‘Jessica Jones’ Season 2 Struggles With The Specter Of #MeToo

Season 1 of Marvel’s Jessica Jones confronted sexual harassment, abuse, and assault in all its pervasive horror, and now season two is debuting in a time when those issues are on everyone’s mind. Although the second season wrapped production in mid-September, a few weeks before the New York Times blew the lid off of Harvey Weinstein’s grotesque pattern of behavior, season two of Marvel’s Jessica Jones still tries to deal with the horrors of workplace harassment and the trauma that comes with it.

It’s not that the show predicted the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements as much as it’s always been concerned with confronting them. And the show is doing so in surprising, sometimes subversive, ways. Oh, and some mild spoilers ahead for Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2. (You’ve been warned.)

Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), a super-powered private eye, has a complicated relationship with abuse, harassment, and assault. Not only was she physically experimented upon against her will, she was abducted, assaulted, and controlled by the master villain of the series, Kilgrave.

In season one, David Tennant’s Kilgrave was the living embodiment of sexual abuse. His superpowers were mental: he could take the strongest woman in the world, Jessica Jones, and make her his pet. He could force her against her will into just about anything. He zapped her of her consent. Worse still, perhaps, he had the ability to linger in a victim’s psyche. The suggestion being that abuse is a two-pronged assault. Besides the obvious physical attack, there is the prolonged anguish of psychological trauma.

Marvel and Netflix have been teasing Kilgrave’s return, and while we can’t get into specifics of the where’s and how’s and why’s behind it, we can say that it makes a terrifying sort of sense. Resurrecting Kilgrave — in any form — doubles down on the idea that trauma is an everlasting thing. You can think you’ve conquered the demons that haunt you, but then, at the worst moment, they’ll rise from their graves.

Season 2, though, has a more complicated relationship with trauma and abuse. First, we get a glimpse of how sexual abuse shaped Jessica’s best friend, Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor). In her youth, Trish was a popular singer and actress under the moniker, “Patsy Walker.” Though her child stardom is often treated as a wry punchline, season two reveals that there is a lot of trauma associated with her alter ego. Namely, she was in an abusive relationship with a powerful director when she was still a minor. As an adult she can recognize it as statutory rape and abuse, but his defense is that she knew what she was doing.

Trish consistently returns to the roots of her pain — her Patsy Walker identity — in an effort to leverage these experiences for power in the present. She dons the Patsy Walker outfit and sings her annoyingly popular song for a price: a physical clue to Jessica’s own past. She sets up a confrontation with her abuser so that she can blackmail him to help Jessica, but on a deeper level Trish wants to transform her own abusive past into something powerful, if not also positive. Every time she confronts her own demons, she is making a move that should help her friend Jessica do the same.

She’s taking her pain and attempting to make it her power.

And then there’s Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss). While most of the conversations around #MeToo and #TimesUp have focused on powerful men preying upon women, in Season 2’s first episode, the harasser is a ruthless hotshot lesbian attorney who always seems to wiggle her way out of disaster. She’s a friend of Danny Rand (Finn Jones) and a sort of mentor figure to Jessica Jones. She also gets saddled with a messy sexual harassment suit by her former lover/secretary, Pam. How does Jeri deal with it? By laughing the allegation off with a laugh and a snide comment.

What’s shocking is that’s Jeri’s defense isn’t that she assumed they were carrying on a consensual affair, but that she thought Pam was essentially “asking for it.” This grace note of a plot point serves to illustrate that sexual harassment isn’t about gender, or even sex, but power. Pam was an employee who was having an affair with her boss. How much control did she really have in the course of the relationship? How many options did she have professionally? That Jeri scoffs at the whole situation only highlights her high status. Jeri had the power in the relationship and Jeri abused it.

What’s most frustrating about this (beyond slotting the show’s main LGBT character into pseudo-villainous role) is that it muddies the waters. Perhaps this is the point, to show that unlike Season 1’s Kilgrave/Abuser-wrong, Jessica Jones/Abused-right, that real life is always more complicated. And certainly that’s been a large part of the discussion with #MeToo, around what does (and doesn’t) constitute abuse. But at least in the initial episodes screened, Jeri’s plotline almost immediately gets dropped with little to no repercussions, and it doesn’t gel with the similarly convoluted storyline happening with Jessica and Patsy.

There is a lot more to say abuse, its lasting impact, and how and who abusers are in society. Season 1 did that expertly, and from what we’ve seen Season 2 continues that conversation in a far more scattershot manner. In the midst of a time when we need to push the conversation forward, Jessica Jones doesn’t quite get there. But at least its talking, and that shows progress. It’s asking questions we don’t necessarily have the answers to.

Stream Marvel's Jessica Jones on Netflix