'Jessica Jones' Part 3: A.K.A. The End of Everything

One year ago, the Jessica Jones series finale brought the entire Marvel/Netflix Universe to an end. In the  final  part of this retrospective, SJ and Bethany break down the highs (Hellcat!) and lows (#TrishWalkerDeservedBetter) of the third season. We put our backgrounds in criminology and sociology to use, looking at the history of women's anger/violence and why TV just can't seem to  let powerful female characters live (*ahemGoT*). Author Reuben “Tihi” Hayslett returns to weigh in on the show's lasting impact for survivors of abuse. 

TRIGGER WARNING: Some discussion of abuse.
If you need help, please reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline:  

• @ndvh on Twitter
• CALL 1-800-799-7233
• TTY 1-800-787-3224
• chat: thehotline.org

Thank you again to Reuben “Tihi” Hayslett for sharing his story with us. Read his essay, We Don’t Need Another Hero: How Netflix’s Jessica Jones Saved My Life, and his collection of short stories, Dark Corners.

References:
Marvel's Jessica Jones Directed by Krysten Ritter - Netflix behind-the-scenes video
Rachael Taylor Deals with Trish Walker's Inner Demons in Marvel's Jessica Jones - interview

Credits:
Jessica Jones main title written by Sean Callery; cover performed by L'Orchestra Cinematique. Check out more of their awesome covers on Youtube and their album Geek Tunes.
All series clips property of Marvel and ABC Studios.
Logo by Max Badger.

Follow Popculty on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram for all the news and commentary on the underrepresented pop culture you care about!

Chapters

• 0:00 Announcements
• 3:05 The Good: Hellcat!
• 8:44 The Good: Jessica & Trish
• 13:04 Jessica vs. Trish
• 20:56 Sallinger
• 29:41 Malcolm and Jeri
• 33:26 The Bad: Erik is a Literal Tool
• 36:26 WTF: Luke Cage cameo
• 37:41 WTF: The Raft
• 40:56 The Finale that Happened Vs. The Finale We Wanted
• 51:18 A History of Angry Women
• 1:15:01 The Bad: Old Tropes and Harmful Messaging
• 1:17:28 The Bad: R.I.P. Female Friendship
• 1:21:00 Theories: What Happened?
• 1:27:05 Wrap-up: Is Jessica a Hero?
• 1:32:01 Listener Thoughts
• 1:39:21 Want a bonus episode??
• 1:40:01 Credits

Transcript

SJ: 0:14

Welcome back to The Popculty Podcast, where we celebrate women creators and diverse perspectives in pop culture. I'm your host, SJ. And this week we are wrapping up our Jessica Jones series. Again, I sit down with my friend Bethany, a sociologist, to talk about the show through a feminist lens. Last time, we talked about the season one finale and then got into season two a bit. Here, we're going to discuss the final season three and, well, we had a lot of thoughts. Real quick before we dive in, a couple of announcements: We have released our very first bonus episode for patrons of the show, an exclusive interview with Brandon Cole, an accessibility consultant for the new, wildly successful video game, The Last of Us Part 2. He talked to me about convincing the Naughty Dog team to make the most accessible game ever.

Brandon Cole: 1:00

Even if you're not trying to, you can sometimes make an accessibility feature. One of my prime examples was Resident Evil 6, which has a unique movement mechanic that makes most of that game playable by the blind, by accident. So I used that as an example and said, "Hey, accessibility sometimes happens by accident. Imagine what you could do if you intentionally did these things, you know?"

SJ: 1:22

You can listen to the full interview by going to patreon.com/popculty and signing up at any tier. That will unlock access to this and all future bonus episodes of the show. And stay tuned to the regular feed for our upcoming 'The Last of Us Part 2' episode. Becoming a patron is the best way to directly support the show, but I know times are financially tough for a lot of folks right now, so if you enjoy the show, but are unable to give, the second best way to support us is to rate and review the show. You can do that through Apple Podcasts or your pod-catcher of choice. Currently, we only have one review on Apple Podcasts(shout-out to Shubham). Getting a few more would really boost the show's visibility and let people know we're here. I would like to shout out our newest patrons - Patrick, who you heard in episode four, still our most popular episode of the show; Thank you to John as well - Keep those movie and TV reviews coming; And JC - Thank you so much for your support. You too could earn a shout-out on the next episode of The Popculty Podcast. Just click the 'Support the show' link on our show page and become a patron at the Ms. Marvel level or higher. That's just $5 a month that goes directly to keeping the show going and keeping it ad-free, which not many podcasts can say. Just one trigger warning for this episode for some discussion of abuse. And spoiler alert obviously for Jessica Jones season three, but also for the Game of Thrones finale, because I will be drawing some parallels there. Without further ado, here is our final part three of our Jessica Jones debrief. I'm going to switch to my"Filled with Rage" mug, because we're going to be discussing season three.

Bethany: 3:13

[laughs]

SJ: 3:13

[sips] All right. I don't think either of us hated it on the whole...

Bethany: 3:17

No.

SJ: 3:18

Except for really the last episode, would you say?

Bethany: 3:21

Yeah, maybe even the second half of the second to last episode.

SJ: 3:25

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's first talk about maybe what worked for us in season three. There's a lot going on. Like we said, the end of season two really sets up this complicated and evolving dynamic between Jessica and Trish. They start out very much divided, they're not speaking. And Trish is really doing everything she can to redeem herself in Jessica's eyes and to also use her new powers, which she got from Dr. Carl in the last season. She's discovering her powers, she's honing them, she's training, she is putting her body through hell to be the superhero that she has always wanted to be, and to prove herself to Jessica. Now in the comics, Patsy Walker is a character that goes back to the 1940s, but in The Avengers in 1976, she becomes the superhero Hellcat. The show has been dropping these little Hellcat easter eggs since the first season, teasing this origin story, and it finally delivered. Episode two was hands-down one of my favorite episodes. It was actually directed by Krysten Ritter - it's her directorial debut - and she just killed it. Here's a little clip from a Netflix behind-the-scenes video.

Krysten Ritter: 4:32

[to camera operator] Can we try again where we go a little faster? [to viewer] We're following the point of view of Trish, so I get to really delve deeper into her character and her motivation.

Rachael Taylor (Trish): 4:43

[to viewer] I just feel like crazy, crazy lucky that she's the person directing this ep. There is no single person that is as invested in Jessica Jones than Krysten Ritter. No other director knows what it's like to originate a superhero character.

Krysten Ritter: 5:01

[to crew] Cut! We got that.

Eka Darville (Malcolm): 5:02

[to viewer] She's an actor, first and foremost. So she gets it in such an intimate way that directors just don't. She's uniquely qualified because she understands the flow of the show and cares more than anyone else. And her enthusiasm is infectious.

Krysten Ritter: 5:20

[to crew] Cut, check, nailed it! [to viewer] These are my people, so getting to collaborate with this crew and cast that I love so much in this new way was really exciting.

SJ: 5:30

This episode works really well for a number of reasons, but one of them is this POV split. You've got episode one telling the events of the story from Jessica's perspective, as always, and then episode two tells those same events but now from Trish's perspective. That's such a clever thing to do, because on the one hand, it's the perfect way, technically, to convey the rift that has developed between these two characters, while also introducing a complicating subjectivity to the narrative.

Bethany: 6:00

Yeah, so I loved the character development with Trish. I think it needed to happen. And I think because she finally gets these powers at the end of the second season, the way that it develops is so organic. Because prior to her getting these powers, she's taking self defense classes, she's kind of a workaholic, she's extremely determined, she's (like I said earlier) very uptight and on top of things. And then she gets these powers that she's been resentful of that, she's been jealous of, that she's wanted, but then also sort of hated in some ways too, or at least has made seem bad in some ways at times with Jessica, right? And then she gets them herself, and it makes sense to me that she's under an overpass, running up walls, that she's training, but she's still in her fitness gear, so she still looks like Trish (even though she looks a bit more tired or a little more strung out that season). I was there for that. That needed to happen.

SJ: 7:00

Totally. I also love that it's taking the time to show us how someone would become a hero. Jessica didn't have that. We didn't go through that with her, because she's... Well, we can get into whether she is actually even a hero, but she doesn't want to be. She's never trained. So to see a character who wants it so badly, she's willing to put her body through this... And you're right - This is something she's been doing since before she had powers. I mean, in season one, she's doing Krav Maga until she gets nosebleeds. We've seen this desperation and desire to be powerful enough to protect the innocent, basically, and to do good in the world. We've seen that since season one. She got a hold of Simpson's pills that one time that kind of jacked her up and made her super aggro...

Bethany: 7:42

She steals his inhaler for a while.

SJ: 7:44

Right, exactly, in season two she steals his inhaler, so she's willing to become an addict again, just to get some semblance of power. And then this season, she finally has the powers, and she is just going all in. So it was just a matter of time, but it was also just really fun to watch her do the work.

Bethany: 8:02

I think her break away from Jessica in the third season is really natural too, because she has wanted to be part of these investigations and cases, but prior to having powers, she relied on Jessica to determine what those were going to be and what they looked like, as much as she was doing her own investigations or whatever. But when she gets her own powers, she doesn't have to rely on Jessica anymore, and because they've had this recent falling-out - because we now understand that Trish is capable of murder - she can just go out on her own. So right from the beginning, you know that this season is about Trish going out on her own and being kind of a wild card away from Jessica, at this point.

SJ: 8:43

Yeah. One scene I really loved between the two of them was in the alleyway after Jessica gets stabbed - which we didn't even talk about [laughs]. She gets stabbed in like the second episode, by Sallinger, and loses her spleen. So it actually causes permanent damage to her body that she can't heal from. And the doctors are telling her, "Okay, you cannot drink as much as you always do. You need to take it easy. You need to take medicine. You need to drink water instead of whiskey." Jessica, of course, disregards everything, continues to chug whiskey and keep chasing this case as if her side isn't about to split open. And as a viewer you're like, "Oh my god, stop being so stubborn, Jessica! Please, take care of yourself!" And Trish actually, in like an audience surrogate moment, calls her out on it.

Jessica: 9:31

You found Brant's contact info.

Trish: 9:33

I'm going after him.

Jessica: 9:34

Jesus, are we really doing this shit again?

Trish: 9:37

Oh, you look like death. Just give me the sculpture!

Jessica: 9:40

Just give *me* the phone.

Trish: 9:41

I know this goes against your entire sense of self - That you can be weak and I can be strong.

Jessica: 9:47

Don't hang that self-help bullshit on me.

Trish: 9:50

You know what's bullshit? Getting stabbed because you're caught off-guard, off-task, and probably drunk. You want to be a hero, but you don't walk the walk. How many times have you trained in the past, ever? Better yet, how many bottles have you drained?

Jessica: 10:02

Hand it over, now.

Trish: 10:04

I've spent the past year honing my skills, evolving into the best version of myself. I'm unstoppable. And I have all my organs intact.[yelps, groans]

SJ: 10:18

Okay, yes, Trish kind of deserved to get slapped across the alley at the end there. But you know what? Points were made. I really loved watching their dynamic this season go from that kind of back and forth in the first couple episodes to eventually a real partnership, which starts in that train yard scene in episode five that I mentioned last time.

Trish: 10:39

He's still out there.

Jessica: 10:40

[coughs] Yeah, but I get to breathe. I'm still alive.[pause] Thanks.

Trish: 10:57

[after a silence] I wish...I wish I didn't kill your mom.

Jessica: 11:20

[after a long pause] I wish she wasn't a mass murderer.[police sirens approaching] Oh shit, they're coming. You gotta go.

Trish: 11:34

What about my statement?

Jessica: 11:35

We need your anonymity.

Trish: 11:39

We'll get him.

Jessica: 11:42

Good tagline.[footsteps recede quickly]

SJ: 11:47

And we finally get to see these two teaming up. They are both empowered (literally, they both have powers), their fighting styles and their strengths really complement each other, and you know what, they make a really good team. But at the same time, we have this sinking feeling that this probably can't last. And sure enough, as the season progresses, we see this widening chasm between their ideals that, at the end of the day, just can't be reconciled. The way all that unfolds felt right to me. It felt necessary and organic and kind of inevitable.

Bethany: 12:23

Yeah.

SJ: 12:23

I thought all of that was good, up until a point, right? Until the last few episodes, when it just seems to take a hard right off a steep cliff.

Bethany: 12:31

[laughs] Yes.

SJ: 12:32

So why don't we get into the things that didn't work for us about season three.

Bethany: 12:36

I mean, I totally agree with you that we needed to see Jessica and Trish split apart, because they have always had these conflicting ideas of morality, these conflicting ideas about how they should pursue this vigilante work that they both do, in some capacity(I think Jessica doesn't particularly like doing it or necessarily want to do it). But I was SO disappointed with the last two episodes, the way that they concluded.

SJ: 13:05

So in the second half of the third season, Trish has really embraced her vigilante calling. She's going after decidedly evil people, she's stopping rapists in the act, she goes after a corrupt cop who kills drug dealers in order to take their money. While beating a confession out of him, she goes too far and ends up killing him. That definitely wasn't planned. You can see her shock and disgust with herself when that happens. But she then goes after a wealthy developer guy who burned down his own buildings with people inside to collect the insurance, and again, while beating him up, accidentally kills him. So this starts to become a bit of a pattern for her. But I completely understand where she's coming from. After everything she's been through, after everything she's seen Jessica and the people around her go through, and seeing the failures of the criminal justice system, which is a joke in this Marvel/Netflix universe, especially. The last season of Daredevil really got into this too, where it's like, you can play by the letter of the law, you can get a taped confession - It doesn't matter. These guys will get off and they will continue to do this. So Trish is just so sick of seeing this, and to be honest, I was too. I think a lot of us watching were so frustrated with the lack of justice through legal channels. She's taking things into her own hands, and I really do think she's justified. The show obviously does mostly as well, because characters around her keep saying things like, "I'm glad she maimed that asshole," or "I wish she'd killed him." So everyone around her is voicing their support, but then when she actually goes out and kills these guys, on accident (kind of), people are like, "Oh, she's out of control!" I don't know, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Bethany: 14:53

I think the media outrage at her character is very realistic. The idea of a vigilante woman who's killing men, particularly men in powerful positions - Somebody like that would be vilified in an instant.

SJ: 15:09

Yeah, that's true.

Bethany: 15:10

What I didn't like was the portrayal of Jessica's reaction to it. Because Jessica doesn't give a shit about these people.

SJ: 15:18

Right? Thank you.

Bethany: 15:20

Yes, Jessica doesn't want them to be killed, right? Like, she leaves the season three main villain, Sallinger, on her office floor for the cops to come get because her solution is he's gonna get justice by going to prison (and Trish disagrees with that). But I didn't like how we have this scene where Jessica is almost allies for a second with Sallinger, by protecting him away from Trish. I just didn't see that.

Jessica: 15:49

Trish!

Trish: 15:50

Walk away Jess.

Jessica: 15:51

Are you really gonna do this here?

Trish: 15:53

You're trying to save him?

Jessica: 15:54

Trying to save *you*.

Trish: 15:55

Don't. [sounds of struggle]

SJ: 16:04

So here the show is trying to say it's not really about saving Sallinger, it's about saving Trish from herself.

Bethany: 16:11

Yeah, I think it's a fair assessment, I just don't know that it was convincing.[Jessica and Sallinger's] interaction with each other seemed too friendly in the elevator. Jess and Trish became so alienated from each other in this really bizarre way that felt like Jess and Sallinger, at one point, were on the same side against Trish.

SJ: 16:28

Hmm.

Bethany: 16:29

That, to me, didn't feel convincing. And I think there would have been a way to write it to capture what you said was the real justification of saving Trish through Sallinger. I thought it was weird, though, that they use Sallinger as the character for Jess to have to save Trish from. I almost feel like you could have done that more effectively if it had been Trish against someone who wasn't as evil as Sallinger. Like, literally any other character.

SJ: 16:57

Yeah.

Bethany: 16:57

Then you could see Jess being more defensive of that character and see that Trish had gone so far. I don't really think it's going that far to want to kill somebody who killed your mom and is a mass murderer sociopath. That's not really compelling for me. Like, that wouldn't be an indication where I'm like, "Oh, you've gone too far." I'd be like, "No, that sounds right." [laughs]

SJ: 17:20

[laughs] Yeah, for real.

Jessica: 17:22

So, how did it feel?

Trish: 17:25

Horrible. And necessary.

Jessica: 17:30

Necessary? He was in police custody, about to be locked up.

Trish: 17:33

For how long?

Jessica: 17:34

For life.

Trish: 17:35

[after a pause] I'm sorry, for what this might mean for us. [stands] I have to change. [drily] We're debuting our Spring/Summer Collection.

Jessica: 17:51

You're going to work?

Trish: 17:52

My cover is more important now than ever.

Jessica: 17:55

Why? Because you brutally wiped a man off the face of the earth?

Trish: 17:59

If you don't like my methods, fine. But I know there is part of you that is relieved he's gone.

Jessica: 18:05

Not if it was you that did it.

Trish: 18:06

Who was going to protect the people that he could hurt? You made it perfectly clear it wasn't going to be you. You've forgotten what it's like to feel afraid. The rest of us haven't.

Jessica: 18:19

I have never been more afraid than I am right now. Because I need you to turn yourself in.

Bethany: 18:29

All of a sudden, Jessica's character is not the Jessica that we fell in love with in the first and second and even the beginning of the third season, where she would say,"Eh, fuck him, he's a horrible person. The world is better off without him." I didn't feel like she was just fighting against Trish's morality differences there, it really felt like she was somehow taking issue with these people dying in the first place. And I just don't think that she would really care that much, even if it's not the way that she would choose to do it.

SJ: 18:57

I completely agree. And the show even doubles down on that indignation with that scene with Jeri, where she has the trauma blanket on--

Bethany: 19:05

[laughs] Yes.

SJ: 19:05

--after Trish has gone and killed Sallinger. Jeri Hogarth Is traumatized? By the death of a serial killer who was proba ly going to target her next? re you kidding me? Do you know his character?

Bethany: 19:16

She's not fazed.

SJ: 19:17

She doesn't care. She watched her wife die in front of her.

Bethany: 19:19

Exactly. After being - not stabbed - *sliced* many, many times!

SJ: 19:25

[laughs] I know!

Bethany: 19:25

She only sees[Sallinger] dead in the elevator. She doesn't witness this entire thing happening. She just sees a dead body. We're talking about Jeri Hogarth here- She is ruthless! For all we know, Jeri has killed somebody, maybe with her bare hands. We don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me.

SJ: 19:39

Oh, we've seen her, at the very least, contrive and be an accomplice to, murders before. Like, many times.

Bethany: 19:46

Yeah.

SJ: 19:47

She is stone cold. This show saying, "Even Jeri was shaken by the death of Sallinger"? I'm like, "Noooo."

Bethany: 19:54

Maybe we were supposed to feel shocked that Trish had done this thing, but they were trying to show it through two characters who wouldn't act like that! Hogarth and Jessica would not have been fazed, AND they wouldn't have particularly cared, in my opinion. I think Jessica would have been like,"Oh, that's a shame. I would have loved to see him go through the justice system and know that he's experiencing isolation now away from humanity. That's fine. We didn't need to kill him, because now he's locked up and it doesn't matter, as long as the people who should be safe are safe." Because Jessica's ultimate objective, in my mind, is just to keep the innocent people safe. Trish is the one who has the vengeance and the retaliation. I wasn't buying the sudden change in Hogarth and Jessica in especially the last two episodes, and it was such a disappointment for me. It was such a letdown for these two really badass female characters, who, up to that point, I was like, "You don't give a shit about some of these people. And I love that."

SJ: 20:56

Okay, let's talk a little bit more about Sallinger. What did you think of him as the villain this season?

Bethany: 21:02

I have really mixed feelings about Sallinger. At the beginning of the season, I thought he was a great villain. I believed his character as being really creepy, really evil, this mastermind manipulator. And that was a little bit darker than some of the other stuff we had seen. The tone of his character was different. And then as we've said before, by the end of the season, I wasn't buying his character anymore and his weird interactions with Jessica at the end. I think it could have even been something as easy as having his actor be different too, because he seemed weirdly passive to me in that episode that we're referring to. He almost seemed like a prop for Jessica to have this standoff with Trish. Everything prior to that, we understood Sallinger to hate Jess and hate any super, and be this really evil, awful person. It just wasn't convincing. And that, for me, is one of the things that has actually stuck with me most from the third season as being something that I just did not like.

SJ: 22:03

It was weird to see him go from this very menacing, deeply creepy threat to, like you say, basically a prop. By the end, he's like this ragdoll being passed around between Jessica and the cops. He's such a non-threat and almost a non-character at that point.

Bethany: 22:22

I'm curious if you thought of this with his character, but his justification of hating supers because they didn't work for their abilities, and having this hatred towards them reminded me so much of the narrative we hear in this country about poor people or immigrants.

SJ: 22:38

Oh, interesting.

Bethany: 22:39

And maybe I'm just hearing the similar language, but there's a parallel for me between the two. He has this military background, he has this white male, very privileged-through-education kind of hyper-masculine thing going on. And to me, that kind of fits on top of a lot of that same justification. I don't think you can make the same parallel to say that supers then are the poor people or whatever these other groups are, but there is still a similar kind of class thing happening.

SJ: 23:08

Yeah, for sure. There's a limit to that metaphor, but I can absolutely see it.

Sallinger: 23:14

You were given every advantage, allowed to make mistake after mistake. And just like Donny, you never worked hard or made any effort to improve. It was handed to you.

SJ: 23:29

It does remind me of a lot of the really bitter, older, whiter sections of the country in particular, that are just so angry about everything from letting immigrants into this country to affirmative action.

Bethany: 23:46

It seems sort of in line with the same argument that is made by a lot of people who've become disillusioned because they've bought into this narrative - which, as a sociologist, I say is false - of being able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. The idea that that's actually something you can ever really achieve? We know that's not true because of a lot of different reasons. And it leads a lot of people to have this sense of resentment and hate.

SJ: 24:12

Yeah, that's a good observation. I think that had to be, at least subconsciously, in the writers' heads.

Bethany: 24:17

And I think in superhero stuff, there's always this tension between having superpowers versus just being a superhero. Like, Batman doesn't have the same kind of thing as the X-Men, but there's always this tension where there's some people who want supernatural abilities to just be integrated into society and have no problem, and then there's the people who are scared or hateful or they they want to eradicate them, or have war.

SJ: 24:45

Yes. X-Men is a great example of that.

Bethany: 24:48

Yeah, you see that trope. I think even in X-Men they touch on it almost as being like a racial thing. I don't think that's happening in Jessica Jones as much. But yeah, that's a very similar superhero narrative, this question of, what do you do with people in the world who have these extra abilities?

SJ: 25:03

And superhero narratives and comic books in general have always been such a good vehicle for having discussions about what's going on in the socio-political landscape. If you read interviews with Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, comic book writers of the 60s who were creating characters like X-Men, like Black Panther, like Luke Cage then in the 70s, they were hyper-aware of what was going on in the real world, and they were using comic books as a way to talk about these issues. Superheroes have always been a great metaphor for 'the other' in society - any group that is considered...

Bethany: 25:42

Stigmatized, marginalized...

SJ: 25:43

Yes. The body of literature that has been written on what superheroes represent is vast.

Bethany: 25:50

Yeah, I think it's just another visualization or representation of those things.

SJ: 25:55

The thing I thought was the most interesting about Sallinger as a villain was how different he was from the previous two villains, in that he's just human. He's just a guy, and kind of a schlubby, nondescript guy, to boot. What an interesting choice after we've seen, Kilgrave, a mind-controlling rapist, Alisa, who is super strong. And now we just get this human, garden-variety serial killer. I thought that was an interesting change of pace, to have him not powered. Sometimes his argument struck me as pretty similar to some of the things that Trish is saying in that season too - This whole idea of how Jessica didn't earn her powers and how she's just wasting them... I don't want to equate Trish with Sallinger, because I think the show tries to do that and it does not work at all but there were threads of the same argument.

Bethany: 26:55

I almost wonder if their decision to have him as the villain was partly as a counterbalance to the discussion of powers in the third season, which was so much of the focus when Trish realized that she had these powers. Although I'm still a little bit confused about whether her powers are on the same level or not, because she needed this year to hone them.

SJ: 27:16

Right. They seem...

Bethany: 27:18

She got, like, baby powers? [laughs]

SJ: 27:19

I know! The experiment that Dr. Carl did on her, it's like it *barely* worked.

Bethany: 27:25

Yeah, that's sort of how I feel. And I don't know if they did that so that they could still have this conversation about Jessica deserving her powers or not using them for good and Trish was, or if they just needed to keep Trish being so extra, because she is so much of the time, and it would be consistent with her character to go do all of this training.

SJ: 27:43

[laughs] Yeah.

Bethany: 27:44

Or if they needed it as a medium between Sallinger and Jessica... That's one of the third season things I'm still left kind of not understanding or being very clear on. I do think that having him as this human character, like we've mentioned, brought in this really popular trope in superhero worlds, where there's people who are against supers. So maybe that was part of it. But then I also think another piece was that it provided this platform to talk about what Jessica's powers meant, what it means to be super-powered more broadly, and then how that fits in with her relationship with Trish.

SJ: 28:22

And in regards to what we were talking about earlier, how Sallinger's character kind of fizzles out towards the end, now that I think about it, it's almost like he has to fizzle out so that Trish can take his place as the main season three villain. I feel like that's how the show at least wants us to feel. They present him as the main villain at first, and then as the season goes on, we're supposed to realize that Trisha is "the bad guy," as she says in the last episode.

Bethany: 28:57

Yeah, I think so. And maybe that's why the ending feels sort of weird, is they just didn't execute that switch in a way that felt organic or believable for both characters, for Sallinger and also for Trish. Even though I think Jessica didn't act as true to her character by the end of season three, I think she was actually probably more consistent than some of the other characters. And I think maybe part of that is that they didn't need to do as much of a character arc with her. She didn't go through as much of a transformation as Trish did.

SJ: 29:35

She really doesn't.

Bethany: 29:36

Yeah, no, so they didn't need to really portray that, and maybe it was easier to kind of keep her...

SJ: 29:40

Right. Can we talk about how morally gray Malcolm gets this season, and how much he was pissing me off?

Bethany: 29:49

Yeah.

SJ: 29:50

He AND Jeri. When he starts to go work for Jeri, she clearly rubs off on him real quick because the two of them are doing things that are at best morally gray, and at worst criminal, for at least the whole season, but there are next to no consequences for either of them.

Bethany: 30:07

I mean, Jeri's character... I actually feel like she was pretty consistent up until that last piece we've mentioned, where she's upset outside the courthouse.

SJ: 30:15

Yes. The "trauma blanket moment." [laughs]

Bethany: 30:17

[laughs] Yes. Prior to that, she's always been morally questionable.

SJ: 30:23

For sure.

Bethany: 30:24

Yeah, Malcolm's character is weird. And, you know, to be honest, I'm not sure if I think it's more or less believable the way they had him change. He comes into the show initially not being a character who you know if you can trust or not. He has this troubled background, you get some perspective on how he became the way he did because he was being mind-controlled. And then he's a little bit impressionable, and then he goes through this transformation where he is really, really principled, and you see him as one of these anchors of a moral compass for the show - like, here's where good is. I do feel like they kind of threw that away really easily for him to then become part of Jeri's thing. But I don't know if I felt like it was necessarily inconsistent for him. It was a little annoying. I was kind of annoyed with his character arc in the third season. I wasn't particularly into it. But yeah, not really sure.

SJ: 31:13

What frustrated me about his arc this season was how he seemed to know what he was doing was deeply fucked-up, yet he was continuing to do it. He would just ask for more money to do worse. That's what really got me. I mean, he's protecting these entitled, rich, white kids who are repeat offenders who are injuring and killing people with their negligence. He's working for Jeri, doing her bidding. He and she both are involved in that guy's suicide... Between the two of them, they are doing a whole lot of harm in certainly the first half of season three that I don't think is addressed or given the same weight that Trish's actions are later kind of demonized. Her reasons for what she does always felt so much more sympathetic than any of the reasons that Jeri or Malcolm or even Erik gave for their super sketchy actions. And what pisses me off the most is that all of those characters that I just mentioned get redemption in some way, and all of them more or less get happy endings. Meanwhile, Trish is"unsavable."

Jessica: 32:32

I used to know who you were. Who's next? What if it's someone who's redeemable? What if it's someone who's flat-out innocent? You can't know. You can't stop yourself.

Trish: 32:48

I will stop when it's right.

Jessica: 32:50

You have no control over it. I've seen this before.

Trish: 32:54

I know who I am. It's you who can't see.

Bethany: 32:58

I mean, I guess there's something to be said for Jess saying, "No, making decisions about who lives and dies is where I draw the line." There's something kind of commendable and I think understandable about that. And maybe it's consistent with this idea that everyone deserves - I don't want to say"fair," because we know it's not fair, but - a "fair" trial. But yeah, the way that they condemned Trish, it was not convincing. The way they tried to portray her as being this fully-embodied, evil-turned character...

SJ: 33:26

And one of the ways they tried to do that was through the character of Erik, who you told me is also known as Mindwave in the comics. But his ability is basically to sense evil in other people, and he's introduced at the beginning of the season as kind of a love interest for Jessica. I really cooled on him when it became glaringly apparent that his only function was to serve as a litmus test for Trish's "evil." The whole season, he's around Trish, doesn't get a read on her, doesn't get a read on her. And then all the sudden, she's making him cry blood, like Sallinger did? Are you kidding me??

Bethany: 34:06

Right.

SJ: 34:07

Sallinger, the sociopathic, cold-blooded killer who slices up people for sport, has been doing it for decades, is the equivalent of Trish accidentally killing a couple of really bad dudes? What??

Bethany: 34:23

I'm not entirely convinced it was an accident with Trish--

SJ: 34:26

That's fair.

Bethany: 34:27

--because to be honest, her rage and her training to be the person we ultimately see her become is consistent with somebody who would maybe kill men like that.

SJ: 34:35

Yeah, that's true.

Bethany: 34:36

But it's not sadistic on the same level as Sallinger, who is a premeditated serial killer, who does it for the purpose of torturing these people--

SJ: 34:46

He basically gets off on it.

Bethany: 34:48

Exactly. Trish has albeit maybe a little bit overzealous attitude towards revenge and justice, and her moral compass may be a little bit off from what a lot of people would want to happen--

SJ: 35:00

Maybe not quite true north.[laughs]

Bethany: 35:00

Exactly. And we know that this exists - The jus ice system is not effective, rig t? And she knows that, and she's taken it into her own hands. An it's consistent too with Tris thinking that she can do everyt ing, that she has all the answ rs. But yeah, I actually personally didn't like Erik's c aracter. Honestly, he was extr mely forgettable for me. Like I watched that season two mon hs ago, and I've already kind of forgotten his character, because he was so kind of dull.

SJ: 35:05

No, same. But especially having seen the end and how his use was basically to tell us how evil people were. And really, with proper writing, we should be able to figure that out for ourselves, right? It's just kind of a lazy writing tool in a show that's better than that.

Bethany: 35:45

Yeah, I completely agree with you. I like the comparison to it being a litmus test. I think that's totally right. I also wasn't buying the level of evil that he was reading off of Trish.

SJ: 35:55

He needs to standardize his scale of one to ten, because he was all over the place with that.

Bethany: 36:00

Yeah.

SJ: 36:00

Malcolm's giving him a five at one point? I don't know, it was all over the place.

Bethany: 36:05

Yeah, I agree. I think that character wasn't well thought-out. I always have a big issue with little inconsistencies like that in movies and shows, where it's like, "Wait, you were getting a reading this way, in this situation, but not in this one?" Yeah, I don't know. If you're gonna bring a character like that on, I feel like you have to be really on with how they're going to be picking up on things. And I just wasn't getting that.

SJ: 36:26

Me neither.

Bethany: 36:27

I thought the Luke Cage cameo was a little weird also...? [laughs]

SJ: 36:31

Yes, thank you! When he first showed up, I was like,"Yay, it's Luke Cage! We're gonna actually get one last cameo in this Marvel/Netflix universe!" But then he started talking, and I was like, "Oh, no...This is super contrived."

Bethany: 36:43

It was bad.

SJ: 36:44

It was not good. He basically shows up to convince Jessica to put Trish in The Raft. And he does it by comparing total apples to oranges - If anyone's watched Luke Cage and they know his brother that they're talking about, I mean, it's his half brother who he barely had a relationship with. This guy is bonkers, keeps trying to kill Luke Cage, definitely belongs on The Raft. And Luke is basically like, "I know you can do it to your sister because I did it to my brother." And I'm like, "No?! This isn't similar at all!"

Bethany: 37:13

It was very, very weird. I don't feel like we needed that. I almost think it was like a hats-off to the whole Marvel Universe. They were trying to wrap it up by having this fun little cameo. It was bizarre. [laughs] I don't think it added anything to the show. I thought their reunion with each other was extremely inorganic...

SJ: 37:33

Super awkward.

Bethany: 37:34

Especially given their really weird and complex history that we got in season one, which I was actually really into and I thought was cool.

SJ: 37:41

Yeah. Also, let's talk about The Raft for a minute. In the MCU, this is the highest-security prison on Earth, built to contain the most dangerous super-powered criminals.

Jeri Hogarth: 37:52

And just so we're clear, The Raft is completely remote. No visitors. You would be in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.

SJ: 37:58

It basically sounds like the Guantanamo Bay of the MCU. People go there and they're never seen or heard from again. So the fact that Trish is sent to The Raft? I mean, yes, she technically has superpowers, but let's be honest, she can see in the dark and she's agile. This isn't Scarlet Witch we're talking about. This isn't Doctor Strange, who can bend time and space to his will. This isn't even The Hulk. The Raft seemed like such an extreme thing to do to her. It seems worse than death to me, honestly. Like, I would rather she had died somehow, than for Jessica to have made the choice to send her to this place where they will never see each other again...

Bethany: 38:39

Right.

SJ: 38:40

It just... [sighs] It really, like, hurts me to think about.

Bethany: 38:44

It seems inconsistent for me with Jessica's character too. What she ultimately wants is the people she cares about to be okay. And I think that sending Trish to The Raft obviously isn't that.

SJ: 38:56

Yeah, and it makes even less sense when you consider everything she's done to protect Trish up to this point.

Bethany: 39:02

I mean, in the first season, she saves Trish and snaps a guy's neck without pause.

SJ: 39:09

Exactly! And in episode nine, not two weeks before she sends her to The Raft, she destroys the only evidence that could have put Sallinger behind bars, in order to keep Trish OUT of prison, because she can't imagine life without her!

Jessica: 39:24

You have no idea what he did for you tonight.

Trish: 39:27

All right, what did he do?

Jessica: 39:29

He helped me with the Sallinger situation.

Trish: 39:33

What does that mean?[long silence] Jess, tell me.

Jessica: 39:44

Sallinger wanted me to destroy the evidence that proved he killed Nathan Silva.

Trish: 39:54

[quietly] No...

Jessica: 39:55

It was the only way--

Trish: 39:56

No. No, no, no, no...

Jessica: 39:56

-to protect you.

Trish: 39:58

I told you I didn't care, that I would go to jail! All that matters is nailing Sallinger!

Jessica: 40:04

[softly] Then you and I have very different priorities.

Trish: 40:07

Tell him the deal is off. Tell him that you changed your mind and that the deal is off.

Jessica: 40:13

It's already done.

Trish: 40:14

[tearfully] He tortured and killed her. And he will never pay for it, but he has to pay for somebody's death! Please! [silence] You have just obliterated my only win, in a long, agonizing list of losses!

Jessica: 40:46

I had to make a decision: Destroy him or save you. I choose you, every day!

Bethany: 40:59

To me, the most organic resolution for their two characters would have been they had to split up. I didn't see a way for them to reconcile. I didn't think that they could stay together and work together. It was made pretty clear that they had very different ideas about how those things should happen. But Jessica had a moment at the end of season three where she could have let Trish go. And she could have let Trish travel away and do her vigilante things somewhere else, where it wasn't in Jessica's face, where Jessica wasn't seeing her in danger, so she wasn't having to feel like she was having to throw herself in front of things all the time or save Trish. For me, I would have been so much more satisfied with seeing Jessica let Trish go, and then we see Trish go off into her own. Maybe it leads to potential spin-off in our minds, then it allows Jessica to develop in different ways. Throwing Trish to The Raft just seemed...it seemed weird.

SJ: 41:53

Mm-hmm.

Bethany: 41:54

It was a really big letdown because, to me, Jessica would never have done that.

SJ: 41:58

She really wouldn't have. And that moment you're talking about where she could have let Trish go? Instead, that whole scene in the hangar is one big, contrived, ultimate showdown that makes no sense.

Trish: 42:13

Why can't you just let me go?

Jessica: 42:17

Sallinger. Nussbaumer. Montero.

Trish: 42:23

They won't hurt anyone else.

Jessica: 42:25

No, but you will.

SJ: 42:31

Jessica went there to take Trish down or take her out - which I don't believe. She then basically corners Trish, who fights back defensively, uses her night vision and whatever she can to try to get away. When it's clear that Jessica won't let her get away, Trish STABS Jessica!

Bethany: 42:52

Yeah.

SJ: 42:52

She tries to kill her! When that happened, I, like, dissociated from my body.

Bethany: 42:57

[laughs]

SJ: 42:58

That would NEVER have happened. And then Trish kind of realizes what she's done. In that moment, Jessica takes advantage of her shock, knocks her out, turns around and throws her to The Raft. I don't believe anything about that.

Bethany: 43:13

Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think they, in such a disappointing way, had Trish's character unravel into this really overdone portrayal of a crazy, unhinged woman, right? Like, we've seen this, you know - She's out of control, she's angry...

SJ: 43:30

*ahem Game of Thrones*

Bethany: 43:31

Yeah! And then we're supposed to believe that she would have killed Jessica, and that she's so deranged that that justifies Jessica sending her to The Raft? She never would have killed Jessica. Especially because, in my mind, the reason why Trish becomes such an intense vigilante is because she has such an extreme good moral compass, to the point that it actually ends up sometimes being bad. Killing Jessica is antithesis of that.

SJ: 43:58

It does not fit with her moral code, whether you agree with that moral code or not, it doesn't fit.

Trish: 44:04

When I was seven, my dad still lived at home. We were happy...when he was sober. He never physically hurt me. My mom took all the hits. But she was too proud to call the police. One day, I came home and he was screaming at her, and I heard a thump. I went upstairs and my mom was bleeding. He had hit her head into the wall. And that's when I decided: He had to go. I touched my mom's blood, smeared it all over my face, my t-shirt. And I ran across to the neighbor, Mrs. Levin. And I told her my dad had hit me. My mom never contradicted me. I think it's when she first realized I could act. [laughs drily] My dad was arrested. I never saw him again. Now, what I did was wrong. But it was also right.

Malcolm: 45:51

So the ends justify the means?

Trish: 45:57

If I want it to end.

Malcolm: 45:59

Want what to end?

Trish: 46:02

Evil...I guess.

SJ: 46:07

If you listen to the things that Trish is saying, and you look at her actions, they follow a pattern. She has a very strong sense of justice. She's not crazy. She's not evil. She doesn't kill randomly. So for the show to turn around and just be like, "Welp, bitches be crazy!" No. They did a similar thing with the Game of Thrones finale, which a lot of people were upset about--

Bethany: 46:28

Yes.

SJ: 46:28

--because we've had eight seasons of Danaerys being kind and showing mercy. She's gone around liberating entire cities and freeing slaves. She kills, but she kills rapists and slavers and bad guys.

Bethany: 46:41

But she's also ruthless sometimes.

SJ: 46:43

She can be ruthless, that's true. But then in the second to last episode--

Bethany: 46:47

Yeah.

SJ: 46:47

--she just burns tens of thousands of innocent women and children to death with her dragons? And that show makes this really half-assed explanation of, "Oh, well, she's a Targaryen, she was always going to go mad." This show kind of does the same thing with Trish. There's no real solid justification made. It's a lot of writing contrivances - like bringing in Luke Cage randomly, like turning Erik into a human litmus test - all to try to convince us that Trish has gone off the rails. Sorry, but that's not the character. She's pretty mentally sound in my opinion, whether you agree with her or not.

Bethany: 47:23

Yeah. I mean, the Game of Thrones thing is a whole--

SJ: 47:27

I know, that's a whole other thing. Sorry, I didn't mean to get into that too much.

Bethany: 47:30

No, no, no. I'm glad you did. [both laugh] No, Trish-- Trish is like one of the most put-together people in the series of Jessica Jones, right? Like, she does all this investigative work, she gets all these details, she's always on top of things. I just don't buy that she becomes so unhinged with her powers, that it transforms her in the way that we're supposed to believe, where ultimately she's going to kill Jessica, and what, we're supposed to presume that she just would randomly kill anybody? I mean, I don't think that we could see her become as intense of a character as they're portraying her if it wasn't driven by a really strong sense of something. But then they kind of pretend like that isn't there. To me, it was a major contradiction.

SJ: 48:17

Yeah, and instead, they do this weird thing where they try to suddenly chalk it up to her abusive past, which feels completely regressive for this show, and is something that Jessica would never say to Trish.

Jessica: 48:31

I thought this was because of what Sallinger did to you. [sounds of Trish panting, retreating] Or maybe it was a side-effect of your powers. But it has been there all along. I saw it when you shot my mother. And I can see it now.

Trish: 48:49

You're wrong.

Jessica: 48:51

It's Dorothy who beat this self-righteous resolve into you. You think you're avenging her. You've become her.

Trish: 49:02

Goddammit, stop!! [knife unsheathes]

Bethany: 49:06

I, in my mind, kind of pretend like that ending didn't happen.

SJ: 49:09

Yes!

Bethany: 49:09

And I go with the alternative one that I would have liked, where, in the hangar, Jess lets her go and is just like, "We don't see eye to eye, so I can't be with her anymore."

SJ: 49:19

That's literally where I'm at. I've watched this season three times now, and every single time I get to that scene, I have the same reaction, where my mind just flat-out rejects what I'm seeing. It's so surreal, it's like descending into the uncanny valley. They want us to believe that this is how this would have gone, how these characters would have acted, that this *is* how it ends. And I just cannot, and will not ever, believe that that's how it would have gone. In my head, they have...pretty much what you said, they've kind of parted ways and agreed to disagree, basically.

Bethany: 49:58

I haven't talked to many men about this, and I wonder if maybe they would have a different perspective on this final episode. Because I feel like the people who I've talked to about it have all been female-identifying people, and I think part of the reason it felt so wrong is because it violated this very intimate, close female friendship in a way that didn't make for a good TV show, it didn't make for a good plot finish. We didn't want that kind of resolution.

SJ: 50:25

Yeah.

Bethany: 50:26

I was just really bummed about it. And I was just bummed at the deterioration of Trish's character. You know, we had this person who had been built up in a lot of ways throughout the three seasons, and then they just kind of let her down. And I think it let people down who liked her character, or liked certain qualities of her character.

SJ: 50:43

Yeah, I hear you. And I was really struck by the show's ultimate lack of sympathy for Trish, who is a survivor of child abuse, she's an addict, she's a rape survivor, and it just throws her to the wolves. I just hated that. And there were so many opportunities for them to salvage this character or salvage her relationship with Jessica. There's that other moment when Trish is about to beat up that guy, and his kid walks in, and it seems to really shake her. But then the show just blows right past that. So many opportunities that were missed in favor of driving her character straight off a cliff.

Bethany: 51:18

I almost feel like TV doesn't know what to do with these complex, powerful female characters in a way to resolve their storylines. Because if they start to become vengeful, or they start to become morally questionable, the conclusion is just that they're crazy or unhinged, and now they're this"dangerous woman," and we have to confine them.

SJ: 51:40

Yes. And that actually kind of perfectly brings us back to something that you brought up early in our conversation that I would really love to delve into now, which is women's anger. We talked about Jessica, and a little bit Trish, how they are representations of angry women that we do not often see represented on screen. There seems to be these socially-prescribed, acceptable ways for women to show their emotions, both in real life and in media, and I'm just wondering if you could maybe elaborate on that, as a sociologist.

Bethany: 52:15

Sure. So just kind of in a broad sense, gender has these prescribed gender roles. It's how you portray or how you present the gender that you associate or identify with. And then society says that there are acceptable manifestations of that. And acceptable really can manifest as meaning a lot of things. It can be something as subtle as people giving you verbal feedback, or kind of catching you, to pretty extreme policing of that - literally an actual police thing sometimes, but also in violence. So there's a lot of manifestations of how these norms are controlled in the social world. Anger, traditionally, is not an emotion that has been acceptable for women. When we look back at women, for example, being angry in the mid-century, this was mostly happening with housewives, who were middle or upper-class white women being labeled as "hysterical," because they were actually just angry that they were unhappy with their lives. And we're sort of becoming a little bit more conscientious of that. I think there's two pieces of it. There are the ideals of femininity, which I think are rapidly changing, and presentations of femininity. So it used to mean that you weren't feminine if you were angry. So there's one side of this that's, Are you a woman/female/feminine if you're angry? And is that okay? Is that the way that women should be? And then the other piece of it is, what types of people, specifically what types of woman, are associated with these different things? So not only are we seeing different formations and presentations of gender, right, it's not nearly as much of a binary anymore, we're also seeing this shift in what are considered stereotypically gendered emotions. So we do talk about, I think, in society a lot more about how women are allowed to be angry, how women do have anger, although I do still think that it's a highly stigmatized emotion for women. Historically, anger from women would be labeled as "crazy," for lack of a better word. It was a sign that there was something kind of mentally off. I think now, it's not so much seen as a mental health issue, but it's still seen as being part of this irrational mindset. So male anger is rational, it's reasonable, it's justified. Female anger is overblown, it's reactive, it's too emotional.

SJ: 54:52

It's "blood coming out of her wherever," it's "nasty woman"...

Bethany: 54:56

Exactly. So something I see happening in society these days, at least on social media, is that you do have a much more mainstream dialogue and conversation about women being able to be angry, about anger not having to be just a masculine thing, and about it being rational and needing to be validated. But I also wonder how much of the people saying that end up in an echo chamber with themselves, where some people believe that there is a kind of false liberation from these really harmful gender norms. I think some people believe that society has transcended gender norms. Because if you are following a lot of social media that is very empowering, that is very feminist, or pro-gender equality, you're getting the message that a lot of people are on board with validating women's anger or validating these non-normative presentations of gender. But I don't think that we should undersell just how prevalent and how strong these kind of traditional gender norms still are in society, and how much they really are still embedded in a lot of mainstream television, music, advertisements, and just daily interactions with other people.

SJ: 56:11

What do you think has been the overall pop cultural representation of women's anger? And do you see a shift in that at all, maybe since the #MeToo Movement?

Bethany: 56:22

I do think that you see it more now today. Although I will add that I think there's a huge racial component of this"angry woman," the way that it's policed, and the way that it's really monitored or controlled. That is to say that I think right now the representation of white women being angry is much more acceptable than women of color.

SJ: 56:45

That's a really good point, yeah.

Bethany: 56:47

And that's pretty consistent with historical racist and stereotyped notions of women of color being angry being closer to "wild" and"savage" - these really disparaging views. And I do think that there is still very much a degree of policing, specifically for women of color and anger, although I think that could also be said of anger and people of color in general.

SJ: 57:13

That's a really good point to make, is that this isn't just a gendered double standard. It's also one with a huge racial component. White women, we are becoming much more able to express our anger, but I am still seeing how hard it is for women of color to express any kind of justified outrage and not be afraid of coming off as the "angry black woman." That's the big fear that has been historically kind of thrust upon them.

Bethany: 57:43

Yeah.

SJ: 57:44

And in terms of Jessica Jones, obviously, it's a pretty white show, in terms of the main cast of characters. And the two characters that we have been talking the most about, Jessica and Trish, are two white women. So I just want to preface this mini conversation about female rage by saying that this is pretty specific to the experience of angry white women. And if either of these characters were women of color, I think the story would be vastly different.

Bethany: 58:14

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I think also that they're presented as predominantly heterosexual. I mean, I think that's up for interpretation a little bit, but the representation in the TV show still kind of reads that way, for the most part, especially with Jessica's love interests being very stereotypical presentations of masculinity. So I do think that it's good that we add that disclaimer that we're talking about, you know, heterosexual white women, and acknowledging the fan base for the show. You brought up fear a second ago, and I think that fear is a big piece of how female rage or female anger or female violence(if you want to extend that) is interpreted. In society, if we see white women be angry and even violent, there's not a sense of fear that comes with that, from anyone who it's directed at. I think the fight for a lot of white women is to be validated for the reasons why they're angry.

SJ: 59:13

Mm-hmm.

Bethany: 59:13

Whereas, I think that for women of color, the fear is two-sided. It's kind of like, if you express yourself in our society that's so heavily policed, the threat of violence is so real, what does it look like if you express yourself that way? And that threat just doesn't exist for white women in the same way. And then there's also this representation of women of color who are angry, and especially women who may be violent in any capacity, where that's something we're supposed to be scared of in society. And I don't think that white women are framed in the same negative light as being somehow scary people.

SJ: 59:53

I think you're absolutely right. This show though, Jessica Jones, I feel gets very close to doing that with Trish's is anger. It really demonizes her in the end as this scary, crazy lady, and the way the media reacts to her, which, as you pointed out, is exactly what would happen if we saw this in real life. If there was a woman running around the streets of New York beating up men, there would absolutely be this outrage that we don't see for real-life male vigilantes. [bloop] Just look at the recent events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a 17-year-old white male killed two Black Lives Matter protesters. Conservatives quickly hailed him as a folk hero, and evangelical Christian groups raised over a half million dollars for his bail. And even more recently, the domestic terrorist organization that plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, was downplayed in the media as a "militia" group. And the sitting Sheriff has defended the kidnapping plot as a"possible citizens arrest."[bloop] Police officers even wear t-shirts with the Punisher symbol on them.

Bethany: 1:01:02

Yeah.

SJ: 1:01:03

There is such an embracing of the male vigilante and of male violence and revenge and that sort of thing. But the second we see a female example of that - because let's be honest, Trish is basically a female version of The Punisher. She does many the same things that Frank does, but actually, I would argue she has a much stronger moral code. Frank is willing to kill innocents. So even though she adheres to a stricter moral code, just the very nature of her being a woman automatically casts her as a villain to the public. And the show doesn't do much to refute that.

Bethany: 1:01:40

No, I agree with you. I think they're playing on that same very historical trope of female anger being rooted in some kind of irrationality. We saw this with that horrible ending of Game of Thrones, which we don't need to talk about, but with the Mad Queen, it's this idea where if a woman is too angry, or she's angry for too long, it's some indication of her mental health and her ability to be a rational being that I don't think we ever see with male characters.

SJ: 1:02:14

No. I don't think I've ever seen it. I'm mentally running through the list of male vigilante characters, and it's just never a question. Their mental health is never called into question, and we're never expected to do anything but root for them, by default, because they're the main character, right? Even though they're killing people, it's for "the right reasons," and they're killing bad people. All of those things can be said about Trish, yet the hatred I've seen from some people in the fandom towards her character, and then the way she's treated in the show is so infuriating to me![laughs] It makes *me* even angrier, because I actually see her as a really powerful embodiment of the anger that I have been feeling, and that every woman I know has been feeling since the 2016 election, since the #MeToo Movement, since the Kavanaugh hearings. We needed a character like Trish to express that. I also really felt her frustration with the lack of justice through legal channels. I mentioned that the criminal justice system in the Marvel/Netflix universe is a bit of a joke? Uh, obviously, heavily inspired by the real-life U.S. criminal justice system, which I spent several years studying, and at one point thought I was going to be a lawyer or a judge. As I was getting my degree in that field, the more I saw of it, the more I realized how deeply, fundamentally broken the system is. And I felt so utterly powerless to affect any change in it, that by the time graduation rolled around, I wanted nothing to do with it. Because the reality of its day to day operation, and the way that it disproportionately affects the already most marginalized members of society was soul-crushing to me.

Bethany: 1:04:07

Mm.

SJ: 1:04:07

Seeing real-life villains get away with shit over and over? I mean, I think about how many decades Harvey Weinstein was able to get away with what he did...

Bethany: 1:04:16

Well, our president...[laughs]

SJ: 1:04:18

Right, exactly, the most egregious example. So I see the appeal of fictional characters that take the law into their own hands. I love male vigilantes, I love The Punisher. That's very satisfying too. And I think I love Trish more because she represents a feminized version of that that we really have not seen before. A woman enacting that same violence that we have cheered male characters doing for decades. There's something very different about a white man's outrage over a personal affront versus a woman's outrage at an institution that serves to systematically dehumanize, disbelieve, and re-traumatize her.

Bethany: 1:05:02

Yeah.

SJ: 1:05:03

It's so satisfying to see justice be done through her actions. But then to see her be punished for that in the end? It makes me realize how far we still have to go to get to a point where we, as a society, can validate or even be comfortable with women's anger, real or fictional.

Bethany: 1:05:22

Yeah. I think there's something in the same vein that we're talking about... I think there's also something really interesting about people's reaction to Jessica being angry and violent and Trish being angry and violent, and how different their presentations of femininity are. And I think it is actually fair enough to say what you did that it is a kind of feminized anger, because I don't think anybody was upset with Jess ever being this angry woman...

SJ: 1:05:48

Right.

Bethany: 1:05:48

But she always presented herself from the beginning of the show, as I previously mentioned, a little bit more androgynous. The way she dresses is less classically feminine, and it doesn't adhere to these same types of feminized gender roles. Whereas Trish always did, and she kind of embodied a much more delicate, feminine character. So to see her get angry, it's like, even further from her representation as a woman than it was for Jess. And I wonder if that's partly what upset some people or they had a hard time reconciling was that you can be very traditionally feminine and still be angry and violent.

SJ: 1:06:32

Oh, yeah. No, I think you really hit on something there. I have never seen anyone accuse Jessica of being too angry or too violent. I've actually never really seen anyone hardly criticize Jessica, even though she's definitely not a perfect person (which is one of the things we love about her). People really embrace her flaws, and embrace her expression of anger, but they don't really do that with Trish's. The theory that I have been tossing around, I wonder how much it comes down to where that anger is placed by each of those characters. It strikes me that Jessica has always been someone who has turned her anger inwards, she's directed it at herself. It manifests in her drinking, in her self-isolation. And I see Trish, on the other hand, as someone who refuses to take it out on herself. She's a *former* addict. I think she probably took it out on herself for a long time, and she's so over that. She sees who the actual perpetrators of injustice in society are, and that's where she places her anger. Do you think that that's a fair assessment, this contrast between self-directed anger and a woman who refuses to direct her anger inwards, as society tells us to do?

Bethany: 1:07:58

Yeah...Yeah, so I think that could certainly be part of it. And as you mention it now, it's kind of resounding with me a little bit that yeah, I do think that's a piece of it. Although I do still think that there's this really different embodiment of gender happening.

SJ: 1:08:12

For sure, yeah.

Bethany: 1:08:12

It's probably a combination of the two. Because I think even if Trish were directing it inward, because of her femininity being so different from Jessica's, I think we would even view that as different. I'm trying to imagine if Trish drank as much, for example, as Jessica does, and I don't think we would see that as the same way. I still think we, as viewers, would have the imag that Trish had, you know, "go e off the deep end."

SJ: 1:08:41

Right.

Bethany: 1:08:41

There's something that's more acceptable for the behaviors that Jessica does. I'm partly convinced that it's because she has this "cool factor." And part of this cool factor is being a little bit closer to masculinity. And I hate to say that, but when we think about these classic icons of cool, they're hyper-masculine. And even the idea of being androgynous is actually just masculine. It's not really gender-neutral. It just means a woman being less feminine. And I do think that there's sort of an understanding of seeing Jessica and saying,"Oh, well, she's *that* type of woman or girl, and she can drink like that, and dress like that." That's fine for her to be angry and whatever - You would expect that from a woman in a leather jacket and boots, who's grumpy.

SJ: 1:09:31

[laughs] Yeah.

Bethany: 1:09:32

But you wouldn't expect that from someone like Trish, who's this petite blonde in high heels.

SJ: 1:09:37

I think you're totally right about that, yeah. As soon as you said it, it rang true for me. I think it's gotta be some kind of combination of those two things. And you know, it's just another one of those differences between the two that really highlights their disparate experiences and ultimately, their different fates. Jessica is allowed her anger. She gets to keep that. And she's allowed basically a happy ending. But Trish is not. She is shackled and put away from society forever.

Bethany: 1:10:10

Yeah.

SJ: 1:10:11

Again, I want to kill someone. [laughs]

Bethany: 1:10:14

[laughs] I know. Although, you know, if we want to frame that ending that we hate so much in a sociological light, we could say that that is society ultimately condemning her transformation as being an unacceptable manifestation...?

SJ: 1:10:30

[sighs] True...

Bethany: 1:10:30

I'm-- I'm trying to find the silver lining. [laughs]

SJ: 1:10:32

I know, I know. I've been trying too. Trust me, girl, I've been trying. [both laugh] In a way, you could see it as maybe the show making a commentary on the way that we treat angry women like Trish... She almost seems representative to me of the way that we've treated the fairly few examples we've had of violent women. I'm thinking of Aileen Wuornos, I'm thinking of...

Bethany: 1:11:01

Borden?

SJ: 1:11:02

The woman who cut her husband's dick off... They just made a docu-- Lorena! Lorena Bobbitt.

Bethany: 1:11:08

Yep.

SJ: 1:11:09

The way we have always demonized women that are violent, even when they're acting out of self-defense. And actually, Wuornos and Bobbitt are really good examples of how sexuality, class, and race, respectively, also compound the issue, like you mentioned. So if we're giving the show the benefit of the doubt, I guess we could say that it's commenting on that...

Bethany: 1:11:33

I do think that there's a much more public dialogue about female anger or female rage, female violence, that I think is heading in positive directions towards normalizing that and being more acceptable and having some sort of gender equality with those gender norms. But I don't think that it has necessarily translated yet into differences in things like the criminal justice system, as you mentioned, or even social interactions necessarily. Maybe it's that first step. Because it's certainly more visible, it's being talked about, but I don't think that it has gone too far past that yet.

SJ: 1:12:10

So here you have a show that has more than one very angry woman, and the way that it ultimately classifies Trish as uncontrollable, too violent, unhinged? It's never said any of those things about Jessica, and she's just as angry.

Bethany: 1:12:26

Right.

SJ: 1:12:27

You know, they have that scene - I thought it was probably the last good scene of the series - at the end of Episode 12, where you feel like Jessica has maybe gotten through to Trish. She tells her, "Okay, Sallinger is locked up, he is going to prison for real this time. It's over. You can be done." And Trish is chained to the floor of her apartment, and she looks so tired and defeated, and she's fighting back tears...

Jessica: 1:12:53

This is over. It isn't satisfying, it doesn't take away the pain, it doesn't affect either of us, except that he's done. That's it.

Trish: 1:13:08

[voice almost a whisper, shaking with emotion] But I'm so. Angry.

Jessica: 1:13:15

So am I. That's the burden we have to carry.

Trish: 1:13:27

I'm not sure I can.

Jessica: 1:13:30

Most people can't. They wind up dead or in jail.

Trish: 1:13:42

I never meant to hurt you.

Jessica: 1:13:48

Me neither. [chains fall to floor]

SJ: 1:13:55

I love the acknowledgement here of the anger that both of these characters feel and how hard it is to not let it destroy you, especially when it is so justified. You know, the writer Soraya Chemaly talks about how anger is an incredibly useful emotion, especially for women, because it's what tells us when we're being mistreated. Both Trish and Jessica have been abused and treated unfairly by many, many people in their lives(most recently Salinger). It's understandable that both of them have this deep well of rage. And I like that the show paused to acknowledge that that anger in each of them has a right to exist. The way I felt after watching that scene was, neither of them need to be punished any further, by society or by themselves. There was a real sense of completion and understanding between the characters that really set the stage for healing to now happen. That's why I say I think it would have made a really great finale. But then five minutes later, Trish hunts Sallinger down, in police custody, and kills him. It feels like the writers all of a sudden realized that they had a whole other episode that they needed to fill for their thirteen episode quota, threw everything out the window that they had just established, in order to set up this cliffhanger... I cannot describe how disappointing that was.

Bethany: 1:15:25

We've seen this ending happen before in comic book things. The villain ultimately gets sent away to whatever the equivalent is of The Raft. You know, Magneto gets put somewhere where there's no metal. In Sherlock, Moriarty gets sent to a similar version of this island. I think what happened is they took this ending that is like a comic book ending, and is right for certain comic book villain/hero arcs, and put it on top of this show that it didn't fit. Because Jessica Jones isn't like the typical heroes-- or I guess she's kind of an antihero in some ways. And Trish isn't really a villain, even though she becomes this complicated vigilante at the end. It was like trying to put a... round block through a square hole, or whatever that saying is.[laughs]

SJ: 1:16:17

Yeah.

Bethany: 1:16:17

That's how I felt about it. I felt like they were like,"Oh, we have to conclude this show and just wrap it up, so let's give it this really generic superhero ending that we've seen before with villains." It didn't work for this show, because this show wasn't a generic superhero show.

SJ: 1:16:33

Totally. It's always been different from anything else in the MCU, so for it to just fall into this trope... And the message of it really does not sit well with me. We're left with this feeling of, "Trish was just too broken." People keep talking about how Dorothy just messed her up so bad, she was always going to go crazy - Kind of the same as Daenerys in Game of Thrones. I hate that message, that we can't escape the traumas of our past, or we are what our parents' shortcomings have made us. That's not a helpful message. And it's so not what the show has always stood for. It's always been a super feminist, empowering, really revolutionary show. For them to now turn around in the very last episode and say, "jk, some people are just too broken" - What a depressing, fatalistic message that really has no place in a show that has always been about a woman's ability to overcome.

Bethany: 1:17:28

Right.

SJ: 1:17:29

I came across this interview with Rachael Taylor, who plays Trish, and I keep coming back to this thing she said: "I don't think Trish wants to be powerful to anybody's detriment, certainly not Jessica's. Because I do think one of the core elements of the series and of the first season, and why I wanted to do the project, was the friendship between Trish and Jessica is an anchoring element for the show. It's grounded, it's the one genuinely warm and intact, positive piece of the show. And that was something that Krysten and I really wanted to do - We wanted to keep that friendship as a safe space for the two women, which I think is impressive that it exists there as an element in the show, because it is a dark series. And I think to have that one surviving relationship of humanity is really important." I 100% agree with this, and I feel like the finale is a direct betrayal of everything she just said. Because like you were saying, it doesn't allow their relationship to survive. I mean, they don't have one anymore.

Bethany: 1:18:23

Right.

SJ: 1:18:23

There's not even closure between the two of them. That last scene between them? Okay, talk to me about that, because that was so threadbare to me.

Bethany: 1:18:31

Yes. She sees her at a distance, and we're supposed to, like, reconcile this decision that Jessica Jones had made. And we're supposed to see Trish as completely unsavable... I just wasn't buying it.

SJ: 1:18:45

It felt very lazy to me, obviously unsatisfying. There were no goodbyes, there was no closure at all. And for a show that, as we've been talking about, has been about these two from the beginning, I think we really deserved to have one last conversation, at least, between the two of them, and the show didn't even give us that. Like you said, it's Jessica just watching from a distance, Trish being put on a helicopter to be taken to The Raft, never to be seen again. The performances in that scene are interesting because there is no dialogue. As she's being loaded into the helicopter by police and it's going into the air, Trish is maintaining eye contact with Jessica - She's not looking away. And she has this look on her face that I took to mean... I feel like she was forgiving her for doing this to her? And maybe accepting that this "had to be done" or whatever... That was what I got. What did you see in that scene?

Bethany: 1:19:36

Um...I think we were, like you said, supposed to take away that she was forgiving her in a sense... Or not even forgiving, but sort of saying,"Okay, I acknowledge why you did this." But I also felt like she-- and maybe I was just reading it through the relationship that I had known them to have and that I wanted them to still have-- I felt like there was some betrayal in that look. There was a little bit of a shock that Jessica did that to her.

SJ: 1:20:06

Yeah, I think so too. I think there was a lot in that look that we were supposed to infer somehow, even though the show really wasn't giving us much to work with. And that's why I say it was kind of a lazy move. The actors did what they could with it, but I can't imagine that they were satisfied with how things went down between the two of them, especially with all these things that the actors and creators have said along the way, and just looking back at the last two seasons at the way this relationship has been treated with real kindness and priority over almost any other element in the show - I don't buy that this was The Plan.

Bethany: 1:20:42

I'm so surprised that as many people who were part of this show up to that point finished this episode out like this. I can't believe that Krysten Ritter or somebody wasn't like, "Hey, this is my character, and you've ruined her! And I'm not going to act out this last episode!"

SJ: 1:21:00

Do you have any theories as to what happened with this last episode?

Bethany: 1:21:04

In terms of production?

SJ: 1:21:05

Production, or whatever.

Bethany: 1:21:07

Yeah, so I have no idea what happened with this last episode. I can only imagine that it either had different writers, which I don't know if it did or not - that would be interesting to look into. If it did have different writers, then it's like, okay, that answers that. If it didn't have different writers, I think it was probably some combination of Marvel being cancelled on Netflix across the board with the other shows, and they just needed a quick way to wrap up. Maybe the [production team] didn't have enough time for it, and maybe that's why we saw this really generic superhero ending, because it was like an easy grab. I don't know. I honestly, I would like to have seen what the behind-the-scenes conversations looked like.

SJ: 1:21:53

Oh, me too. I think you might be right about this having something to do with Disney buying Marvel, and then announcing their Disney+ streaming platform. Obviously, they didn't want any competition, they didn't want Marvel shows on any other streaming platforms. So when I pull back and look at it from kind of a bird's eye perspective, and look at the studio political landscape at the time, this was right around the time that they announced Disney+, and this was right around the time where they were canceling all the other Marvel/Netflix shows. Luke Cage was announced it wasn't getting another season. Daredevil and The Punisher had just recently dropped their final seasons, and it was announced they would not be coming back. Iron Fist obviously got canceled first[both laugh] 'cause no one liked it. But they're left with Jessica Jones. It's the one Netflix/Marvel show that is still in production while all these announcements are being made. I think this word was handed down from on high that was basically like, "Wrap it up. We don't care how. It doesn't even have to be good. Just finish it, so that we don't waste money." That would make a whole lot of sense for the turn that it took in the last episode. And it also would explain why there was zero marketing for this final season. I was talking to people weeks after season three had debuted, and they were like, "Wait, there's a season three??" No one knew about it. Two weeks before[it dropped], they announced it for the first time, and only on the Jessica Jones Twitter account. There was no mention from the official Netflix...

Bethany: 1:23:17

Not to mention-- You're not on Instagram, right?

SJ: 1:23:20

I'm not. That's like the last frontier for me. [laughs]

Bethany: 1:23:22

Netflix's Instagram is a joke.

SJ: 1:23:25

It's just like Stranger Things, right?

Bethany: 1:23:27

It's Stranger Things and whatever that Cole Sprouse show is...

SJ: 1:23:31

I don't think I know this... But another presumably male-driven, straight, white show, right?

Bethany: 1:23:36

Exactly. But I only saw[the new season of Jessica Jones] because it popped up because I had 'liked' the previous two seasons on my Netflix account. So when they released the third one, it popped up with 'New episodes available.' And I was like, "Oh wow, okay. This is cool." An I thought maybe I had missed th advertising because of sc ool. But, no, looking back on t, it just wasn't there. I hink our theory is supported by his weird cameo from Luke Cage, ecause they were like, "Your sho isn't going to be con inuing either, so we'll just kin of throw you into Jessica J nes's finale, so that people c n see you one last time."

SJ: 1:24:09

Yeah, it felt like total fanservice.

Bethany: 1:24:11

I was really bummed about Daredevil too.

SJ: 1:24:13

Same.

Bethany: 1:24:13

I'm a big Daredevil fan.

SJ: 1:24:15

Are you?

Bethany: 1:24:15

Yeah. So that was disappointing.

SJ: 1:24:17

I had a lot of issues with the last season of that show as well.

Bethany: 1:24:20

Yeah.

SJ: 1:24:20

I feel like they probably knew on some level as they were finishing up Daredevil, that the writing's on the wall. So I think maybe they weren't as on top of things as they were in previous seasons. And I couldn't finish the second season of The Punisher.

Bethany: 1:24:32

I never watched the Punisher.

SJ: 1:24:34

You know, I thought the first season was actually... I was surprisingly into it. I did not think I would like this ultra-violent male antihero. We've seen enough of them, it's not really my thing. But I thought they actually made it pretty interesting. And then season two is just-- I couldn't get through it. So it was kind of a pattern of diminishing returns for all of these shows. When you look at it that way, it's kind of a miracle that the last season of Jessica Jones held up as well as it did, for as long as it did.

Bethany: 1:25:01

Yeah.

SJ: 1:25:02

I really just one day want to ask Melissa Rosenberg what her original ending for the show was, because I will never in a million years believe that it was this.

Bethany: 1:25:10

No. I think we could have expected - because it had such a strong viewership - I think we could have expected at least another few seasons. Assuming that all the actors wanted to stay on. And obviously, I would have totally been there for that.

SJ: 1:25:22

There was talk of a potential Hellcat spin-off. I would have watched the shit out of that!

Bethany: 1:25:26

Ooh, yeah!

SJ: 1:25:26

That would have been perfect. And season three would have set that up beautifully. Or even if Jessica Jones had continued with another season of figuring out that Jessica/Trish dynamic... I easily could have seen the show going for another few seasons. And it's really a shame that we're not going to get that, just because of money changing hands and Disney buying up everything in existence.

Bethany: 1:25:47

Not that Netflix is a mom and pop movie store or anything--

SJ: 1:25:51

[both laugh] Right.

Bethany: 1:25:50

But I completely agree with you. You know, Disney, you already own everything. Do you have to take Marvel?

SJ: 1:25:52

Ugh, I know. What you and I did a minute ago is we basically wrote a new ending that feels truer to this series that we love. That is essentially what fanfiction does. And I came across this quote from the director of Media Studies at MIT- his name's Henry Jenkins - that I think absolutely nails what we have just talked about, especially as it relates to the broader picture of how this ending might have happened because of larger political forces (i.e. Disney buying Marvel). So he says, "Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk."

Bethany: 1:26:44

Mmm, that's really good. I like that.

SJ: 1:26:46

That, to me, is essentially what we have just done, in a nutshell. And it makes me really fucking sad that we had to do that.

Bethany: 1:26:54

Yeah.

Gillian: 1:26:56

I'm sick of people throwing away friends and family like there's plenty more where that came from. There isn't. Work it out.

SJ: 1:27:10

So I guess just to wrap things up, there's one question that I'm still left mulling over. The show's always asked us, and Jessica has always had this inner dialogue with herself, whether or not she's actually a hero. I'm not really sure the show lands on an answer, which I don't think that it necessarily should. But I'm wondering if you see Jessica as a hero.

Bethany: 1:27:31

That's such a complicated question for me. I don't want to say, "Yes, I do see her as a hero," because I feel like that word is almost too simple for her. She is, in some ways, like an antihero. She is begrudging about the work that she does, but she still continues to do it - One, because she's good at it, but two, because she has a sense of wanting to protect people. She has this good sense of morality. But she's also not driven in the way that we see Trish driven, or that we see other superheroes in DC or Marvel driven. I think if I had to make a hard decision, I would say that Jessica is not a hero in my mind, only because I think she lets down certain qualities that we typically think of [for heroes]. But in some ways, I like her more because of that. And I kind of compare her to Batman in this sense, even though they come from very different worlds and backgrounds. But Batman is kind of a vigilante more than a hero. They both have a slightly iffy moral code, in terms of methods. They're not all just about wranglin' up the bad guys and leaving them for the cops. They're also willing to break the law or be violent. So I want to say she's not a hero, because I think she's very flawed. To me, "hero" almost takes away from some of the things I love so much about her.

SJ: 1:28:49

I think that's a really good way of articulating it, and I feel much the same way. I think she's a little too selfish to be a hero. And I don't say that as a bad thing, because obviously we really love this character and all her flaws and complexity. But the common conception of a hero is someone who makes "the tough choices," right? When no one else can. So if you're going by that definition, honestly, Trish is more of a hero.

Bethany: 1:29:11

Yeah.

Jeri Hogarth: 1:29:12

She wants her sister back.

Trish: 1:29:15

Well, so do I. She doesn't understand what I'm doing because she can't do it. She can't make the ultimate sacrifice.

Jeri Hogarth: 1:29:23

Which is?

Trish: 1:29:26

Everything.

SJ: 1:29:28

She will do whatever it takes, she'll sacrifice her relationship with Jessica - She's willing to go the distance. And Jessica isn't. She destroyed evidence that would have put Sallinger away, in order to protect Trish. I mean, that was an emotional and kind of selfish decision. And I don't begrudge her that at all. It makes me love her even more, but I don't think that's what a bonafide hero would do.

Bethany: 1:29:48

I feel like the word"hero" puts people on a pedestal in a way that implies that there's maybe nothing wrong with them, or they're fully good or something. I wouldn't put her up there like that, you know? Maybe my definition of hero needs to change--

SJ: 1:30:04

Sure, it depends on your definition.

Bethany: 1:30:06

Absolutely. I just don't think that she would care about being a hero or being seen a hero. And I think she even says that at various points.

SJ: 1:30:14

Oh, she does. It's kind of weird that she talks about it so much, especially in the last season, in her voiceover. She's constantly talking about it, but I get the sense that she feels like it's something she should be concerned about, but really isn't. She talks about her mom's definition of a hero: "Giving a shit and doing something about it." She's always measuring herself against that and wondering if she should care, and if she should try, and if she's making her mom proud. I think that's where a lot of that inner dialogue comes from, is just her wanting to make her mom proud, especially now that she's dead.

Bethany: 1:30:44

And she has other characters constantly making her feel guilty or making her feel bad - Trish is the number one in this, who is constantly pushing her to be a hero. But we see this from Malcolm at different points, and even Hogarth. I think she questions it more because the media questions it for her, and because Trish questions it for her, and everyone in her life is sort of saying, "You need to make a decision about what you are and who you are," more than she actually struggles with it. And I think she does to an extent, but I think she struggles more with, 'how do I handle these ways that I feel and things that I want to do?' more than she struggles with 'what is my label?' or 'what is my title?'

SJ: 1:31:24

Yeah, I think that's spot-on. Personally, I don't really care too much if she's a hero or not, because at the end of the day, the choices she makes make her very human. And for me, that's what's so compelling about her.

Bethany: 1:31:37

Yeah.

SJ: 1:31:38

Well, this has been awesome. This project has been... In some way, shape, or form, it's been a goal of mine for a long time to have these conversations about this show. So thank you so much for all your time and perspective on this.

Bethany: 1:31:53

Thanks for letting me do this with you!

SJ: 1:31:55

Oh, yeah! It was really fun talking to you.

Bethany: 1:31:57

Yeah, you too.

SJ: 1:31:58

Thank you, Bethany.

Bethany: 1:31:59

Of course!

SJ: 1:32:00

Take care.

Bethany: 1:32:00

Bye.

SJ: 1:32:01

Even with a disappointing finale, Jessica Jones still gave us life for 38 out of 39 episodes. We've spent the last few hours talking about how much the show has meant to us, and the impacts we've seen it have on culture already. That's not going to change. So to close out this series, I wanted to hear from some of you again. Kristin from Seattle had some thoughts on Jessica as a hero, and another aspect of the show she found really interesting, which was each character's pursuit of love and happiness. She writes,"The series most hostile character, Jeri Hogarth, uses an idea of love as a means to gain power, and in the end, all she really wants is to help the person she loves most in the world. Dorothy Walker uses the love of her daughter to gain fame and success, exploiting Trish in the process. Alisa's love of her daughter keeps her fighting for Jessica's time, even though it puts both of them in danger. Trish is a lover of humanity, and sees it as her duty to seek justice in the world. Ultimately, for most of the main characters, their pursuit leads them to either death (in the case of Jessica and Trish's moms), imprisonment(in the case of Trish), or dying alone (which seems the fate for Jeri after the series finale, and possibly Malcolm too, who sabotages his relationships). Jessica, however, intent on a life of solitude can't seem to escape those who love her. She gives in sometimes, like with her mother, but in the end, explicitly shown in the series finale, her life of heroism takes over. She sends the person she loves the most to a life of exile, in order to protect humanity. Though the finale has proven controversial, it showcases what Jessica does best. She becomes a hero, despite her own feelings, and she takes charge of her life - something she's struggled with since Kilgrave." Thank you for writing in, Kristin. I really love those observations. We also heard again from Reuben "Tihi" Hayslett, who shared his essay on Jessica Jones with us in Part Two.

Reuben Hayslett: 1:33:51

I wrote that article almost as soon as I finished watching season one, because it was so illuminating. This show made me realize that I was just coping, and that there might not be anything wrong with coping. It made me realize that we can grow past trauma, that we don't always have to be the traumatic events that happened to us, but that in a way, the trauma does make us stronger. I feel like in the years since Jessica Jones, I've been trying to grapple with this idea of whether or not I'm stronger because I've gone through abuse. I like to think now I'm, you know, maybe more enlightened, that the trauma I experienced in my first relationship is much more a reflection of the person I was in a relationship with than it was anything about me. No one deserves abuse. No one deserves trauma. And it's incredibly difficult to admit that, even to yourself. And you know, obviously I still struggle with it. One of the things that I wanted to talk about though is, in the years since the show has been on, and now that it's finally cancelled, I've heard a lot of opinions from people that season one of Jessica Jones is where it's at - It's the best, and the show was not as good after season one. And I completely disagree. As much as season one was so illuminating about how I was and wasn't dealing with my trauma, season two and season three gave me this amazing gift of showing that life goes on *after*. Life goes on after Jessica went through the trauma with Kilgrave. She confronted him, she got some amount of closure, and she's not totally healed, which is okay - There's so many of us out here who are not totally healed, and that's fine. But the other important thing was, Jessica Jones still had many more adventures. She had many more lives to save. She had much more purpose beyond this one event. And it's beautiful to see that. It's beautiful to understand that. And it's beautiful to come to know that as much as I admire Jessica Jones, as much as I still drink(although I drink a lot less these days, I still drink just like Jessica drinks), I still feel like we're somewhat the same as a person. Except for now what's different is I'm beginning to understand what the after-abuse life is. Sometimes it's still traumatic. Sometimes you're still injured, sometimes you're scarred. Sometimes you get closure. Sometimes you meet new people, sometimes the people in your life change. Sometimes life happens and life will continue to happen. We don't see a lot of stories like this. In media in general, we don't see a lot of stories that confront, in a real, intimate way, what abuse looks like. And I feel like we see almost no stories in our mainstream media about how you put your life back together, how you continue living your life, what the next chapters are, after that really ugly chapter. And it's so helpful. It's so inspiring. In the days and weeks after my abuser's last attack, I had really difficult times trying to imagine any sort of future for myself. There have been periods of my life where the future is so unknowable, so impossible. And then other times where you feel like you have a plan. But trying to build that out, we don't get these role models. We're never going to get another Jessica Jones who can show us what things are like - And not the rose-colored glasses, 'you're gonna be a hero', 'you're gonna stop the bad guy every single time' version, but the real and noble life of, 'You're going to meet more people, you're going to have new experiences. Your past experiences will inform these new experiences. You're going to have new adventures. There are going to be other important things that you have to deal with, in, around, and outside of, that abuse that you suffered.' And that was an excellent gift that I don't think any show on TV has ever really given me. So thank you. Thank you for this opportunity, and thank you for sharing my story. And thank you for celebrating this story of Jessica Jones. It's really important, and you know, some people are gonna forget, but I am never gonna forget this show.

SJ: 1:38:50

I'm with you, Reuben. I really appreciate you sharing your story with us and being a part of this series. Thanks so much for joining us for this Jessica Jones debrief. This has been a passion project of mine for a long time and I'm just so happy that it is out there in the world. I'd love to know your thoughts on the finale - What did *you* think of that ending? Tweet at me, @popculty, follow the blog for more visual content at popculty.blog. And update, I am now on Instagram! So you can follow me there @thepopculty. And hey, if you are sad that this series is ending, I have good news for you! There is a bonus episode that will be coming out later this month for patrons of the show. In it, we discussed a recently-unveiled interview with Melissa Rosenberg about the last season of the show, and shall we say, it was surprising. [to Bethany] I read it, you read it. Um, I'm still reeling a little bit from the things that were said. [laughs]

Bethany: 1:39:47

I was shocked! [laughs]

SJ: 1:39:48

[to listener] To hear the rest of that conversation and some outtakes from this series, go to patreon.com/popculty, or click the 'Support the show' link in your podcast app and support the show for as little as $2 a month. Many thanks to all of our patrons, especially our high-tier supporters - Charles, Mary, Ken, Suzy, and our mysterious "Patranon". Thank you to Reuben, Kristin, and everyone who wrote, called, and tweeted in their thoughts for these episodes. Huge thanks again also to the very talented and generous folks at L'orchestra Cinematique, for letting us use their fantastic Jessica Jones main theme cover in all of these episodes. You should check out all their other amazing covers on their YouTube channel and their album Geek Tunes. The show is produced and edited by yours truly, SJ Palm. Cover art by Max Badger. All clips used in this episode are property of Marvel and ABC Studios, and are used herein under the Fair Use Clause of Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Until next time - Stay critical, support women directors, and demand representation.