I recently watched the second season of the Marvel Netflix series Jessica Jones. Overall I thought it was OK, but it was nowhere near as compelling or tightly-crafted as the first season. The more of these Marvel Netflix series I watch the more I'm forced to conclude that Daredevil season 1 and Jessica Jones season 1 were outliers and they've been regressing to the mean since then.

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Spoilers below

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Jessica's personality front-and-center

The hardest part of the Jessica Jones series to swallow has always been her personality. She's an angry misanthrope who is always trying to prove that the world is as bad as she thinks it is. The first season does a good job of nevertheless making her sympathetic, you can understand that a lot of terrible stuff has happened in her life to validate her dark perspective. And a hard-drinking private investigator with a lousy attitude makes sense for a “noir detective” type of show. But in this season they essentially make Jessica's personality the central element by introducing her mother with a lot of the same traits. They're both control freaks who expect someone else to clean up their messes and have people around them who seem all-too-eager to enable that attitude. If Jessica could see herself from the outside she'd never put up with her own bullshit, but she is surrounded by people who are seeking her approval.

It's Patsy

I found the Trish storyline to be the most engaging part of the season. Sometimes it felt a bit rushed, but from the slightly comic “angry driving” scene to her epic “mad as hell” moment where she quits TrishTalk there was a lot more engaging emotion and drama in her story than in Jessica's. You can sympathize with her desperation to do more with her life and understand why she makes so many bad choices in her flawed, frantic efforts to get what she thinks she needs. I'm interested to see where they go with her story now that she has started developing her own “Hellcat” superpowers.

Another villain problem

Season 1 of Jessica Jones had one of the best, if not the best, villains in any Marvel Cinematic Universe story. This season is kind of the opposite of that, is there a villain at all? Jessica focuses most of her ire at Dr. Karl Malus, who (in the backstory) is guilty of the horrible crime of... saving terminally injured people? And occasionally giving them superpowers as a side-effect? Yeah, it's not great that he was doing unapproved medical experiments on humans. And it's not great that his experiments created a rage-monster that killed people (although people seem able to forgive Bruce Banner for doing that...). And it's not great that he didn't keep a closer eye on Jessica's mother's secret murder spree. But he pretty much owns up to all of that as soon as he's called on it. He seems like a flawed guy, but not necessarily a bad one. His heart was in the right place, even if his sense of ethics might not have been all it could have been. Jessica's mother has one foot in the villain role, most of the problems and deaths in the story are caused by her, but they also go out of their way to make her sympathetic and the protagonist spends most of the back half of the season trying to help her.

Too insular

I think they missed an opportunity with this season by making it too much about Jessica and her backstory and not enough about Jessica in the here-and-now. The first season of the show was all about how her history made her who she is. They could have explored her character in a post-Killgrave world while having her investigate a noir-ish mystery, I think that could have been very compelling (and tracking down the people behind the power-giving experiments could have worked perfectly well for that). Instead the mystery is solved pretty trivially and the show tries to re-explore a lot of the backstory issues that were already examined, which means this version ends up feeling lackluster in comparison to the original. Maybe exploring Jessica's relationship with her mother could have been interesting eventually, but by doing it as season 2 it makes the entire Jessica Jones series feel very insular and incestuous.

Despite my criticisms it's still OK, maybe even good

After the first two episodes I was afraid the season would be mediocre or worse. It picked up a bit after that. It wasn't great, but it was entertaining. I'd say it's on par or better than the average superhero show: it's not a must-binge-watch show like the best of the Marvel Netflix catalog, but it's fine.