Marvel's Jessica Jones - Season 2 Review

I'm really late to the party with the second season of Marvel's Jessica Jones, but in my defense I was really busy when the season dropped on 8th March (incidentally International Women's Day). Finally though, over Easter weekend I managed to watch the entire season, and to be honest I thoroughly enjoyed it. Perhaps my expectations were much lower than most other peoples', but generally this season has had a "meh" reaction from audiences, criticising it for being overlong and not being as interesting as the first season. In my opinion though, I actually found this to be a slight step-up from last season, despite not having nearly enough David Tennant as Kilgrave.

This second outing for Jessica felt like an actual mystery to me, unlike the first which featured an over-arching narrative that seemed to go absolutely nowhere for most of the season, in part because the show's premise was explained very well in the trailers - which essentially simplified five, maybe six episodes worth of plot, meaning that I was sat around waiting for the story to really begin. With the second season though, the most we really got from the trailers was that it would explore who gave Jessica her powers...other than that, I was going in completely blind, making for an intriguing viewing experience. I spent so much of the first half of the season trying to piece everything together with Jessica, which is really what you want from a detective show.

When the pieces finally fall into place though (and I won't get into spoilers here), the series is then able to take it in an unexpected direction. While many have found the pace of the series to be far too slow, I felt that the latter half of the season was intentionally so, because the season wasn't building up to a grand finale in the same way that other shows - like Daredevil, Iron Fist or The Defenders - have done in the past. Instead, the season maintained its focus on the characters in such a way that didn't feel nearly as contrived as last season. Even Hogarth had a much smaller role this season - which I was very thankful for, even if she still appears way too much for such a one-note character.

There's still a sense that the season could've been eight or ten episodes and been better off for it, but because the season was so unorthodox in its structure I never quite knew where it would go next until very close to the end - and, at that point, I was just compelled to keep watching to see how they'd go about it. In fact, I really, really liked the ending to this season. There's no definitive cliff-hanger as such, but there's character arcs set up in such a way that I'm intrigued to see where the show as a whole goes next. I was worried Jessica herself would end up in the same place she was at the start of the season (after all, her character doesn't change a huge amount over the course of both the first season and The Defenders miniseries), but the writers clearly knew what they wanted to do with her character, giving her (and the season) a nicely bittersweet ending.

Perhaps watching the season over the course of a few days made for more compelling viewing than if I'd watched it more spread-out (as I had with the first season), but I really enjoyed this second season of Jessica Jones. I thought the story was very good and well thought out, I thought the character arcs were all developed very well and I found the season to be really satisfying as a whole - in part because it concluded the leftover story elements from the first season without focusing too much on the elements of that story-line I really didn't like. I don't think Jessica Jones' second season is perfect by any means, but certainly up there with the first seasons of Daredevil and The Punisher respectively, setting the bar quite high for Luke Cage's second outing - which so far sounds pretty great...