Netflix ‘Jessica Jones’ season 1, episode 8 review: Can Jessica turn Kilgrave good?
On the last episode of “Jessica Jones” season 1 we saw Kilgrave confess his love for Jessica, give her a lost diary from her teenage years and bring her back to her childhood home, but is this all enough to make Jessica love him back? He is certainly pulling out all the stops, but it’s impossible to know what his real motivation behind all of this really is since we all know that the man is pure evil.
Kilgrave leads Jessica around her childhood home and shows her that he has set it up exactly as it was when she lived there with her parents. He learns that she is there to get a recorded confession from him about killing Hope’s parents, and while she expected a pretty negative reaction from him when he found out, he lets it pass saying that while he’s not delusional that she came there out of love for him.
After a very awkward dinner between them, Jessica goes upstairs to rest and finds Will there to save the day. He tells her that he’s placed a bomb in the basement and Jessica refuses to let Kilgrave die until Hope is cleared of all charges. She tells Kilgrave about the bomb and uses Will’s cell phone to record her conversations with Kilgrave since he took hers away. Kilgrave takes her act of saving his life as feelings for him and for the first time he has hope.
After having a dream about her family, Jessica wakes up the next day with a new found vigor to play the game and get the confession out of Kilgrave. After learning more about each other, Jessica can’t take anymore and lashes out at him for what he did to her. Kilgrave blames his parents for what he’s become and before Jessica can really dig into him, he pulls out the yellow flash drive that he made her dig up the night she killed Luke’s wife asking her if she wants to see what they did to him. We see that as a child he was put through a battery of tests (from his parents who were scientists) including cerebral spine fluid extraction and he explains that she was not the only person that has been violated and thought that she would understand him better then anyone.
Jessica starts to wonder if the reason he doesn’t know how to use his powers for good is because no one taught him and that maybe she can be the person to do that. She asks Kilgrave to come with her to a home where a husband is holding his family hostage and get him to mind control the husband into letting the family go – to become the hero for once. He saves the wife and children and makes the husband turn himself over to the police.
Afterwards, Kilgrave is on a hero’s high and is trying to talk Jessica into the two of them becoming a dynamic duo to start saving more lives. He plays into her goodwill and guilt saying that without her he will always choose the wrong thing to do, but with her help they can do a lot more good. Jessica realizes that this might actually be true, but it’s such a huge decision… will she do it? After taking a walk to think about it (and talking to Trish) she returns home to Kilgrave with his favorite Chinese food and says that as long as he’s willing to try the hero thing, she’s willing to try it with him – or at least that’s what she tells him. Instead she drugs him, nabs the flash drive and takes off with Kilgrave.
We have been waiting for an episode like this since the show started – a real focus on Jessica and Kilgrave together and as much as we haven’t bought into Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones (we still think she over acts), the chemistry between her and David Tennant on screen is undeniable. Can every episode just be the two of them together?Episode grade: A-
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