“Jessica Jones” Season 3 Is a Rumination on Abuse and Survival

Of all the casualties of the souring corporate relationship between Netflix and Disney, resulting in the cancellation of the Marvel Netflix shows, the loss of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage hurt me the most. With Jessica’s Season Three debut this month marking the official end of the Marvel-Netflix era, television critics have written eulogies to what was once a seismic shift in how we thought of superheroes on TV. Most of those tributes have centered on the white men tentpoles Daredevil and The Punisher.

I’ll add this: Before there were record shattering dreams of Wakanda, Luke Cage was a bullet-proof black hero in a hoodie who will be forever tied to the sci-fi fantasies of the Black Lives Matter generation. Before Captain Marvel was allowed righteous feminist anger on the Big Screen, there was Jessica Jones fighting the lingering trauma of her rapist armed with little more than her other-worldly strength and a cheap bottle of bourbon. Despite the weaknesses of their respective series, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage both changed the ways we thought of supers on screen. That impact is indelible.

Jessica and Luke briefly reunite one last time in Jessica Jones third season, a fitting nod to the closure of both series. This may be the end of the Marvel Netflix Universe, but at no point does Jessica’s final outing feel rushed or without reason. The third season poetically plays like the end of a planned performance, a double entendre that is in no way lost on showrunner Melissa Rosenberg: “I feel like it’s three acts of a play, you know? It’s really a complete journey for all the characters not just Jessica… It did feel like it was a full story. It was a complete story and arc for our characters.”

In fact, continuing with our little “rule of three” (third act, third season), the final arc of Jessica Jones is split up surprisingly even between its three leading women characters – Jessica; her adopted sister and best friend, Trish Walker; and her high-powered attorney, Jeri Hogarth. I say surprisingly because in previous seasons Hogarth’s role has been liminal at best. The lesbian lawyer never fully integrated herself into Jessica’s world and as a result her storytelling has been shallow and short-sighted. In Jessica’s third season, she steps onto the main stage in full messy glory.

Jeri Hogarth was diagnosed with ALS last season. Coming to terms with the reality that her body is changing forever has pushed her to cling to any power she has left. According to the show’s mythology, Hogarth clawed her way out of childhood poverty to become one of the richest and most sought after lawyers in New York. When her first law firm fell into disarray, Hogarth rebuilt her empire again. She does not take “no” for an answer.

She’s hard, both in persona and likability. Bette Porter taken to her most exaggerated and dangerous conclusion. It’s difficult to watch Hogarth’s final dark turn, largely fueled by her own bodily fears and turned into a rampage against her former allies in New York City’s “superhero” community – Jessica Jones included. At the same time, by rooting her impulses in a relatable confrontation with her own mortality, Jessica Jones gives Hogarth a depth that she’s been robbed of up until this moment. I spent much of the third season angry at her choices, but I couldn’t stop watching her unfold. Somehow, despite all odds, Jeri Hogarth has become one of the MCU’s greatest and most memorable antiheroes.

A large part of what makes Jeri Hogarth’s third season arc so compelling is her new love interest, Kith Lyonne. I don’t have to be intellectual about this – Kith and Jeri are really fucking hot together. They have sex while Kith plays the Cello and later again, in public, during a New York orchestra performance. Women over 40 having great sex with each other is one of my favorite things and we never have enough of it on television. Sure, Kith’s relationship with Jeri ultimately becomes ensnarled in everything that makes Jeri impossible to cheer for – but damnit the sexiness of their relationship almost makes it worth it.

Jerilyn Hogarth isn’t the only one who finds her last turn to be completely sowed in classic “superhero questions” of good vs. evil or intention vs. impact. Jessica Jones’ third season is a 13-hour meditation on what it means to be a hero. Who’s allowed the title? Can take it upon ourselves? Is it something that society demands of us? What separates heroism from vigilantism? Is there ever a line that divides the two?

It’s thoughtful premise, pensive, and to be honest, it doesn’t always work in the show’s favor. It took almost half the season to find myself invested in Jessica Jones because of its slow pace. Watching the spiraling of Trish is finally what pulled me in.

Trish ended the second season having gone through an almost life-ending surgery to get super powers. If you’re a fan of Marvel comics, you already know that Trish Walker becomes Hellcat – a member of both The Avengers and The Defenders. While she’s never called Hellcat in the Netflix series, references to her feline powers abound (my favorite includes a very bloody, but cathartic, literal clawing off of a villain’s face). However, if you were excited for the dynamic duo of Hellcat and Jessica Jones as superhero besties fighting crime in the Big Apple – well, let’s just say that Jessica Jones takes another another path instead.

Trish has never hidden that she envied Jessica’s gifts. This season she discovers the work behind the metaphorical superhero mantle is not as easy as it first appears. I’m not just talking about the physicality of the job, which Trish trains for masterfully, but the mental strain. Trish killed Jessica’s mother at the end of Season Two, and the emotional fallout of that decision haunts both women for the entire last thirteen episodes. I know that fans of the show who’ve envisioned Jessica and Trish’s relationship as romantic may feel differently about this than I do, but I loved that their final arc centered itself on the intimacy and complications of their sisterhood. There were times when it felt like a love letter. Not all love is easy.

Technically there is a Big Bad in Jessica’s last season, some serial killer named Gregory Sallinger who’s based off of the supervillain Foolkiller in the Marvel comics, but he’s lackluster. I couldn’t help but wonder if we were meant to consider Trish as this year’s main antagonist instead – or at least the possibility of who Trish almost becomes, lost to the madness of her own power. She never learns that strength is always matched in turn by vulnerability, that superpowers can not keep in you a bubble away from pain. It makes her more dangerous than perhaps any villain Jessica’s encountered since Season One’s Killgrave (who, as far as I’m concerned, is in a terrifying class of his own).

My biggest fear for Jessica Jones’ final season was that it would ruin the bond between Jessica and Trish. While they are violently stretched thin all season, I don’t think they ever shatter. Still, it’s probably not the kind of satisfying conclusion between the two that fans want.

From the beginning, Jessica Jones has been a super charged allegory for stories about abuse and survival. That’s more true than ever in its third act. Jessica and Trish have both lived through childhood abuse, both are survivors of emotional manipulation and, at different points in their life, rape. Through it all, they depend on each other as a guiding port in the storm. Their connection is fierce because it comes from seeing each other in a way the rest of the world refuses to see either of them. It comes from being each other’s protector, each other’s compass.

In the end, Jessica represents someone who breaks the cycle of the abuse she’s been subjected to. In a cruel final twist, Trish becomes the other side of that coin. She’s an abuse victim who grows up to perpetuate the violence once enacted against her. The change happens so slowly – you nearly don’t feel it for most of the season. By the time you realize what story Jessica Jones is really telling, it’s too late to look away.

Krysten Ritter, Rachael Taylor, and Carrie-Anne Moss ground the final season with standout performances. I’d also be remiss not to mention Aneesh Sheth, who has the thankless but absolutely necessary job of bringing levity to a season that’s otherwise marred in its own self-pity and sorrow. She’s Jessica’s new assistant, Gillian, and she’s breaking new ground as the MCU’s first trans character (played by a trans actress of color, no less). Did I mention she’s hilarious?

After drafting a team of all women directors for its second season, I was disappointed to see that Melissa Rosenberg did not to keep the tradition alive for Jessica Jones’ final outing. Certainly, there are still a lot of women filmmakers who deserve the much-needed exposure and work. Jessica Jones had a lot of heavy-lifting ahead to accomplish in its last season, not only for itself, but as the concluding chapter of the Marvel-Netflix story book. It’s a lot to ask out of anyone, and to its credit Jessica Jones shoulders that mantle willingly.

The white men of Daredevil may try to take all the glory, but ultimately the final word is hers — and ours.



“Jessica Jones” Season 2: Female Rage, Trauma, and the Triumph of Women Telling Stories About Women

Warning, major spoilers for Jessica Jones Season Two ahead! Like literally all the spoilers.

Jessica Jones is back! After two and a half years of only getting to share her in The Defenders, we finally get her back on her very own show for a second season of the Marvel series. As gritty as ever, Season Two counted 13 episodes, with 13 female directors, and a majority female writing staff. I went to a Jessica Jones panel at Paleyfest the day Season Two dropped on Netflix, and one of my favorite moments was when showrunner/writer/executive producer Melissa Rosenberg was asked about that decision and that process and her answer was basically that it wasn’t very hard. She said she originally set out to have at least half of the episodes directed by women, but when they sat down to look through their options, there were plenty of seasoned, talented directors to choose from, so why not hire them for all 13 episodes?

Another thing I took away from that panel, and something I think is apparent more than ever, is that this show isn’t about women, and it isn’t about superpowers. It’s about a traumatized, alcoholic PI with a heart bigger than she cares to admit, a former child star turned radio host who is desperate to help people and to matter, and a high-powered lawyer who fought her way to the top tooth and nail and is determined to stay there. It just so happens that these three characters are women. It just so happens that one has powers. It just so happens that one is a lesbian. But the sentiment didn’t end there — we’ve heard that all before, right? What really hit home for me is that Rosenberg elaborated that it’s not that it doesn’t MATTER that these characters are women, because being women shaped how they came to see the world, and shapes how they move around in it. Being women — having powers, being a lesbian — DOES help define them. It’s just not the ONLY thing that does.

Directors from top left, clockwise: Millicent Shelton (first black women to receive Emmy nomination for best comedy directing), Liz Friedlander (former music video director), Deborah Chow (internationally award-winning short film director), Jennifer Lynch (first women to win best director at New York City Horror Film Festival).

And truly that’s what makes these characters work; none of them are just one thing. They are layered and complicated and very, very flawed — all in ways real people are. And they’re set in a world where unreal things happen.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of this season, I do want to say that I don’t think it was as good as the first season. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the second season, and I think it was cleverly written, well crafted, beautifully acted, and visually stunning. But I don’t think any villain will ever be as scary to me as Kilgrave. That said, there were some really great themes and storylines we can unpack together.

When Strong Women Feel Weak

We have Jessica Jones; superhuman strength, highly skilled PI, witty as a whip, loyal as a person can get. Then we have Trish Walker; fierce determination, a passion for making a difference. And Jeri Hogarth. Motivated, smart, knows how to go after what she wants, takes nobody’s shit. Three very different women with very different strengths, but all three are tough and complex, and all three have seen some shit.

This season all three of them are put through the wringer once again. They all are exposed to a chink in their armor and they all lose their damn heads about it.

Jessica meets someone stronger than herself, which already has her on her toes, and then that someone turns out to be her mother. Her MOTHER. Alisa Jones. The one she thought was dead all this time. This one thing that made up so much of who she was for so long was untrue. She wasn’t an orphan after all. Her mother had been alive all these years. Her mother is alive right now. And her mother is a murderer.

When Killgrave had control of Jessica, he left her with more than the trauma of raping and controlling her. He left her with a fear of her own strength. He forced her to kill someone, and then he all but forced her to kill him. Kilgrave made her a murderer twice over, and every time she has to throw a robber across a convenience store or punch a thug square in the face, she’s holding back, she’s thinking of the lives she’s taken with her bare hands. They haunt her.

Wanna go home, make some nachos, and watch Carol?

If you asked Jessica Jones to list the people she’s killed, however, those wouldn’t be the only two people on her list. Murdered, sure, but not killed. Because she also blames herself for the deaths of her parents and her little brother.

So now Jessica’s entire world is flipped upside down; her darkest truths were lies, her biggest fears are coming true before her eyes. Her mother never died, her mother has the same powers she does, and her mother is using those same powers to commit vicious murders.

Jessica’s voiceover at different points over the season laments this turn of events, saying she’d always wished to have her mother back. But as she has to chain her mother to the bed to sleep at night, as she has to talk her mother out of blackout rages, as she has to beg her mother not to actively and purposefully murder her best friend, she realizes that maybe this dream she had been holding onto for over a decade isn’t what she wanted after all. As the dream cloud rises, more truths are revealed; she was experimented on after the car accident, her parents were near divorce at the time of the accident and her little brother knew it, her mother killed the first boyfriend she ever really loved — whose death she ALSO blamed herself for all these years, because she assumed the gang guys she beat the snot out of killed him. (Side note, this flashback episode might have been my favorite episode of the season, and the origin story of Jessica’s leather jacket was such a nice touch.)

Jessica thought Kilgrave’s death would free her of this type of mindfucking, but unfortunately she was wrong.

This is exacerbated toward the end of the season, when Jessica goes into a prison guard’s house to prove he was abusing and murdering inmates at the women’s prison where he worked, and finds herself being attacked. The man had killed before, and he was shouting “it’s self defense” after pepper spraying her, swinging his weapon at her unarmed, unseeing person. She fought back, her self-defense being far more legitimate, and ended up lodging the tool in the guy’s face fatally by accident.

But poor Jessica can’t trust that it was an accident; was this always bound to happen? Was this wickedness always inside her? One of the most intense parts of this season was in the aftermath of killing this man, Jessica is starting to hyperventilate and eventually quiets the voices in her head long enough to write a suicide note confessing to his crimes and throwing his body off a building. When she calls her mother to tell her that the guard who had been torturing her wouldn’t be a problem anymore, her mother — everything Jessica fears she’ll become — says she’s proud of her. Not long after this, the vision of Kilgrave appears and says he’s proud of her, too. Jessica tries to use her old coping mechanisms to shoo him away but this isn’t the real Kilgrave. This is the aftershock of her trauma. This is the pain and fear she’s been hiding from and ignoring, manifesting as Kilgrave.

Eventually, Jessica realizes the major difference between her and her mother, between her and Kilgrave and she says it to the visage of Kilgrave that has been haunting her: She can control her power, control herself, which means she’s more powerful than he’ll ever be.

While all this is happening to Jessica, Trish is going through her own shit.

Trish’s whole thing this season is that she’s having a hardcore hero complex. Last season showed Trish wanting to encourage Jess to use her powers for good, but this season she’s fed up with just being a moral compass. In fact, she smashes her moral compass to bits and sets off in search of power of her own. At first, just figuratively. She doesn’t have superpowers, but she has her voice. She thought that could be enough. But no one was paying attention to her on Trish Talk when she wasn’t doing fluff pieces, and meanwhile Jessica, in her opinion, was wielding all this power and not doing anything with it. And this is just the straw the breaks the camel’s back as far as feeling like her voice doesn’t matter; she was her mother’s puppet from a young age, and was raped by a producer when she was 15 years old, all but at the request of her mother. The fame has people assuming things about her, or calling her by a name that isn’t hers.

It’s not a circus coat; I’m making a superhero evolution!

This helpless feeling comes to a head when she’s attacked by what was then just thought to be a monster and can’t defend herself. Her ex-boyfriend Simpson is murdered, leaving behind his super-soldier inhaler, which Trish decides to start using, despite: a) almost dying last time she used it b) not knowing exactly what was in it c) being an addict. But she insists to anyone who asks (mostly Malcolm) that it’s not addictive, that it’s not a drug, that it’s the same as going for a run or having a lot of caffeine. Lying to herself, lying to everyone. Because she does get addicted — and maybe it wasn’t a dependency on the chemicals itself (even though the lows are so low I have a feeling that might be part of it) but to the power. She’s stronger, smarter, faster when this stuff is coursing through her veins. Another problem is, now that she has these abilities, she keeps thrusting herself into danger’s path. Jessica sees her doing it and just tries to scold her out of it; though in her defense she has a lot going on, too. What’s worse is, when Trish’s inhaler runs out, she risks her ENTIRE LIFE to try to undergo a similar experiment to the one who gave Jessica (AND HER MOMMY DEAREST) her powers. Jessica realizes then that they’ve been out of sync, but worries it’s too late.

It’s so hard to watch because Jessica and Trish feel so far away from each other, like they’re running in parallel circles, rarely meeting where they should be, but the entire time, throughout the entire season, they’re thinking and talking about each other so much. They’re just so caught up in their own issues they forget to reach out. They’re so busy trying to protect each other they don’t take the time to be with each other. I wanted to sit them down on a coach and be like TALK TO EACH OTHER because in every interaction they had one of them was hiding something from the other or tamping down a feeling they should have expressed. Even when they were working together they were only touching on the important things, brushing them aside, focused on the mission at hand.

(Look, I still ship it and I’m not sorry.)

So. You think Matt Smith deserved more money than Claire Foy on The Crown?

While these two are going through all this, Jeri Hogarth has her own parallel story going on. It intersects with Jessica’s story here and there, but hers is largely an internal struggle. She starts the season winning an award, feeling on top of the world, when she’s knocked off her pedestal by the news that she has ALS. This news breaks her. She feels defeated already, she starts putting her affairs in order, starts looking into euthanasia. She doesn’t want to live out the final years of her life, not knowing if it will be two years or ten, she doesn’t want to ever feel physically weak. She’s ready to say her goodbyes to this cruel world when an opportunity arises and she can’t help herself but take it.

Jessica has an ex-nurse named Ines who needs protection, because she knows things about the illegal experiments she’s trying to expose, and asks Jeri for help, for use of a safe-house or something. Jeri sees this opening and takes Ines into her own home, wanting to learn more about these experiments, wanting more of her nurse expertise. Because of this, she isn’t using her usual keen senses, and gets swept up in the promise of being strong again. She kisses Ines’s scars and Ines lets Jeri feel like she’s protecting her, and eventually tells her about a man she knows who can heal people. The red flags are there, but Jeri doesn’t see them; Jeri doesn’t want to see them. A woman who has built her career on truth and lies and knowing the difference fell for this con, and got wiped out because of it. The moment she realizes it, the moment she comes home and finds her place cleaned out… it’s the moment she breaks.

Love Makes a Family

Family is a major theme this season. Jessica has always insisted she had no family. Her parents and brother were dead, the end. Despite Trish calling Jessica her sister all season, Jessica doesn’t return the sentiment. That is, until the turning point in her new relationship with her mother. In fact, two things happen in a short period of time. When Mama Jones is raging, attacking Trish, trying to kill her for bringing attention to the hospital, for setting off this chain of events, and, at the root of it, for being closer to her daughter than she herself is. Usually when her mother got into these rages, only sedatives could stop her, but not this time; this time Jessica stops her with one word: Mom. Not too long after that, Jessica is explaining why she knows they can’t live like this, together, free, why things will never be the same as it was before the accident: Alisa tried to kill her sister. Jessica says it this time, sister.

And this is significant, because as we’ve established, Jess has a hard time letting people in. Poor Malcolm spent the entire season trying to help her and getting himself fired over and over again as a thank you. But being faced with her “real” family and realizing that sharing blood, even sharing a history and memories, didn’t automatically or magically make her love Alisa the way had imagined she would love a mother. Love HER mother. So maybe it’s okay to let other people in, to start considering other people family, even though they aren’t the family she lost. This this is the kernel of hope the season ends on, with Jessica joining Oscar and his son Vito for dinner. Maybe not what she might have considered a “normal” family a few years ago, but a family nonetheless. She’s ready to stop dwelling on the horrible things that have happened to her and focus instead on the future. On living.

Overall, I loved the depth and heart of the season. As promised, the season wasn’t about superpowers or being the Chosen One or saving the city. It was about Jessica Jones and the people in her life, it was about her trauma and her relationships and her trying to figure out who she is and what she wants. It was about strength and power and weakness and fear and love and family. It was about Jessica Jones.

My misandry isn’t ironic.

I enjoyed that the men were all secondary in the plotlines throughout the season. They were all vehicles for a woman’s plot, not the other way around. Trish’s now ex-fiance, Malcolm, Oscar, Pryce, Dr. Malus, None of them had storylines of their own, they were all inextricably tied to one of the main female characters — but the same wasn’t true in the reverse. Proven by the fact that I hardly mentioned any men at all until the end of this review.

Along with Jessica having dinner with Oscar at the end of the season, Trish and Jess have one final blowout. Trish shot Alisa in an attempt to stop her, because in her mind she was inherently dangerous, and was afraid the police wouldn’t be able to differentiate between “good powers” and “bad powers” when they got there. But Jessica didn’t think that was Trish’s decision to make. The last thing Jessica says to Trish is that every time she looks at her, all she sees is the person who killed her mother. My biggest fear for the future of this show is that the break this bond suffered might be irreparable. It was stretched and stressed all season and then it was shattered with a single gunshot. Trish went too far and I’m not sure they can come back from that.

Trish’s kernel of hope, though, was on her way out of Jessica’s apartment building after this fight. She drops her phone and catches it with catlike reflexes. One might even say… Hellcat-like reflexes. (Also earlier a doctor told her she used up two of her nine lives which maybe was ham-handed but guess what I DON’T CARE, I’M EXCITED FOR HELLCAT.)

Jeri, too, ends more hopeful than she was, and instead of researching euthanasia drugs, when we see her last, she’s starting up her own law firm. She, not unlike Jessica, is ready to learn how to live.

I have a few hopes for Season Three — first and foremost that it’s not 2.5 years until it happens (if it happens at all). This show also really needs to add some women of color. We had the additions of Pryce and Oscar (and Vito) this year, and Oscar’s ex briefly, but especially if Trish and Jessica are going to take time to find their way back to each other, a female partner in (hyperbolic) crime would be fun to watch, I think. I’d also like Jeri to have a love interest that isn’t so… tragic. So far we have a dead wife, an ex-mistress who is suing her, and a faux girlfriend who conned her. Jeri’s story ended with some hope — she was even flirting with her yoga teacher — but something solid and stable might be nice.

My main hope, though, is that Jessica Jones will pave the way for more women to write and direct and edit and produce TV shows and movies about women. It makes all the difference in the world when they do.

Syfy’s “Wynonna Earp” Is The Love Child Of “Jessica Jones” And “Lost Girl”

Feature image courtesy of NBC Universal

Spoilers below for the pilot episode of Wynonna Earp. 

A brown-haired bad girl in a leather jacket — running from her past, hiding from her mistakes, staying away to protect the people she loves — gets coerced into sticking around to fight bad guys because she has a hidden hero’s heart to complement her superpowers. Am I talking about Jessica Jones or Lost Girl? Neither, actually! I’m talking about Syfy’s new drama, Wynonna Earp, a show that feels like Jessica Jones and Bo Dennis had a super Canadian baby, designated Buffy Summers her godmother, and raised her deep in the heart of Texas.

Based on the IDW comic book of the same name, Wynonna Earp tells the story of Wyatt Earp’s great-great granddaughter, who left her home town of Purgatory as soon as she was old enough, but is drawn back on the eve of her 27th birthday to attend her uncle’s funeral. His isn’t the only death Wynonna has to deal with; on the way into Purgatory, her bus breaks down and her seat mate gets dragged into the woods and decapitated. Who’s doing these dastardly deeds? Demons, duh. The 77 people Wyatt Earp killed with his gun, The Peacemaker, are reincarnated when the heir to his firearm turns 27. It was the fate of Wynonna’s father to destroy them, and now it’s her own destiny. (It’s a little more complicated than that, successor-wise, but I don’t want to spoil all of Wynonna’s angst.)

Wynonna is, of course, joined by a ragtag team of demon-hunting wannabes. There’s her frenetic younger sister, Waverly Earp, who has put in the research and is ready to get down to business. There’s the supremely archetypal Special Agent Dolls from the U.S. government’s Paranormal Research Division, who basically blackmails Wynonna into joining his team after he catches her retrieving The Peacemaker from the place she buried it a decade ago and witnesses her taking down two demons with it. There’s Officer Haught (pronounced Officer Hot), who, rumor has it, is going to make this show “hella gay.” And then there’s Doc Holiday. Or the ghost of Doc Holiday. Or the good guy demon of Doc Holiday. Of all the Canadians doing random Southern accents, his is by far the worst and my favorite.

Like all pilots, this one is full of introduction and exposition, but it elevates itself above Syfy’s usual paint-by-numbers premiere episodes. Wynnonna also knows exactly what shows audiences are going to compare it to, and leans into those similarities with a perfect mix fondness and camp. That second thing links it most closely to Lost Girl, a series that never took itself too seriously, and it makes sense that Wynonna Earp would embrace that part of its potential because former Lost Girl showrunner Emily Andras is at the helm here too.

Despite the fact that I was able to call up three female-fronted pulpy action shows to compare this one to, there’s still a dearth of lady-led series in this heavily male-dominated genre, and there’s never been a woman heading up a paranormal western. And this one has a female showrunner who has a long history of understanding what makes queer fandom’s heart go KABOOM. There’s a good balance here between humor, heart, and the supernatural monsters Syfy requires to make the whole thing worth their time. In fact, the amount of gore — accomished through inevitably low-budget CGI — is pretty shocking. There’s a human head on a pike in the middle of a forest, and some dumb schmuck gets his literal tongue yanked right out of his mouth! (The landscape, however, is real and wonderful.)

If Wynonna Earp can juggle that balance and continue to trust their engaging, kickass heroine to shoulder the show’s most important emotional moments, we won’t be able to leave Purgatory either.

Pop Culture Fix: Cara Delevingne Is Spookier Than Ever In The Bonkers New “Suicide Squad” Trailer

This is the Pop Culture Fix, your weekly round-up of all the queer bits and bobs of pop culture, and also a place to discuss the burning question: Which team would win at mini-golf — Root and Shaw, or Clarke and Lexa?

Movies

In the midst of all the new superhero TV last night, DC dropped a second trailer for Suicide Squad. It’s a complete tonal shift from the first one. Instead of framing it as Just Another Nolan Movie, DC has decided to frame it as Just Another Guardians Of The Galaxy, Marvel’s Not The Only One Who Can Have Fun, You Guys movie. It’s actually a really good trailer, better than the movie will be, probably, and your girl Cara Delevingne, who plays Enchantress, gets more screentime this time around.

Also, here are the first clips from the new Wonder Woman movie. Enjoy the footage while white men talk over it and tell you why Wonder Woman is so important to you and to women everywhere.

https://youtu.be/i9Ur4De7yT8

+ Carol may have gotten snubbed for Best Movie by the Oscars, but it sure as Belivet won every single damn trophy at the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Awards. And also its snub led to a lot of great thinkpieces about What The Hell Is Wrong With The Academy. Here’s a great one over at The Atlantic that dares people to call Carol “cold.” And another one about how Carol never wanted to be “the lesbian Brokeback Mountain.”

+ Jada Pinkett Smith is leading an Oscar’s boycott due to the show’s continued lack of diversity. BET founder, Robert L. Johnson, talked to Variety about some actionable ways the Academy can get its shit together w/r/t minorities.

Teevee

+ As you know, Netflix loves you, and therefore has released: a teaser trailer for season four of Orange Is the New Black, news that Jessica Jones has been renewed for a second season, and promises of a third season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt before season two even airs. Kimmy‘s coming back on April 15. Grace and Frankie is coming back on May 6. And Orange Is the New Black is coming back on June 17. So, that’s your summer planned out.

P.S. Our Lady of Most Perfect Smiles, Samira Wiley, says this season is going to be really different than every season before it.

+ Renewal news from the Television Critics Association. These character are also returning to your TVs for more seasons: Nyssa al Guhl (Arrow), Cookie Lyon (Empire)

+ Hey remember Adventure Time‘s Marceline-centric mini-series Stakes? Okay, so: 1. io9 has a really cool look at the animation behind the climactic scene of the final episode. And 2. Olivia Olson, voice of the Vampire Queen herself, talked to The Mary Sue about it.

I’ve had so many great fan experiences going to so many conventions. I’ve had girls come up to me and say I love Marceline, because she’s so proud of being different it makes me want to embrace my weirdness and not really care. It’s kind of created this fun rivalry in the fans. A lot of people are like I’m Princess Bubblegum! and other people are like I’m Marceline! And I’m like Team Marceline! Be the weirdo! Be the dark one!

+ The 100 is back tomorrow night(!) and HitFix says this season is the best because it grapples with the question: What if there are no good guys?

+ Here are three shows in pre-production that may interest you:

1. CBS’ all-new Nancy Drew (they promise Nancy Drew won’t be white).

2. A new “women’s baseball drama” from Fox.

3. Rutina Weasley (who you mostly know as Tara from True Blood) as the lead in Ava DuVernay’s new OWN show, Queen Sugar.

Queer People In The World Doing Things

+ I guess Lady Gaga and Linda Perry are feuding? All the blogs are abuzz with it. Lady Gaga has a writing credit on an Oscar-nominated song, ‘Til It Happens to You, from a documentary called The Hunting Ground about sexual assault — but Perry says Gaga didn’t write shit on that song, that it was all her and Diane Warren, and so Gaga shouldn’t have a writing credit at all. But Warren says that the song was a “special collaboration” and Gaga does deserve writing credit. Anyway, all this happened on Twitter (stars, they’re just like us!), and also Lady Gaga is releasing a new album in 2016.

+ Caitlyn Jenner is going to publish a memoir next year.

+ Openly queer Carol screenwriter Phyllis Nagy has a new project in the works. She’s writing and producing Rachel Kushner’s remarkable novel, Telex From Cuba, for your teevee screen.

+ Cara Delevingne is a wax figure now.

“Jessica Jones” Is An Awesomely, Aggressively Feminist Superhero Series

Netflix’s first female-fronted superhero TV show stars Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones, a human gifted with super strength and super jumping abilities and — despite being an orphan adopted for the sole purpose of exploitation — a hero’s heart. She wants to use her powers to help people. Early on in her crime-fighting career she gets tangled up with another “gifted” human, a sociopathic mind-controller named Zebediah Killgrave, who forces her to do horrible things on his behalf, including murdering an innocent woman. The show picks up after all that, as Jessica tries to cope with her PTSD by drinking every bottle of cheap bourbon in New York City and making money (to buy more bourbon) by skulking around in the shadows taking pictures of men cheating on their wives. She’s the proprietor of Alias Investigations.

Jessica Jones is not a perfect television show, but it is a perfect punch in the face to the reasons the art of superhero storytelling has mutated into one of the most sexist industries in America.

The thread that ties season one together is Jessica’s relationship to Killgrave, and by examining her trauma from every angle, it becomes one of the most unflinchingly feminist shows I’ve ever seen. Killgrave is the embodiment of male privilege, dialed up to psychotic. His superpower is being a straight white man in America. He’s handsome, he’s wealthy, he gets everything he wants, including sex from whatever woman he desires whenever he desires her. Nothing sets him off like someone telling him no or insulting him. He is entitled to the whole world. At one point he says to Jessica, “How do you people live like this, day after day, just hoping people are going to do what you want? It’s unbearable!”

Jessica Jones pulls no punches when it comes to him or to other men on the show who try to rob women of their agency. The word “rape” makes its way onto the screen in episode eight, but showrunner Melissa Rosenberg has no interest in showing sexual assault for shock value or as a way to make female characters more sympathetic. Rosenberg takes a swipe at politicians who would force women to give birth to their rapists’ babies. And she nods more than once at the idea that Killgrave is obsessed with making women smile at him. She doesn’t draw a direct line from allusions of street harassment to rape, but she doesn’t sidestep that conclusion either. There’s a pill one male character takes that makes him rage out and try even harder than usual to control the women in his life; the pill is named after an MRA subreddit.

There are some good men in Jessica Jones; it’s not Mad Max: Fury Road. However, the story completely centers itself on Jessica and her best friend/foster sister, Trish “Patsy” Walker (played by Rachael Taylor). Their relationship is the thing that empowers them. They rely on each other when they need to Get Shit Done. And even though they argue, it never turns into that gross woman-on-woman catty codswollop so many stories lean into. They squabble like grown-ups who are always going to show up for each other. They each want to be the superhero the other one believes she can be, but they also believe they’ll never live up to the other’s expectations. The show is way more interested in their love story with each other than it is in either of their love stories with the men in their lives.

Even the sex on Jessica Jones is all about what the women want. They’re on top, they’re in charge, they’re receiving instead of giving.

While the main narrative revolves around Killgrave, season one also explores plenty of other storylines. Trish is a former child star with her own radio show and an abusive mother. Jessica has a junkie neighbor who wants to do good but keeps ending up in impossible situations. A woman named Hope is in prison for following Killgrave’s orders and Jessica is determined to find a way to convince a jury that she was under his control when she committed her crimes. Jeri Hogarth is Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first canonically queer female character, and she arrives with two other queer women as well. She is a high powered defense attorney with an enormous office on the hundredth floor and a female assistant she’s in love with and a wife who’s not going to let her walk out the door without a fight (or 75 percent of her assets). And, awesomely, Marvel finally wonders out loud what happened to all the regular old people in Manhattan during the Battle of New York at the end of the first Avengers movie. (Surprise: a lot of civilians died.)

Sometimes Jessica Jones doesn’t balance all of those elements well. Like I said, it’s not a perfect show — but it’s solid, and it’s really important.

In 2015, three superhero TV shows feature female leads (Jessica Jones, Agent Carter, Supergirl), and female-led solo titles make up only a fraction of Marvel and DC’s total comics output. Only two female-fronted superhero movies have hit the big screen, the last of which was released a decade ago. And only about 15% of creative jobs at Marvel and DC are held by women. You’ve heard the complaints: If women exist in comics (or in comic book movies or on comic book TV shows), it’s as love interests, sex objects, or as crumpled up dead bodies smashed inside refrigerators. But it wasn’t always like this! In the Golden Age of comics, girls read as many comics as boys did, and why not? Wonder Woman thundered onto the scene in the early ’40s, an equal to Batman and Superman in every way, and she held everyone’s rapt attention for over a decade as if she’d Golden Lassoed them herself.

In 1954, under growing pressure from Bible-thumping Americans who had taken to burning comic books in public protest in their town squares, comic book publishers adopted the Comics Code Authority, which sought to self-impose moral guidelines on their books to keep them in print. It started with things like banning violence, gore, gun play, and glorifying crime; and evolved — as these things almost always do — into a way for men to exercise more control over women, many of whom were pushing back against being pushed out of their jobs as more and more men returned home from World War II. One of the main tenets of the CCA was: “The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.” Soon after the CCA went into effect, DC’s Editorial Code was updated to say: “The inclusion of females in stories is specifically discouraged. Women, when used in plot structure, should be secondary in importance.”

It has taken 60 years for the conversation to move definitively back toward the place it was in 1940, when William Moulton Marston conceived Wonder Woman. (He would have lost his absolute mind if he’d lived to see Wonder Woman give up her powers to pursue a CCA-approved relationship with her boyfriend.) Jessica Jones is a vital part of that conversation. Unlike Agent Carter and Supergirl (two shows I love very much), Jessica isn’t a squeaky clean hero. Luke Cage calls her a “a hard-drinking, short-fused mess of a woman,” which is completely accurate. Not only would she scowl at the CCA’s ideas about the sanctity of marriage, she’d flip off plenty of other tenets of the Code, too.

Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity … are forbidden.

Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.

Nudity in any form is prohibited, as is indecent or undue exposure.

Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at or portrayed.

Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behavior shall be fostered.

Liquor and tobacco advertising is not acceptable.

Marvel and DC abandoned the CCA years ago when it came to their male heroes, but Jessica Jones is the first female-centric superhero show to completely disregard its influence. She’s not the hero we asked for, but it turns out she’s the hero we’ve needed all along.

Pop Culture Fix: The Good Gay News From New York Comic Con and More Zesty Stories

Autostraddle’s Pop Culture Fix is a weekly round-up of the queer arts and entertainment news you need in your life.

New York Comic Con

This year was my first NYCC (and also maybe my last because I contracted what I think might be the actual plague there), and I was very pleased with the queer pop culture news that came out of the weekend.

+ Person of Interest is really, truly going there with Root and Shaw in the final season. This is a huge deal! With the singular exception of Santana and Brittany on Glee, no TV show has decided to explore a romantic storyline with two established female characters who accidentally have sizzling chemistry. It happens all the time with male/female pairings when TV writers stumble onto that rare on-screen spark they didn’t anticipate, but for female/female pairings, we get the Rizzoli & Isles treatment.

During the POI panel, Sarah Shahi said:

It’s incredibly important for [the LGBT community] to have role models—to have someone on TV they can empathize and emulate and find strength in. I’m so happy to work with this lovely lady, and I want to thank [the writers] for the storytelling. It has been one of the most fulfilling things, to be a voice I feel is underrepresented.

The future is now.

+ Netflix screened the first episode of Jessica Jones and it was even better than I imagined! Carrie-Anne Moss does, indeed, play a gender-flipped Jeryn Hogarth. She has a girlfriend. Also, she has a mistress. Also, the pilot hints very strongly that Jessica Jones herself is bisexual and was, at one time, in a relationship with Trish Walker. And look at what Moss told Entertainment Weekly about Hogarth’s relationship with Jones:

“They’re not friends but they need each other,” Moss said of Hogarth’s relationship with Jessica Jones during an interview with EW. “They come to each other in these scenes, and there’s a lot of back and forth and bad flirtation at times, in life. They’re funny together and can’t stand each other. It’s interesting.”

The series lands on November 20th!

+ The Pretty Little Liars panel at NYCC was interesting. For starters, someone dressed like Red Coat shoved me out of the way to get my seat. But that wasn’t even the most Rosewood role play of the day. No, the most Rosewood role play of the day came when the 50-year-old men in the crowd started screaming at the Liars to love them and marry them, even though they’re all half those guys’ ages.

Here are the first four minutes of the season 6B premiere; it screened at the panel.

Y’all know I have loved this show and have a lot of affection for so many of the people who make it, but I don’t have a great feeling about what’s coming.

Teevee

+ CBS has ordered a comedy pilot from Liz Feldman.

+ Laneia mentioned this in Monday’s AAA, but it bears repeating: Cartoon Network is planning an eight-part Adventure Time mini-series focusing on Marceline the (Queer) Vampire Queen!

+ It feels like this rebooted female-led version of Paradise Island has to include a couple of lesbians, right?

+ VH1 is hosting a panel called LHH: Out in Hip Hop. It’s about being openly gay in the hip hop community.

Film

+ Dope is out on Blu Ray, DVD, and VOD today. It’s one of my favorite movies of the year, in large part because it features one of the most refreshing lesbian characters in film.

+ Jennifer Lawrence wrote an essay about Hollywood’s gender pay inequality problem, and everyone loved it.

+ The trailer for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is so much better than it has a right to be!

https://youtu.be/QWr3mLI8Xl8

Queer Folks

+ This is a really good interview with Ellen Page. Here is an excerpt:

To experience being in love and get to live my life, hold my partner’s hand, bring her to the premiere of the film, go down the red carpet — it’s all these firsts in my life. I’m like, “This is the first time I’m in an out relationship in an airplane!” That might sound so insignificant to a lot of people, but probably not to a lot of people in the LGBT community because they would understand. I can’t tell you how special it is. It’s really extraordinary, and I feel really lucky.

+ Hey, you can read an excerpt from Carrie Brownstein’s new book, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir, in The New Yorker. It’s about her father coming out as gay and it is some gorgeous prose.