This article contains spoilers for the Daredevil: Born Again Season 2
Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones was the MCU’s first leading lady, getting her own Netflix series back in 2015, and she still remains one of their best live-action characters. For me, Jessica Jones combines all my favorite things—she’s like if Kristen Bell’s Veronica Mars and Eliza Dushku’s Faith from Buffy had a daughter who drank a lot. She’s like the most sarcastic final girl in a horror movie, that just happened to live in a universe with superheroes. I will never not be rooting for Jessica.
After Disney nixed all their gritty Netflix shows, I never thought I’d see my beloved hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, grumpy private investigator again. Hell, I never thought we’d see any of those Netflix MCU characters again until Charlie Cox was suddenly popping up as Daredevil again and then news broke he was getting his own Disney+ show. And then it happened: Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 brought Jessica Jones back on my screen!
Jessica’s return was shown in every promo for the second season and, while the season itself was truly fantastic, I found myself internally screaming, “OKAY BUT WHERE IS JESSICA” constantly. That is, until the show’s sixth episode, when she finally appeared.
The episode opens on her daughter, Danielle (played by twins Isabella and Annabelle Ivlev), playing in the house as her mother absolutely destroys armed men outside their home. As Jessica is busy outside, a detonator of some sort is thrown into the house, which Danielle picks up and plays with—that is until her mother, Jessica, comes in and kindly tells her that’s not a toy and deactivates it without much fanfare. It felt so nice to reconnect with Jessica after 7-ish years away, and have her seemingly being in such a good place.
In the comics, Jessica is married to Luke Cage and they have a daughter named Danielle—who even takes on the mantle of Captain America in an alt reality. I rarely care about straight couples in media—but Jessica and Luke? That’s a couple worth caring about. Luke is the more chill one, while Jessica is the more feisty one. The MCU’s Like Cage, played by Mike Colter, met up with Jessica in the first season of her show and even had a romance that came with some very hot, rough superhero sex, knocking down walls and such. But their romance didn’t last and Luke got his own shown sans Jessica. They didn’t meet again until The Defenders—where Jessica recaps their relationship for Daredevil by saying, “We met. We drank. I shot him in the head.” The two actors are both hot and have such great chemistry as Luke and Jessica—I wanted them to get back together so badly!
And the end of Daredevil: Born Again season 2 gave us that happy ending of them together. The ending confirmed what a lot of folks had assumed—that Danielle was indeed the daughter of Luke and Jessica. Seeing Luke Cage, all handsome in a suit, walk in to see his fam in the (maybe possibly) newly reformed Alias Investigations office made me well up with tears.
From one traumatized fuck-up to another, it’s nice to see Jessica get a happy ending—and without sacrificing who she is as a character. In the Season 2 finale of Daredevil: Born Again, Jessica takes a swig of whiskey before going into battle alongside her devil horned lawyer friend. She still curses, she stills rolls her eyes, and she still wears the same leather jacket—she was not toned down for Disney or because she was now a mom.
Jessica’s story is about managing your trauma—she doesn’t have a moment of “getting better” or “overcoming,” but she does figure out how to manage it. One could say she manages her trauma even better than her angsty pal Matt Murdock. But, she also doesn’t have the fun baggage of Catholic guilt. It’s why her and Matt make for such a fun pair—they’re both severely damaged but in wildly different ways with wildly different reactions to their traumas.
The Jessica we meet back up with all these years later seems more confident and just slightly less of an asshole—which feels like earned character development. Folks can change after nearly a full decade but they usually still maintain who they are throughout said change. In The Defenders, Jessica leaves the group, not wanting to deal with whacky ninja bullshit, but eventually comes back to help after having a come to Jesus moment. In Daredevil: Born Again season 2, she only leaves to protect her daughter but eventually comes back to help when Matt Murdock really needs it the most.
So, to see Jessica able to manage her past, while having a family and still kicking ass when she needs to? That was a nice moment of hope in a world where hope is in short supply.
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