Jessica Jones' second season might be even better than the first

The show's revisionist theory of superheroism deepens

Jessica Jones.
(Image credit: David Giesbrecht/Netflix)

"With great power comes great mental illness," a Jessica Jones character says as he tries to explain how his fear-based abilities have changed him. This is the core of the Marvel show's second season, and the first five episodes drive this pointed, revisionist theory of superheroism home. At a moment when the national conversation about shootings ping-pongs between "mental illness" and a fantasy about "a good guy with a gun," Jessica Jones wonders whether that fantasy isn't actually the illness, and what that might mean.

Sophomore seasons are tricky, and Jessica Jones took almost three years to produce a second season with Krysten Ritter's crusty, alcoholic heroine whose unwanted super-strength has messed her up, possibly beyond repair. Some early reviewers have found the season lacking; they miss the suspense David Tennant's Kilgrave — a formidable villain whose ability to control minds turned the season into a brain-bending exploration of consent — undeniably supplied.

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Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.