Jessica Jones: Season One

I wanted to watch Jessica Jones mostly because David Tennant was in it. Same reason I watched Broadchurh or Gracepoint. The fact that it's a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was just a bonus.

I've been a fan of Marvel Comics for a very long time, but Jessica Jones wasn't a character I was particularly familiar with back when I was still reading comics. I knew a bit about her husband, Luke Cage, and her (MCU) best friend, Trish Walker, but I didn't know much about her. After watching the first season, I might have to go back and learn more about the character.
The show has a pretty interesting setup. The titular character is a super-powered Private Investigator with a mysterious past and an obvious drinking problem. Spoilers inbound.

The season begins with Jessica taking a job from the Schlotmans' who are looking for their daughter, Hope. Throughout the course of her investigation, Jessica discovers that the man who kidnapped Hope is the same one who had kidnapped her in the past. A man named Kilgrave (Played by David Tennant) with the power to control peoples actions. She wants to flee town, but she winds up rescuing Hope and bringing her back to her parents. Unfortunately, the girl still has orders, and she kills her parents.

Jessica's next order of business is to try to prove that the girl was under mind-control when she killed her parents.
This brings me to a massive plot-hole I overlooked while I was watching the series. Nobody believes that Kilgrave can mind control people even though Loki mind-controlled loads of people in The Avengers. We live in the age of the internet, there would have been pictures and video, and stories about that plastered on the internet within seconds. Literally seconds. If people didn't believe the first claims of Loki mind-controlling people, by the time the hundredth, or the thousandth story came out, even if the government didn't comment on it, there wouldn't be many people who thought it was fake, especially after a big green man, a dude in powered armor, a literal Norse God, a walking flag with a shield and a pair of gimmick soldiers fought off an alien invasion coming through a freaking wormhole above New York City. And you know something? That's not even half of what's happened in the past four years. A building disappeared, an army of robotic men dropped a city in Europe, SHIELD was disbanded, helicarriers crashed around the world, Tony Stark's house was destroyed by an army of terrorists, people were literally blowing up all over the world, a man with a silver arm rampaged through a city blowing up cars, Inhumans and mutants have been popping up left and right around the world, and a man in a devil suit has been running around Hell's Kitchen beating up gang-members and taking down a city-wide conspiracy to rule New York. Literally anything is possible. People should know this by now. For how well Daredevil used and acknowledged media coverage of events from the rest of the MCU to affect the story. This is especially odd, since the characters make use of the internet on multiple occasions to obtain information. I know that some of the points the characters make about how people will literally make up any excuse to try and get away with crime, but they shouldn't be dismissing the idea offhand, especially people who know people who have superpowers. 

Jessica convinces her sometimes-boss who's a lawyer, Jerri Hogarth to take the case in exchange for digging up dirt which will let Jerri divorce her (No, the character was not a woman in the comics) wife without giving her any assets.
Meanwhile, Jessica begins a relationship with local bartender and superpowered invincible dude, Luke Cage (Played by  Mike Colter). While Jessica was under Kilgrave's command, she killed Luke's wife.

Eventually, Jessica figures out that Kilgrave's major weakness is being put to sleep, so she steals a bunch of heavy-duty anesthetics to knock him out with. She also teams up with one of Kilgrave's former minions, a cop named Will Simpson to capture him so she can get a confession out of him and clear Hope's name. After a few trials and errors, they manage to get Kilgrave into their trap and on-camera. They locate and bring in his parents to try and talk him into confessing, but that and Jeri disabling the electro-shock system in the cell allows Kilgrave to escape.
Kilgrave commandeers Jeri's car and makes her take him to a doctor to patch up his gunshot wounds from the escape, so she takes him to her wife. Eventually, Kilgrave makes Jeri's wife try and kill her, but Jeri's mistress shows up and kills the wife.

Despite this and other setbacks, Jessica manages to finally catch up to Kilgrave after the situation with Hope is made moot and kill him. She is then left in a position where she may eventually be defended by Foggy Nelson and Matt Murdock.

Aside from the aforementioned massive plot-hole (Which I can only presume must have been a massive oversight on the part of Marvel) this season was pretty good. I didn't even notice it at the time because it's only brought up by a caller on Trish's show and barely mentioned at all later.
I will say this however. The show has no idea what it's going for in terms of plot at times. Will gets hospitalized at one point and starts taking Super-Soldier pills to keep him going after Kilgrave murders a bunch of his friends. The pills wind up driving him crazy and Trish is forced to help Jessica take him down. This is after Will and Trish became intimate, and bonded over their mutual ideals. After they deal with Will, the people who gave him his pills take him away and this is never brought up again.

Then there's Kilgrave. Kilgrave is a great villain, and his moral ambiguity combined with the characters tendency to be a magnificent bastard makes him incredibly entertaining to watch. David Tennant is part of the reason the character is so great. His charisma helps sell the role like nothing else. It's just awesome to see him playing a villain again, and some of his quips are just so freaking funny. The problem is that they couldn't seem to figure out how they wanted to portray the character. They go from mildly sympathetic, childlike woobie who never learned any better to irredeemably purely sadistically evil at multiple points in the season. Almost like there were two writers fighting over how they wanted to characterize him and they didn't have anyone stopping them from mucking up the tone of the show. There's an entire episode dedicated to Jessica teaching Kilgrave how to be a hero, with him taking a liking to it before she betrays him and captures him. This seems to be setting up a situation where she's at least partially responsible for his reign of terror afterwards, but Jessica never appears to care about this, despite feeling responsible for the death of Luke's wife despite being under Kilgrave's control.

At one point, Jessica and company find a bunch of videos of Kilgrave as a child being experimented upon and tortured by his parents. After Jessica finds his parents, they give a story which not only contradicts what Kilgrave told her about them, but also what she'd seen in the videos. Yes, they're pretty much terrified of him, but we have no reason to believe that their story or Kilgrave's is the correct one. Supposedly they were trying to cure him of the virus that made him able to control people (Yeah, that's totally something that could happen. That's not less believable than actual telepathy) but the things we see in the videos make them seem like they were actively trying to encourage this, and Jessica, who's supposed to be one of the least trusting people in the whole MCU, just believes them right off.

That's before we come to Jessica and Kilgrave's relationship. Kilgrave brings up a lot of things he'd done for Jessica while she was with him, and she basically dismisses it as him projecting. He also brings up times when he's let his control lapse to see what she'd do, and rather than going straight with his version of the story, thus making their relationship more complex and interesting, they make it so Jessica actually did try to escape and Kilgrave made her cut her ear before stopping. This seems like a bit of a cop-out when the season so far has done its best to try and make the actions of every other character seem morally grey as opposed to black and white, yet they seem almost determined to make Jessica seem like the put upon hero and Kilgrave the unequivocal villain. I know he's not supposed to be totally sympathetic, but they did their best to make the audience like him without actually paying off his character-arc. I was expecting to see something along the lines of Jessica actually being a willing partner to Kilgrave up until he made her kill Luke's wife and then convincing herself that he was always controlling her all of the time. It would have made for a nice angle on the psychological end, since Jessica is obviously a bit unstable already thanks to the death of her parents and her abusive step-mother. This would have also placed more responsibility onto Jessica's shoulders to justify her sheer levels of self-loathing and guilt. Aside from that though, I don't mind how it turned out. The characterization of Kilgrave and Jessica became massively unfocused by the end of the season, but overall it's still a pretty good show. The other characters however are pretty consistent, which is good.
This brings me to the amazing cast. Jessica is played by Krysten Ritter, who brings across the characters sarcastic self-loathing perfectly. Then there's David Tennant, who's awesome as Kilgrave for all the reasons I've previously mentioned. Mike Colter really manages to sell the "retired hero" sort of thing that I think they were going for with this version of Luke Cage. Wil Traval is good as ex-soldier and current cop Will Simpson. He's a tough son of a gun and seems like he genuinely feels bad about what he did while under Kilgrave's control. It's just a shame he had to be written out of the show.

Rachael Taylor works well as Trish Walker, the former child-star with a traumatic upbringing she'd like to forget. I'm not really sure what else I can say about most of the other members of the supporting cast.

However, there is one specific stand-out that I want to bring up. Eka Darville is in this series as Jessica's Neighbor Malcom Ducasse. Eka Darville is one of my very favorite actors. For those who don't know, Eka Darville played Scott Truman, the Red Ranger in one of my favorite television series of all time, Power Rangers RPM. Eka Darville, like the others in the RPM cast is a tremendously talented actor, who has been criminally underutilized. He's got a great range, and at this point I'm almost convinced that he can do anything and make it great. The sheer gulf between Scott and Malcom is astounding, with Scott being the confident leader type who tries to find the best approach to a situation, and Malcom being this formerly bright and sunny character with noble ideals who was drug into the Kilgrave conflict against his will, forced to become a drug-addict and subsequently forced to overcome it. Malcom does dark things that he knows is right, but it eats himself up inside to the point where it actually causes Jessica's team some trouble, while Scott was the moral center of his team, not because he wanted to be or because he was just there to fill that role in the ensemble like some Rangers are, but because he knew what Corinth needed, and was able to fill that role better than almost anyone else could. For that reason, the characters are basically polar-opposites, as they display different emotions in different ways. Not even just emotions, but also entirely different body-language, tones of voice, method of speaking, gait, and everything. Where Scott had a confident stride, Malcom has a nervous sort of shuffle.

All in all, the story is pretty good and the characters are good as well. While they could have done with a lot tighter characterization of Kilgrave and Jessica, the show is still entertaining to watch, and interesting as they try and unravel the many mysteries within.
In the end, I give the first season of Jessica Jones an 8.1* rating. It has some troubles towards the end, but if you look past them you've got a dang good Neo-Noire series.

Image from impawards.com

J. J. Abrams Star Trek reboot/sequel

Star Trek is one of my favorite Sci-Fi franchises. Star Wars, Stargate and Animorphs are a few others. While I didn't particularly like Star Trek: The Original Series for a lot of reasons, this revived my interest. You see, for every decent episode in my eyes, they had many that were extremely uncomfortable to watch. That sometimes happens with shows, but I just found The Next Generation so much more polished, entertaining and fun. Granted, I will watch it occasionally when it's on TV, which says something about the state of Television these days if a show from forty years ago that had a ton of episodes that were just unsettling and horrifying in their content, if not downright boring when you watched them more than once is better then anything else on TV. Besides, I much preferred the books based on TOS to the actual TOS. That might infuriate some people, but I just like TNG better. Why? Well let's put it this way: Holodecks, and a lower mortality rate.
But now, into the actual review.
Star Trek is a 2009 film that is a quasi-reboot for and quasi-sequel to the classic Star Trek franchise, which utterly tanked with the failure of the last film in the series, Nemesis. Whether that was due to them slicing the film up to draw attention to a confrontation that wound up being short, sad, lame and anticlimactic, or due to the fact that it (Almost completely) destroyed a beloved ship and killed one of the main characters, just like in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (And wound up having exactly the same amount of long term impact as the events of ST2 did) the relevance of this statement is fading, so let's talk about Star Trek.
The movie feels as if it's had a few scenes cut out, but not in the amount or severity that its predecessor was subjected to. In the end, it feels a lot tighter, and it's most definitely a better movie. I remember thinking that this was a horrible idea, that it wasn't going to be any good, and that it couldn't live up to the things that came before. Then I saw Star Trek Nemesis.
I'm going to level with you, I liked all of the Star Trek movies except Nemesis. I'm weird like that, but then again I did see them all one after another in the space of about a month.
I've been going off on a lot of tangents in this review, so I'm gonna reign myself in and talk about what the header says I should talk about.
The special effects and music are as good as the ones from the sequel. I've found when review a sequel before its prequel you can't say much about it that you didn't say about the sequel, demonstrated in my Modern Warefare 2 and CoD4 reviews. But here, they're two very different movies. Star Trek is very much about both how the universe came to branch off from the main one, and about how the characters became who they are, and that's something that hasn't been explored much in official materials as far as I know (But there are so many Star Trek books out there I could be wrong and just not know it because I didn't read them) and it makes for a good movie.
One thing I have to complain about is that the kid they got to play young Kirk doesn't look like Chris Pine, the guy they got to play the adult Kirk. Other than that, there's not much. It took a while for me to get used to the idea of Zachery Quinto as Spock, but eventually it clicked for me. And as for the other actors, I pretty much like all of them. Scotty doesn't look a whole lot like James Doohan, but he knows how to act like him. And Leonard Nimoy has a rather major role in the plot as the Spock from the main universe.
The plot is actually both swift and sweeping, despite the fact that the movie seems to pass like Sonic The Hedgehog was tapping into The Speed Force while jacked up on caffeine.
But a movie that passes too quickly is always better than one than has you tracking the time until it's done. It might not be the perfect movie, but in the end that's not what matters. What matters is that it's a better movie then what came before and it's spawned what could be this generations epic science fiction series. Star Trek: Into Darkness is one of my favorite movies from last year, and it's also one of the best I've seen.
Star Trek has a few flaws, but the original series had its flaws as well. As did TNG, DS9, Voyager (Ugh) as well as the movies.
All in all, it's a movie that begs watching, because it's something that's fun to watch. It's something that lets you escape the drudgery of everyday life and step into the shoes of adventurers who travel the cosmos, saving worlds and solving mysteries.
Perfection is not what to look for, because that's unimportant. A good movie has its flaws, but the polished bits overshadow them. Looking back upon when I first saw it several years ago, I remember it fondly. For everything someone might say is wrong with it, it's fun.
10.2*
Check out my review of the sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness.

Star Wars: Wild Space

Star Wars Wild Space is a Clone Wars tie-in novel that was written by Karen Miller and came out in 2008. It's situated during the missing R2-D2 arc in Clone Wars, and follows what Obi-Wan Kenobi was doing during that span of time. It's also one of my favorite works of fiction, right behind Ready Player One and right before Pendragon Book 6: The Rivers of Zadaa. I'll get to Pendragon someday, and I'll do Sakura Samurai soon, but today's May The Fourth so I figured I'd review this book. I'm not a major Star Wars fan by any means, I haven't watched the movies in years and I've only ever seen one episode of The Clone Wars. I was a fan of the books for a while, but the New Republic era's writing quality spiraled further and further downwards the more I read of it to the point where I stopped reading it. Plus I couldn't figure out which books when where in the timeline since they're not numbered in any way aside from the timeline which is either in the books or isn't. Anyways, the book is three-hundred and forty-two pages long and I listened to the audiobook version myself. The first thing I have to mention is that the audiobook version is amazing. It adds a lot of emotion to the journey and it makes for an entertaining experience. The book starts off after the first battle of Geonosis, and shortly before the end of Attack of the Clones, and provides for a great deal of character development between Obi-Wan and Anakin despite the short length of the scene. It also provides expanded development on the part of the Jedi, making them seem less heartless and allowing for them to seem like actual people. It then skips ahead a bit to after the events of Star Wars: Clone Wars, where Obi-Wan has received information regarding an attack by General Grievous. The following scenes provide for a great deal of interesting character development for everyone involved. Yoda, Obi-Wan, Anakin, Mace Windu, and Padme. It also makes fleshes out the whole universe of Star Wars so that it becomes more three-dimensional, and it's done in such a way that it's relatable to real life, in a way that I felt like I knew what the characters were feeling. This book does a lot to make Revenge of the Sith a better movie, although it also does a lot to make Anakin's face-heel turn towards the end of the movie (And that's not a spoiler because Star Wars Episode V has been out for almost thirty-five years now and everyone pretty much knows Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.) a lot more perplexing.
While he would do anything to protect a certain someone, he also has a lot more reasons to hate and distrust the Sith and everything they want to do then he does to be annoyed by the Jedi, and that was moot by that point in time. This book pretty much just piles on to the reasons as to why Anakin wouldn't trust the Sith, and features absolutely amazing storytelling.
Seriously, a lot of the book is spent with two characters on a planet with nothing else there except local wildlife and it's absolutely astounding how it's written to be riveting. It helps build Obi-Wan up as a character and it also builds up another important character who was barely mentioned in either trilogy, yet who died a tragic death at the hands of the Empire.
It's absolutely beautiful how well this book is written. Everything, from beginning to climax is perfectly paced, and by the time the book ends it seems like you spent a horrible, wonderful and exhausting eternity with the characters from start to finish. The struggle of a man to overcome his obstacles is portrayed so perfectly and so entertainingly that it will leave you wondering why this didn't have a movie all to itself. They could get Ewan Mcgregor and the rest of the original trilogy cast back just to make a movie or maybe even a miniseries out of this and it would be amazing.
From start to finish this book is paced so perfectly and everything is described in a way that left me with a picture of the scenes in my head that was as clear as seeing it in pictures. It's a great book that not enough people have read, and all in all I'd say it deserves a 10.0* rating. I'll see you all next week with another review.