In Season 1 of the Marvel series “Jessica Jones,” the titular
character, an alcoholic and unfriendly private investigator with superpowers, tracked down and eventually killed the villain Kilgrave, a
smarmy, effete Brit with mind-control powers. Kilgrave had kidnapped and
repeatedly raped Jessica years before, but, because she was under his
control, she endured it all with a smile. (Literally: one of Kilgrave’s
favorite uses of his power is compelling women to smile.) The nature of
Kilgrave’s mind control raises difficult issues of complicity for his
victims, some of whom have been forced to do terrible things. They know
that they were acting on his will and not on their own, but they don’t
know why their wills weren’t stronger than his. With Kilgrave finally
dead, Jessica (Krysten Ritter) returns to life as a private eye but remains uncertain about how capable she is of being a force for good.
Press coverage of Kilgrave’s exploits has given her a reputation as a
vigilante, willing and able to take on evil men, but she’s uncomfortable
being portrayed as stronger and braver than she really feels. Season 1 ends with her at her desk listening to voice mails from men and women
begging for her help.

The new season of the series, which premièred on Netflix last week, is
even darker. Still tormented by flashbacks and nightmares, Jessica is
making a shaky attempt at building a “new normal,” one in which she has
stability and routine, if not much companionship or sobriety. But when
her best friend and adoptive sister, the journalist and former child
star Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor), discovers that a shadowy
corporation called I.G.H. may have something to do with how Jessica got her
powers, Jessica is drawn into another showdown against a strong
villain. This time it’s a mysterious, superpowered figure who is
murdering anyone who gets too close to uncovering I.G.H.’s secrets.

At first, the second season drags, hampered by rapidly multiplying
subplots that achieve little. An angry rival detective, who tries to poach Jessica to work for his firm, could be
dispensed with entirely, and so could a strange affair between Trish and
Malcolm (Eka Darville), Jessica’s handsome assistant, which seems mostly
like an excuse to show two very good-looking actors in their underwear.
The show suffers, too, from the absence of the charismatic Kilgrave, who
was played by the excellent David Tennant; he provided direction and
moral stakes, and was satisfyingly hateable (imagine a well-read Martin
Shkreli). In its first few episodes, Season 2 is directionless and
distracted. Then Jessica’s mother appears.

Jessica has long thought that her family was dead, killed in the car
crash from which she emerged with her superhuman strength. In this
season, we learn that her mother (Janet McTeer) has been kept alive by
I.G.H. and subjected to an experimental gene therapy that has given her
super strength, like Jessica’s, along with a new face and a vivid,
frightening temper. It is Jessica’s mother who has been murdering those
who get too close to the truth about I.G.H., including one
particularly brutal dismemberment outside of Jessica’s apartment
building. Trish tries to warn Jesssica away, imploring her to avoid her
dangerous mother or else use her powers to kill her, so that others can
be saved. When mother and daughter finally meet, Jessica faces the choice between regaining the family she’s lost and losing the
one she’s created.

Throughout Season 2, Jessica is awed and terrified by her own anger. A
man who finds her professionally threatening tries to ruin her business,
and she throws him through a glass door. This moment and others prompt
horrified self-reflection: Who has she become? She winds up in a
court-mandated anger-management program, which she doesn’t like, either. The
show’s trajectory from Season 1, which was defined by Jessica’s
victimhood and fear, to Season 2, which is defined by her rage, feels
apt for this moment—as does Jessica’s encounter with a powerful movie
executive who preys on teen-age starlets (she punches a hole in his
Tesla)—even though the series wrapped filming in September, before the
first Harvey Weinstein stories broke. It’s not a coincidence that every
episode was directed by a woman, and that most were written or
co-written by women, as well.

It is the relationships between women that provide Season 2’s most spiky
emotional terrain. Jessica understands, but cannot reconcile, that her
mother both loves her and is a murderer; she knows that Trish,
collapsing under the pressure of her investigation into I.G.H., needs
help, but Jessica can’t bear to give it. She defends Trish to her
mother, and then defends her mother to Trish, even as they both make
choices that hurt her. It’s a still-rare sight, in television if not in
life: the image of a complicated woman navigating a morally complicated
situation, complete with conflicting loyalties and competing demands on
her sympathy. When Jessica and her mother come upon a hideous car
wreck—much like the one that killed Jessica’s father and brother—they
leap into action and save the family pinned inside of a flipped sedan,
which had crashed into a chemical truck. It feels like they have come
full circle. But when Jessica’s mother runs to rescue the truck’s
trapped driver, the explosion that follows triggers a glimpse of guilty
relief on Jessica’s face: she hopes that her mother is dead, so that she
can stop wondering whether or not it is O.K. to love her.

The supernatural element in “Jessica Jones” is less central to the
substance of the show than it is a tool to open doors in the plot. (In
fact, the primary way that Jessica uses her super strength seems to be
in yanking open locked doors.) The season’s best scene comes when
Jessica, already scared and uncertain about what she and her mother have
in common, accidentally kills an enemy during a fight. Horrified, she
sits by the body for hours, hugging her knees and weeping. She
hallucinates an image of Kilgrave, her rapist, applauding her. Coming in the wake of
the #MeToo moment, the scene holds a particular resonance. Women are
becoming aware of the power they possess, and some are not entirely
comfortable with it—not certain that they want it; not certain that they
will be able to craft a more just world than what men have been able to; not
certain that they have the strength, heretofore unimaginable, to use
this power for the service of good. As Jessica rocks back and forth
before the body of her victim, it’s easy to see her terror at her own
act as a kind of mourning—a grief for the innocent, passive person that
she once imagined herself to be. That person is dead.