Do as Jessica says and start at the beginning, as we kick off our binge of Season 2 of Marvel and Netflix’s crime thriller.
Month: March 2018
The Strangers: Prey at Night Is a Solid Horror Sequel
The Strangers: Prey at Night is a taut, scary, and thankfully less dour sequel than the 2008 original.
The Best 4K Streaming Box
Reasonably-priced 4K streaming boxes have finally arrived – here’s our picks for the very best!
Win a PS4 Pro or an Xbox One X With Justice League!
Be like the Flash and enter now for your chance to win a Justice League prize pack and a console!
AFL Clubs Recognise That Esports Are Sports – Why Hasn’t Everyone?
“This should not be an Olympic sport because it is not a sport,” declared Shelly Horton on Channel 9’s Weekend Today earlier this week. In the news ticker the title of the discussion said “Revenge of the Nerds?” in all caps. Peter Stefanovic put up a robust defense of competitive gaming, but it was moot. Shelly had a catchy way to dismiss the concept of esports as a sport.
“You need a little bit of huffy puffy,” she said. “The only thing moving are thumbs, that is not a sport.”
Should video games be an Olympic sport? Professional video gaming or “E-Sports” is already a $1.5 billion industry but it’s predicted to grow by 50% in two years. What are your thoughts? #9Today pic.twitter.com/078r9I8DcM
The Strangers: Prey at Night Review
Back in 2008, when Bryan Bertino’s original The Strangers was released, horror was still in the midst of a wave of dank, hopeless nihilism. Throughout the 2000s – the time of so-called “torture porn” – protagonists in horror movies were frequently made to suffer deeply, often randomly and at the hands of cruel, faceless sadists whose cold bloodlust could never be properly sated. The ultimate dark purpose of the trio of masked home invaders in The Strangers was summed up in that film’s tagline: “Because you were home.”
That same trio of masked assailants have now returned for Johannes Roberts’ decade-later follow-up The Strangers: Prey at Night — a taut, scary, and thankfully less dour sequel which focuses more on emotionally cathartic John Carpenter-like cinematic style, and much less on the mechanics of pain and the inevitability of moral emptiness. The thematic shift from a general pessimism to frightening, death-twinged thrills is a welcome step up.
Marvel’s Jessica Jones: Season 2 Review In Progress
Jessica Jones Season 2 is now live on Netflix, and IGN will be binging and reviewing the new episodes right along with you. Bookmark this hub page and keep checking back for our take on each new installment of Marvel’s superpowered crime thriller. We’ll update this page with the full scored season review once we finish our binge.
Jessica Jones Season 2: Episode 1 – “Start at the Beginning” Review (Spoiler Free) – COMPLETED
Jessica Jones Season 2: Episode 2 – “Freak Accident” Review – COMPLETED
Jessica Jones Episode 204: “God Help the Hobo” Review
This review contains spoilers for Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2, episode 4, titled “God Help the Hobo.” To see where we left off, check out our review of Season 2, episode 3, and follow along with our full season binge here.
This episode reminds me of Daredevil Season 2, episode 3, “New York’s Finest,” in which the Frank Castle chains Matt Murdock up on a roof and proceeds to have an ideological debate with him for almost the entire hour.
Jessica Jones Season 2: Episode 5 – “The Octopus” Review – IGN
“Your paranoia is exhausting.”
This review contains spoilers for Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2, episode 5, titled “The Octopus.” To see where we left off, check out our review of Season 2, episode 4 and follow along with our full season binge here.
Jessica might think that she and super-powered Janet McTeer are the only monsters in town, but she should probably be keeping a closer eye on both Trish and Jeri, who are reacting to their growing sense of helplessness by taking increasingly dangerous risks.
Jeri has offered to shelter Inez Green from the mystery killer not out of the goodness of her heart (duh), but because she’s curious about IGH’s gene-editing therapy, which she’s clearly hoping might offer a cure for her ALS. As far as reckless decisions go, it’s probably not even the most questionable one Jeri has made over the past two seasons, but she’s smart enough to know, even without being privy to all the specifics of Jessica’s case, that it’s a dubious plan, otherwise she wouldn’t have hidden it from Jess.
And Trish might insist that she wants to be Griffin rather than be with him, but she’s behaving a lot more like Will Simpson this season, rebounding from her aborted engagement by juicing herself back up with her ex’s performance-enhancing inhaler, because a “recovering” addict is still an addict.
On the plus: Griffin is a good guy! His sleuthing around on Trish’s computer was all because he needed to find her contacts for a surprise proposal, aww! On the minus: That didn’t stop Trish from breaking up with him. Her career ambitions are valid (and it’s noble that she wants to end things now rather than stringing Griffin along), but she’s pursuing them in exactly the wrong way — no one’s going to take her seriously as a journalist if her investigative skills are just Hulking out and knocking people unconscious.
“The Octopus” is the first episode that really seems to buckle under the season’s glacial pace — with all of our main ensemble separated and following their own story threads (including Jessica playing therapist to gentle IGH janitor David Kawecki), it lacks both the playful character dynamics and the bursts of action that have livened up other slow episodes. With the true antagonist of the season still unclear, you can feel the series starting to meander.
Exit Theatre Mode
In true Netflix fashion, “The Octopus” ends on a cliffhanger that necessitates a continued binge, as Jessica finally tracks down her mystery woman and another apparent IGH stooge, “Dr. Karl,” but since this is the last of the episodes given to critics in advance, let’s hope that the remaining eight episodes will heighten that sense of urgency that permeated much of Season 1, rather than once again trying to stretch out 10 episodes’ worth of plot to fill 13 installments.
The Verdict
Jessica Jones doesn’t necessarily need Kilgrave to be compelling, but the show’s methodical approach to unraveling its central mystery is starting to wear thin. All of Marvel’s Netflix shows have been at their best when they have a strong antagonist to counterbalance the hero, and that vacuum in the center of Jessica Jones Season 2 risks pulling everything off kilter. Episode 6 needs to step things up.
Jessica Jones Episode 203: “Sole Survivor” Review
This review contains spoilers for Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2, episode 3, titled “Sole Survivor.” To see where we left off, check out our review of Season 2, episode 2 and follow along with our full season binge here.
Now things are starting to get interesting.
While the first two episodes of Season 2 felt a little unfocused because Jessica didn’t have an antagonist to follow, everything is starting to sharpen in “Sole Survivor,” as Jessica and Trish get one step closer to solving the mysteries of IGH, thanks to a former ER doctor named Leslie Hansen who apparently supplied patients to Kozlov to experiment on (particularly ones that didn’t have any next of kin to notice their absence).