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Jessica Jones, Episode 8: AKA WWJD

“AKA WWJD” is my favorite episode of this series, even though (or maybe because!) it’s mostly just characters chatting. The closest thing to action is a whispered, cautious exchange of punches between Jessica and Simpson, when he’s trying to get in the way of Jessica doing what she wants.

After the events of last week, Jessica has given up: She’s going to live with Kilgrave, in his creepy recreation of her childhood home. Though the house is full of servants and bodyguards who will kill themselves if Jessica attempts to harm Kilgrave, Kilgrave still insists that he wants her to have freedom of choice.

AKA WWJD

Krysten Ritter and David Tennant are spectacular together. Ritter’s playing the hell out of her part (as always), and Tennant does the impossible and makes the viewer genuinely buy into the notion that he’s in love with Jessica, at least to the extent that he understands the concept of love. He’s charismatic and funny, or he would be if everything he’s doing weren’t designed to control Jessica’s behavior. And meanwhile, of course, he lets himself off the hook by never actually magic-compelling her to do anything.

To make matters more interesting, Jessica gets the idea to harness Kilgrave for the power of good, at which point Whiskey Jenny and I exploded with delight1 and tried to sort out if it was okay morally for us to want the rest of the season to just be “Kilgrave and Jessica fight evil.”2 Jessica takes Kilgrave out to the scene of a hostage crisis and walks him through getting everyone, including the hostage taker, out of the house safely. Kilgrave loves it.

AKA WWJD

So then the question becomes, does Jessica have a moral obligation to stay with Kilgrave, to teach him to use his compelling superpower in a way that helps, rather than hurts, people? That she comes to this question after a huge fight with Kilgrave in which he utterly refuses to admit that what he did to her was rape (“Ugh, I hate that word”) makes her dilemma even more impossible.

What’s that? It sounds like this is a problem for Trish Walker? THE DEVIL YOU SAY.

AKA WWJD
Me, any time a Jessica Jones episode doesn’t heavily feature Trish.

In pursuit of an answer to the question “What would Trish do?” Jessica gets permission from Kilgrave to leave the house for a while. She lays the whole dilemma before Trish and asks what Trish would do. “I don’t know,” says Trish. “Yes, you do,” Jessica answers. “You just don’t want me to do it.”

I LOVE THEM SO MUCH.

Ahem, anyway, so Jessica heads back to Kilgrave’s house with Chinese food, knocks out his servants so they can’t hurt themselves, and then gags Kilgrave so she can inject him with sufentanil. “This is what Jessica would do,” she snarls at him while she’s needling him in the neck. I’m going to assume this is a plan she concocted with Trish, because, well, I love it when they concoct plans together.

AKA WWJD
Or hug.

Simpson tries to get her to murder Kilgrave, but SHE WON’T GODDAMN DO IT. Jessica. SERIOUSLY. The collateral damage stacking up behind you not killing Kilgrave is becoming untenable. Get a damn grip and kill him already.

Jessica breaks things: Does tearing things count? If so, the dress Kilgrave buys her, which is purple AF. A wine bottle when she’s having dinner with Kilgrave (I would too, hell).

Perhaps the most restrained Doctor Who reference imaginable: Kilgrave tells Jessica the woeful story of his life, how his parents experimented on him medically throughout his childhood and then abandoned him when he was ten years old; and she says, “You’re not ten anymore.”3

AKA WWJD
in my heart anyway

What are Jeri and Pam up to? Not much. Pam has two separate cleavage-revealing wrap dresses in this episode, and Wendy’s demanding most of Jeri’s assets in the divorce. Oh, and Jeri texts Jessica demanding dirt on Wendy, but Kilgrave has her phone. He texts back, “Bitches, right?” Ahahahaha. I demand the Jeri/Kilgrave spin-off that we all deserve.

Drinking game rules: Drink whenever there’s unnecessary camera close-ups of needles. It’s not that this happens so often in Jessica Jones. It’s just that I hate needles and need compensatory alcohol in order to deal with them.

  1. We love a team-up. We love a team-up so much that it sometimes blinds us to reality.
  2. Probably not.
  3. Did I notice this only on a rewatch and scream “OH MY GOD TEN TEN TEN”? Maybe. I don’t have to tell you all my secrets.