If you’re here I’m assuming you’ve seen Jessica Jones, but if you haven’t, STOP, go watch it and then come back to share your thoughts! Jimmy Kimmel brought it up when talking to Krysten Ritter, when is it okay to say anything about a show that premieres all at once like Netflix does? I gave you a week, now let’s get to it.
When it comes to Netflix, binge-watching is the norm, and that’s exactly what many of us did this past weekend with Jessica Jones. Some of the early reviews of the show put it up on a pedestal, rating it even higher than Daredevil. My guard was already up because the superhero market is saturated enough to keep making more and more shows, especially if there aren’t going to be exciting crossovers within the Cinematic Universe.
It took me four episodes to really get into Jessica Jones, but when it started to become interesting, I was all in, and by the end I’d fallen in love. I wanted to talk about it, hear what people thought about it…
One of the things I enjoy the most about these kind of shows and movies are the easter eggs and sneaky references. Here are a few I caught myself and some others I found while searching around. How many of these did you notice?
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Comic strip sequence.
Jessica Jones’ front door is a character in itself. At the beginning of the show you might remember a man being thrown out of her apartment through it. That was taken straight out of the first comic book in which Jessica Jones appears, Alias #1.
And that’s not the only shot pulled directly from the comics.
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Kilgrave/The Purple Man.
During the first third of the show, the only appearances of the villain, Kilgrave, are in Jessica’s PTSD episodes, whispering creepily in her ear, surrounded by flashes of purple light. Later on, he dresses in purple and ends up having purple veins showing up when he exercises his power, but he isn’t purple from head to toe like his character in the comics. The color is a tying feature around him more than his signature image.
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AKA Hulk and Captain America.
There are a few references, especially toward the beginning of the show to both the events of The Avengers in New York (the city where Daredevil and Jessica Jones work in) and to “the big green dude who’s cruel” and “the Flag-waver”. Later on we see a kid dressed-up as Cap, shield and all, running around. These kind of references would be cooler if they mentioned them by name, but Jones makes a point to distance herself from them, so it makes sense that she doesn’t name them… I guess.
In this same vein, secondary characters refer to people with habilities as “one of them”, meaning one of those rare people like The Avengers, Loki, Inhumans, the mutants they can’t mention, etc.
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It’s Jessica Jones’ BFF!
Since the first stages of development of the show, Melissa Rosenberg had to adapt to the MCU, so as Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel got her own movie, her original role of BFF went to Patsy (or Trish) Walker. She doesn’t have powers, but we see her training and find out how many resources she has to help out Jessica. In the flashback scene where we see Jessica Jones considering the super heroine role, Trish shows her an outfit and names her Jewel. In the comics, that’s an identity Jones adopted briefly.
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Any other P.I.s in the room?
Jessica mentions Angela Del Toro being another private investigator. In the comics, Del Toro is White Tiger, a supporting character in Daredevil. We can guess she could be cast soon, either to appear in Daredevil, Luke Cage or Iron Fist.
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Who the Nuke is that?
Will Simpson might be the shakiest character in Jessica Jones, but the writers really knew how to spice him up towards the end. Dr. Koslov gives him three kinds of pills: red, blue and white, the colors of the US flag, which Simpson/Nuke had painted in his face in the comics.
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Barman, a Luke Cage, please.
When Luke Cage first appears on Jessica Jones he’s wearing his signature golden-yellow t-shirt from the comics, and he also says “Sweet Christmas!” like his character, in later episodes.
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What doesn’t kill you… What?
Corey from Moviepilot caught another very interesting reference in Episode 11. Either Nolan’s The Dark Knight exists in the MCU and Jessica Jones is a huge fan of the Joker, or someone was having some fun playing around with DC quotes in the writer’s room.
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Finally, a Daredevil connection!
In the last episode, Rosario Dawson makes an appearence as Claire Temple, the nurse treating Luke Cage, also commenting that he’s not the first one with habilities she has encountered, because of course that was Matt Murdock AKA Daredevil. We already know we’ll see Claire in Cage’s solo show, along with her mother.
What easter eggs and/or references did I miss? Let me know in the comments.
