1x01 AKA Ladies Night

I think this was overhyped for me, because the pilot left me fairly cold. Jessica Jones herself feels like a combination of things I've seen before -- some combination of Veronica Mars, Faith from Buffy, and Hancock. Now I appreciated those characters, but that means the protagonist of the series still feels a bit rote.

And Kilgrave's actions as a rape metaphor is pretty on the nose as well. Don't get me wrong, again, Buffy was great at taking the supernatural as a metaphor for real life issues, but this wasn't exactly subtle. I don't know. I like the idea, but the execution throws me for some reason; it almost feels a little too after school special somehow.

In the same vein, the Kilgrave flashes vacilate between being legitimately creepy and a little too hokey for my tastes. On the one hand, it's an interesting way to depict the PTSD of a traumatic event like that, and the idea of it being unclear whether Jones is flashing back or being mentally manipulated is an interesting one. On the other hand, since it's a superhero show, it's pretty clear that we're dealing with a guy with some kind of powers of psychic suggestion, which is appropriately unnerving, but takes some of the suspense out of the question. Plus, the show uses all the old film tricks to depict the panic -- dutch angles, slowing down the framerate while the camera zooms around Jessica, little time cut jumps to indicate disorientation. To that end, I appreciate the scenes bathed in purple light as a not-so subtle indicator of Kilgrave's presence, but even that technique starts to feel a little too bluntly deployed.

And there's a lot of cliches here. We've got the standard noir setup, private detective skulking around the grungier side of New York. There's a cold, calculating lawyer who seems cut from the mold of Claire Underwood on House of Cards, who's cheating on her significant other. There's thinly veiled flirting between Jones and her would-be femme fatale from the bar. There's the rough-around-the-edges friend who's a thief but who'll surely deliver in the clutch at some point. There's the old, estranged friend who thought she could be more. It's all fairly standard stuff.

The dialogue doesn't help. "I couldn't be the hero you thought I was" is an interesting premise for any character, but you shouldn't have the character actually say it, and voice over doesn't help in adding subtlety to any show. Again, I'm at odds because I really like the premise of someone experiencing a trauma and vacillating between shutting out the world and detach into suffering versus trying to move on and rectify things somehow. But the pilot wasn't especially artful about setting that up.

Then again, it's a pilot, and by definition there's a lot of table setting that has to take place. Now that the main character (played with aplomb by Kristyn "Apology Girl" Ritter) and her world and associates are established, somewhat clunkily, it's time to see what the show does in its little playground. The ending, which took me a bit by surprise and had an appropriately horrifying capper to Jessica's brief hint of joy at doing some good, has promise. We'll see where it goes.