally associated with masculinity, but there's also a consideration of the problems of toxic masculinity. Don't those together mean women will increasingly face situations where they have to confront similar toxicity internally? Jessica's mother could be any number of physically strong men who haven't managed their anger and are therefore constantly loose-cannon threats to those around them. Trish could be any number of men whose status has always functioned as a palliative for a certain emptiness and means they're always looking for more status to fill it. But they're women, inhabiting both power and problems together that have perhaps been seen as male.
posted by wildblueyonder at 11:23 PM on March 12, 2018 [7 favorites]
Jeri's arc and Carrie Ann Moss's acting has been the best part of this season.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:01 AM on March 13, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by rmd1023 at 7:01 AM on March 13, 2018 [6 favorites]
My husband called the scam last episode and I didn’t believe him because I want Jeri to keep being a boss-ass bitch.
Alisa is totally going to get the wrong idea about what happened with Dale, though.
posted by harriet vane at 6:22 AM on March 14, 2018
Alisa is totally going to get the wrong idea about what happened with Dale, though.
posted by harriet vane at 6:22 AM on March 14, 2018
He's gotta be dead. That whole "Self Defense! I was attacked first" with the implication he's going to kill Jessica and the disorienting effects of the mace are all obviously reasons for the viewer to excuse Jessica for killing him while, of course, Jessica won't excuse herself and only see horrible evidence that she's destined to wind up like her mother.
And wow, I wanted to see him dead after that scene forcing Alisa to eat meat. Janet McTeer is just killing it and has so totally won me over to Alisa's side, even in spite of all the killing and and ongoing willingness to commit premeditated murder. I want so much to see her spend more time with Jessica, but this is definitely not the right show to start hoping for anything like that.
I think Trish lost my sympathies completely this episode. It was so creepy watching her manipulating and lying to everyone around her about her righteous need to seek justice when she's obviously only scrambling for ways to get more of that drug. Watching her blindly pushing forward and screwing up Jessica's plans was tough to watch.
I was so disappointed that Malcolm slept with her after that completely justified, "We're not friends." But it is pretty great seeing him keep taking the high road by taking responsibility for using the inhaler (after also refusing to stoop to blackmailing a man for being in the closet).
I thought sure from his reaction to the drug that we'd find Malcolm using heroin again or something, and was relieved to see that's not the case, although I was concerned from the faces he was making lifting weights that he might be struggling with something more than his anger at Trish and Jessica.
And wow, finding out about Inez and Shane's scam causes such a horrible re-evaluation of the look on her face when she finds Hogarth's ALS medicine. (Check out my comments about that episode for a few tasty bites of dramatic irony.)
posted by straight at 1:13 AM on March 18, 2018 [4 favorites]
And wow, I wanted to see him dead after that scene forcing Alisa to eat meat. Janet McTeer is just killing it and has so totally won me over to Alisa's side, even in spite of all the killing and and ongoing willingness to commit premeditated murder. I want so much to see her spend more time with Jessica, but this is definitely not the right show to start hoping for anything like that.
I think Trish lost my sympathies completely this episode. It was so creepy watching her manipulating and lying to everyone around her about her righteous need to seek justice when she's obviously only scrambling for ways to get more of that drug. Watching her blindly pushing forward and screwing up Jessica's plans was tough to watch.
I was so disappointed that Malcolm slept with her after that completely justified, "We're not friends." But it is pretty great seeing him keep taking the high road by taking responsibility for using the inhaler (after also refusing to stoop to blackmailing a man for being in the closet).
I thought sure from his reaction to the drug that we'd find Malcolm using heroin again or something, and was relieved to see that's not the case, although I was concerned from the faces he was making lifting weights that he might be struggling with something more than his anger at Trish and Jessica.
And wow, finding out about Inez and Shane's scam causes such a horrible re-evaluation of the look on her face when she finds Hogarth's ALS medicine. (Check out my comments about that episode for a few tasty bites of dramatic irony.)
posted by straight at 1:13 AM on March 18, 2018 [4 favorites]
(I think one of my favorite feelings in fiction is when something happens that feels so wrong that it takes me out of the story but then finding out it's not what it seemed and actually fits just fine.)
posted by straight at 1:19 AM on March 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by straight at 1:19 AM on March 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
That whole Dale thing came out of nowhere, wtf. Also, how was he working at a prison if he's been fired for suicides? Huh?
Poor, poor Jeri.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:24 PM on March 22, 2018
Poor, poor Jeri.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:24 PM on March 22, 2018
Plenty of examples of police and corrections officers being fired for misconduct and rehired either in the same jurisdiction or nearby ones out in the real world.
posted by rmd1023 at 3:18 PM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by rmd1023 at 3:18 PM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
I think I'll answer the phone with the phrase "Smack me in the face with your truth!" for a while, until people stop calling at least.
posted by Grangousier at 4:20 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Grangousier at 4:20 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
During this episode I remarked to my wife, "Why does Jeri Hogarth have a better character arc in Season 2 than Jessica Jones?" I was expecting/hoping for her to be the one to get the treatment from Dr. Karl instead of Trish. Carrie Ann Moss has been the through-line of this season for me, even though she's off on the side most of the time.
posted by five toed sloth at 10:55 PM on March 24, 2018
posted by five toed sloth at 10:55 PM on March 24, 2018
I dunno. These last few episodes. The only coherent storyline is Jeri-Inez-Shane. Jessica/Trish/Malcolm are each in their own world, not really paying attention to the other which is uncharacteristic. Jessica doesn't notice that Trish is back on drugs. Trish doesn't know that Jessica's found the Killer. Neither Jessica nor Malcolm has twigged why Trish is so determined to find Karl. I've lost interest in the Alisa story since she was arrested because of this dragged out confession business. Trish messing up Malcolm was bad and likewise Jessica has dragged Oscar back into the forgery business which would certainly screw up his custody issues if not his freedom if it ever comes out.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:25 PM on April 5, 2018
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:25 PM on April 5, 2018
Reading the AV Club synopsis just now reminded me of another jarring scene: Alisa going off on Trish in jail. I was trying to think, did they know each other before the car crash? Of course not but AV explains that Trish had mentioned that woman doctor's name on her radio show, like back in episode 1 or 2, a very minor plot point and it was enough to make Alisa feel threatened? Even though we never heard IGH referred to again on the air and even though there was never any indication that Alisa listened to her show. I guess I'm finding that this all purpose rage to be a bit boring.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:50 PM on April 5, 2018
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:50 PM on April 5, 2018
Carrie-Ann Moss is great in this but her whole story line seems like padding to fill out 13 episodes. Not much or anything in her whole ALS plot adds to the main plot.
posted by octothorpe at 6:06 AM on April 8, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by octothorpe at 6:06 AM on April 8, 2018 [1 favorite]
It's kind of hilariously implausible to me that Trish's on-air meltdown would inspire anyone to give her an audition.
I was honestly expecting that to be a prank or something. I mean, maybe a Fox News type of network would have a place for a pretty blond to be foaming at the mouth about sex trafficking and rape gangs (scary foreigners!!!) on a daily basis, but ZCN has been positioned on the show as a sort of staid CNN/BBC type of network. Angry Trish seems like a terrible fit for them.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:03 PM on April 23, 2018
I was honestly expecting that to be a prank or something. I mean, maybe a Fox News type of network would have a place for a pretty blond to be foaming at the mouth about sex trafficking and rape gangs (scary foreigners!!!) on a daily basis, but ZCN has been positioned on the show as a sort of staid CNN/BBC type of network. Angry Trish seems like a terrible fit for them.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:03 PM on April 23, 2018
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Poor Hogarth. I know they can draw this ALS plot out over future seasons if they want, but I'm still rooting for her to get super-powered up. (Though she can probably wreak some pretty serious legal revenge on Inez and Shane at least.)
posted by oh yeah! at 10:24 AM on March 11, 2018 [6 favorites]