In Which She Has Googled All Of Your Information

Strength of the Cat

by DICK CHENEY

Jessica Jones
creator Melissa Rosenberg

Krysten Ritter's pale face lingers over her computer. She has an ability long sought after among detectives: the ability to use the Google search functionality to dig up information her clients need. It was somewhere around the time that she searched Wikipedia for a list of New York's hospitals, and then printed out a hard copy of this information on her deskjet printer that I began to get somewhat cynical about Jessica Jones.

In other scenes, Ritter is on the receiving end of the penis of Mike Colter, who plays Luke Cage, a man with impenetrable skin. This presumably would lead to chafing during sex, but Ritter never complains or asks him to use a condom. Their child will be a wizard with instant messaging clients.

The bathroom of this hovel was not so well appointed. Where are the damn sconces!

Ritter's detective is deeply afraid of a man named Kilgrave (a bored-looking David Tennant), who manipulates people by telling them what to do. In this way, he is no different from any other man in Ritter's life — although there are precious few of them present on Jessica Jones. Ritter lives in a netherworld of supportive women, whether it is her lesbian boss (Carrie-Ann Moss), her best friend Trish (Rachael Taylor) or her client Hope (Erin Moriarty).

Now this is a reaction to the male gender that I am more comfortable with overall.

You would think that a relationship with an overly controlling man would give Ritter some kind of distrust of all men. She treats the opposite like they are sort of besides the point, informing her lovers that "I won't break" and allowing them to penetrate her from any angle. Sex is a major part of Jessica Jones — at one point she even breaks her own bed from slamming down on a cock. Jessica really enjoys wintercourse, which is a wonderful, refreshing approach on one level but honestly lacks nuance for a character who has been violated and tortured by a past partner.

Every casting director in Hollywood was a huge Deadwood fan.

Rosenberg has a decent handle on Jones' two main relationships, and it is a joy watching her go back and forth with Carrie-Ann Moss, who makes Ritter seem decidedly warm in comparison, and Rachael Taylor, who humanizes Ritter by making her seem like a silly younger sister at times. It is the character of Luke Cage who has already been appointed his own Netflix series, even though Colter is absolutely atrocious to watch and a series based around Taylor's ethereal beauty and martial arts would make a lot more sense.

A gorgeous vision hosting a radio-only show. No.

Taylor's Trish is actually the most fascinating character on the show, because she is afraid of both men and women. Her apartment is a kind of fortress, and when a fan approaches her to ask for an autograph she she knocks him and down and screams, "He grabbed me!"

I think that is what is missing about the character of Jessica Jones. She does drink a lot, and maybe isn't the nicest person at times, but she never makes any mistakes whatsoever, even putting search terms into her computer. We would not need a cast of characters dedicated to making her seem likable and relatable if she had these qualities as part of her intrinsically.

What kind of person has no hobbies except for Donald Rumsfeld?

The series succeeds mainly on the basis of Rosenberg's snappy writing and upbeat pacing. Few scenes in Jessica Jones are longer than a minute or two, and we virtually never lose track of our lead actress, who is something like a super charismatic ghost. She has grown up a lot, but she is not really all there yet.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

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In Which We Go On After It Happens

What She Doesn't Know

by SHELBY SHAW

Red Widow
creator Melissa Rosenberg

ABC’s new series, Red Widow, is the American redo of a Dutch show called Penoza. Aside from this version being shot in well-to-do Northern California and the need to constantly introduce tropes of American family values, the plot remains between the two versions of the show: Marta Walraven (Radha Mitchell) must take over the business of her husband (Anson Mount) after he is murdered.

By “business” it isn’t his work at the marina per se, but the Russian mafia drug-trading he was roped into by marrying Marta in the first place, she a sort-of mafia whose suspicious brother Irwin (Wil Traval) had convinced Evan to join. 

For one thing, Marta seems strangely clueless about anything involving her own family’s trade. Her father is some big mobster who hangs in a dark place called Café Russiya, but apparently he cannot really protect her and her family when she wants to be disconnected.

We never really learn the extent of her father’s power in the mob, or why he isn’t more powerful. If anything, Marta seems like more of an outsider. She doesn’t entirely know what Evan and Irwin are ever doing for business, and she has no idea about the details involving their protection and relations with the cops. She seems to think that if Evan fails to pull them out of the business and she left with their three children, that she would be safe even without a husband. He gently reminds her often that she doesn’t understand, which is painfully evident.

It isn’t clear what Marta does while Evan is at the marina doing business and the kids are at school. At one point, a police officer states that she’s a housewife and I realize that without this statement I may not have known – Marta is always somewhere or at an event, like her sister Kat’s (Jaime Ray Newman) wedding.

But that’s just it – everything moves so quickly, it’s hard to get a grounding on who these people really are. Sure, we get just enough facts to put together a family portrait, and of course we are left in the dark about most things because a series needs to reveal information weekly, but in terms of the characters as real people… there just seems to be something amiss with each of them, something that doesn’t make them fully human or three-dimensional.

Take their youngest child, Boris (Jakob Salvati), who acts as the catalyst for Marta wanting out of the business in the first place. He brings Evan’s gun to school one day in an attempt to defy his bully, and to be honest, the foreshortened camera angle on the cocked and loaded gun is kind of terrifying because I am not ready to see this kind of gore. But after the scene promptly ends with a cut to the principal’s office, followed by Marta warning Evan that she’ll leave him, the entire thing is forgotten and never mentioned again. Nobody seems fazed that Boris almost killed another child, in public at school, or that he even got a hold of Evan’s gun. Nobody seems to be concerned about what Boris is going through, about the bully, or about whether he learned his lesson.

After Evan dies close to the end of the pilot (for a show called Red Widow I wouldn’t consider this to be a spoiler alert), the necessary montage of crying family members at the hospital is a nice slowness that gets you to feel something after nearly 30 minutes of exposition. But again, the next day hardly feels like the father of these children, the husband of this woman, the friend to his coworkers, has not only died (in front of Boris) but was murdered. Wouldn’t you take a break from your life, mafia or not? It’s only when Marta comes home to find the police ransacking their house that she reminds them (and us) that her husband is barely cold, as she puts it. As much as the dialogue is exposition for our sake as third-party viewers, I feel as if the entire episode is composed purely of self-conscious wording, not genuine lines to tell each other but to tell the viewers.

I don’t want to find out what happens to these people. I’m guided by tropes left and right and can’t begin to imagine how any plot-twist might surface (and would it really surprise us?), not to mention the music tells you everything before it even happens. From this sampling of the series, I’ve learned that nobody really knows anything, the family is dysfunctional because they don’t really interact much on screen, and anything that could be considered devastating might very well not even change the characters’ interiors.

Shelby Shaw is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Chicago. You can find her website here. She twitters here and tumbls here.

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