written by Kiara Williams
The level of unnecessary in the episode is too damn high!
SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT
I’m pretty sure most of the blame for these POV-switch episodes comes from Netflix requesting more episodes than Marvel needed to tell this story. This and Episode 3×02 are both episodes from Trish’s perspective, and I feel that both episodes are talking down to the audience, since they’ve only served to fill in information we either already knew or could infer from what we’ve been told. This isn’t the kind of POV switch you’d see in, say, NieR: Automata, where we get new story info that we couldn’t have possibly known otherwise, thus making the switch necessary.
This is unnecessary.
We start back at the funeral with Trish giving her eulogy, and then a flashback of young Trish reading lines with Dorothy before an audition. Dorothy berates her daughter for not being good enough, saying that her family relies on her for money since her father’s child support isn’t enough for them. Dorothy was abusive and desperate and she has always been forcing Trish to be perfect.
We know this.
We cut back to the hotel that Trish was holed up in, and we get the added scene of Trish meeting and beating up the abusive man from the room next door, which is nice, I guess. Trish punches Erik and while Erik is outside the hotel room, he calls someone to find a poker game for him; we don’t know why yet. Trish leaves to go pay a not-so-friendly visit to Salinger in the hospital, where she learns that Salinger got photos of Dorothy before she died and hid them in one of Dorothy’s photo albums. Trish discovers the photos in Dorothy’s apartment. I know that it’s supposed to add that extra knife twist for Trish, but we’ve already seen Dorothy’s corpse upon Trish initially finding her. So was this necessary? Trish could’ve found the photos the first time she went into the apartment after the murder.
Then we cut to Trish again. She got cast in a supporting role in a sitcom, but that’s not enough for her mother. Dorothy seizes an opportunity after finding out that the lead actress has chicken pox, and gets Trish to do the table read in the girl’s place…after a bit of physical abuse and guilt-tripping. Dorothy was a cutthroat, abusive woman.
We know this.
After seeing the last photos of Dorothy alive, Trish resolves to go find Erik and use his Douche Radar powers to her advantage. He can find bad people, so Trish wants to use that so she can go beat up bad guys and clean up the city. Erik points out “Hey, Nussbaumer’s a problem right now.” “What’s he guilty of?” “Killing some drug dealers.” “He killed bad people?” Trish, are you seven years old? It doesn’t matter that they were kids. Cops killing extrajudiciously is bad. Period. The fact that Erik has to explain their humanity to Trish just shows how far gone she is.
“If he kills another kid, you will be the only person on Earth who saw it coming.” Trish goes from being all gung-ho about the cop killing drug dealers to using their youth to convince Erik to help her go after Nussbaumer. Is youth the only reason people can change? Are all old drug dealers just irredeemably awful and they deserve to die? Trish’s black-and-white thinking grates on my soul, and gosh, remember when I thought Trish was coming around earlier this season?
Good times.
Erik gets Nussbaumer to meet him at a secluded space, and Trish rattles off the names of Nussbaumer’s victims (which I can’t help but mention that all of those names sound like they belonged to minorities; I’m just saying). She then confronts Nussbaumer once Erik gets his admissions on camera. Trish attacks Nussbaumer and takes his badge. “You don’t deserve this.” Trish didn’t realize until too late that kicking people into metal poles kills them. Later, Trish learns that Jessica is the person of interest whom the cops are searching for. She vehemently defends Jess, knowing that she didn’t kill the cop, because Trish is the one who did. She goes to tell Erik about the cops on Jess’ tail, and Erik comes up with a plan to frame another of his marks. “This is so dicked up,” he says. Let Erik say “fuck!”
Cut back to young Trish. She and Dorothy learn that Dorothy’s lead-stealing plan worked. Trish wants to celebrate, but Dorothy tells her to act like an adult, despite the fact that she’s, what, ten? Dorothy tells her daughter that hundreds of families are dependent on her being perfect every day on set. Holy shit, that’s a lot of pressure. Obviously Dorothy has always been kind of awful, but…
We know this already.
Do you see what I’m getting at?
We do get something new when we see Jeri visit Trish, offering to destroy the footage from her office in exchange for her getting info to help Kith’s lawsuit. Trish doesn’t have much choice, and she reluctantly agrees. After the funeral, Trish finds out about the warrant for Jessica’s arrest and she tells Erik to put their plan into motion now. Here, Trish also comes up with the idea to plant Nussbaumer’s badge on Jace Montero, the arsonist. While Jess was tailing Trish, Erik was tailing Jess in order to let Trish know where she was. And it was Erik who actually let the cops know where Jess was so that she could be arrested. I did think that timing was a little too good. “So dicked up.” Let Erik say “fuck!”
We cut to where the last episode ended: Jace Montero’s construction site. Trish confronts and attacks him. She soon gets carried away, at one point seeing Salinger in Montero’s face, and she kills him. Panicking, Erik bails, and Trish plants the badge on Montero’s body, giving Jess an out. You would think Trish would be a bit more horrified, but she just asks Erik if the world is better. Erik says that he’s done with all this, but Trish doesn’t care. With her mother’s words echoing in her head, Trish staggers off to deliver more elementary-school-brand justice. She has truly gone off the deep end.
But we already knew this.
Jessica Jones Seasons 1-3 are available now on Netflix. Kiara can be reached on Twitter @DJPrincessK.