Jessica Jones season 3, episode 4 review: A.K.A Customer Service is Standing By

Jessica Jones and Erik are able to do some good, while Malcolm wrestles with morality on the latest episode of season 3.

Previously, on Jessica Jones, viewers saw the repercussions of Jessica getting stabbed. This episode starts where the last one left off, with Jessica asking Trish Walker the name of the person who Trish was attacking in his apartment. After Jessica gets a name, she kicks Trish out of her room. Within the next ten minutes we find out the damage caused by the stabbing. Jessica Jones doesn’t have a spleen (hence the name of the episode, A.K.A I Have No Spleen).

Jessica eventually tracks down the guy she was looking for and finds out he didn’t stab her. This puts her back to square one. However, Erik comes in to meet Jessica, and she gets something off of him. She realizes that she wasn’t the person the stabber was after, and that Erik was the true target.

Jessica and Erik’s excellent adventure

Jessica picks Erik up off his feet and demands to know why someone would be trying to stab him. She has more than a right to be mad. Jessica lost a spleen because of him. Erik tells her how he was in debt big to some bad people, which isn’t the shocking part. The part that came as a surprise was that Erik has powers. He has a way of knowing what people are evil. He can feel them, and the worse they are, the more severe  his headache gets. He said it’s worse when he feels nothing at all. It’s almost like the person doesn’t feel bad about anything.

Erik and Jessica embark on a journey to get the blackmail money. This excursion leads to some self-reflection on Jessica’s part. After they got the money from the drop, Jessica would go and meet the person. Erik didn’t care. He got the money and it was time to go. That wasn’t enough for Jessica, as she needed to know what they did. This leads to Jessica uncovering some deplorable things about these people and made it a point to expose them. When she asked Erik why didn’t he do something about it, he said he tried, and it didn’t change anything. Despite what Erik said, Jessica continued to do what she thought was right: Making sure the wrongdoers paid for what they had done.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones

Jeri and Malcolm

Jeri is attempting to steal her old girlfriend Kith away from her husband and, after coming up empty on a couple of occasions, she finally decided to open the gate on some dirt Malcolm digs up. Malcolm released proof that Kith’s husband was taking money from their dead daughter’s scholarship foundation and using it on his other girlfriends (Kith and her husband were is an open relationship). And doing so is taking a serious toll on Malcolm’s morality, which he continues to struggle with.

Malcolm is a good person, and he’s transformed so much since season one, all while sticking to his principles. He’s now well off, living with a beautiful woman with a bright future in law, and working on a career of his own. But because he’s been through so much before getting to this good place, he hates seeing people be taken advantage of.  In the season premiere, he had to let an athlete client of Jeri’s get off for drunk driving and hitting a pedestrian. He made the guy sign over the rights to his car, but Malcolm knew this wasn’t the first time it’s happened, and that it wouldn’t be the last.  Malcolm later ramming the athlete’s car and giving him a season-ending injury in the process shows Malcolm intense desire for justice. Let’s see how he responds to everything he did to Kith’s husband and what he’ll do if Jeri asks him to do something worse.

The new villain

This was a great episode. The story between Erik and Jessica leads to the big bad in this season, and it’s someone she can’t merely defeat by punching, not unlike Cottonmouth in Luke Cage. Villains you can beat down are cool, but the cerebral ones are the most difficult to defeat. Jones thought she had him dead to rights in his apartment, but he was one step ahead of her. And he told her this in a completely arrogant and condescending manner. Him calling the cops and sounding panicked was perfect. There was nothing she could do but leave. Even her recording of the conversation was useless. He may not be the villain we wanted, but maybe the one we needed. Not the villain we wanted, but maybe the one we needed.

We’re three episodes into the final season of Jessica Jones, and the show has done a good job with establishing all the characters in a short amount of time. We know who the heroes are and where they stand. We’ve also established what happened between seasons without sacrificing what’s going on now. There’s a new villain that’s dangerous in ways we haven’t seen in this series. We also have a guy (Erik) with a good heart ,who will probably get some kind of redemption in the future. Normally packing this much into one season is a bad idea and things get jumbled. Thankfully, this isn’t the case here,