#gregory sallinger

[benwalkerupdates]

2019 jessica jones poster to promote season 3! (okay, not exactly fair to count as proper ben content if you can only see a quarter of his face, so i’ll double up today haha)

[agentsmiths]

Jessica Jones Season 3: A Summary.

[drpepperhateblog]

The new villain is not horrifying in the way Kilgrave was, or in the way Alisa was, he’s a whole new kind of evil, the type who paints himself as a victim. His use of words is very specific. “Female.” “Single white male.” “Feminist.”

Fascinating choice of villain.

[nautical-language]

[macgargan]

I was re-reading my posts from last night, and I really need to emphasize how completely unnecessary Trish and even Jeri’s character arcs were. They could have had the exact same message they wanted to push in the show, murdering vigilantes are bad, and done exactly none of that.

You know what would have been a much more satisfying order of events? Trish and Jessica teaming up, and Trish growing into her own as a hero. They’re chasing after a serial killer, but then it’s revealed that the serial killer is... A vigilante! The common denominator between all of his victims are that they’re criminals!! Except, the most recent ones seem more petty, and it turns out that hey maybe we don’t have the next Punisher on our hands, but a guy who needs some serious help.

It could even make Jeri a more sympathetic character by having her defend Greg, because on the surface he seems like a good guy, but oh no... He’s really not. She was wrong the whole time, and she gets to grow from realizing her mistake. Instead of having her defend an actual proven unrepentant serial killer because exposure.

Lets say you want to still have the arc of Trish struggling with morality. You could have her take on a role similar to Kurt Gerhardt in the comics. She sees his work, is inspired, and wants to do what he does, but better. But, either Jessica stops her before she does or Erik mentions a growing darkness in her that makes her reconsider her actions.

Regardless, all of the bullshit plot points that trashed Trish’s character are the ones that make Greg the interesting and nuanced character he is. There was absolutely no reason for season 3 to go the way it did.

[jbk405]

I’m not done with the whole season yet, but I have to say that Jessica Jones season three took a hard downward turn right about halfway through.

I was initially somewhat happy that Gregory Sallinger was set up as the villain of the season.  He was a bad guy all on his own, with no history or personal involvement with Jessica, and it’s become a problem with all of the MCU TV shows that the villains have obsessions with and vendettas against the heroes themselves.  A nice unconnected serial killer gives us somebody where we don’t need to wallow in how the hero “created” the villain or how they’re Not So Different or get bogged down in “See, superheroes lead to supervillains, they’re just as bad!”

But then the struggle against Sallinger was handled so poorly, with Jessica and Trish sabotaging their own investigation apparently on purpose by removing and hiding evidence.  They continued to blunder about, and when they found new evidence they messed that up by taunting him about it so he could react (At least the show realized that Jessica screwed up by doing this, but that doesn’t undo the damage).  The complete inability of the police to find anything to hold Sallinger for doesn’t work either: Serial killers are a problem in real-life because the authorities either don’t know they’re active or don’t know their identity.  Evidence not being admissible or suppressed by a lawyer is one thing, but for them to not find anything after identifying both him and his victims doesn’t make sense.

The show was trying for a Hannibal Lecter/Dexter/Criminal Minds type of back-and-forth cat-and-mouse between Jessica and Sallinger and it just didn’t work.

Then there’s the sudden turn with Trish after her mother is killed.

First off, I find it very hard to feel bad about Dorothy’s death at all.  She was abusive, manipulative, and she pimped out her own teenage daughter to help her career.  Her entire presence over the first two seasons emphasized that she hadn’t changed in recent years, either.  She still sees Trish as a mealticket and doesn’t feel any guilt over what she did.  And while I might not say she deserves a horrifically torturous death like this, I don’t see tragedy in her death itself.

And that could have still worked in the episode, the death of Jessica’s mother in season two was extremely powerful even though she was a murderer, but they didn’t frame it anywhere near as well as they did with Jessica’s mother.  It was just framed as “it’s sad that Trish’s mother is dead” instead of “Even though Dorothy was a monster and Trish knows she was a horrible person she was still hugely integral to Trish’s life and that can’t be ignored”.

Secondly, by having this be what turns Trish ‘evil’ it negates all of the foreshadowing throughout the first half of the season for Trish’s natural descent to villainy.  We had seen her impulsiveness, her entitlement, her need for adulation and respect and glory, and it was clearly leading up to a later conflict towards the climax of the season.  Instead having it be because her mother was brutally murdered it all becomes unconnected.

Especially since her evil actions are so specifically unconnected to the early foreshadowing.  She had previously called the paparazzi on herself to get pictures taken in costume, while now she’s performing these murders in secrecy and making sure not to be discovered instead of having her costumed persona trumpeting them as “This is what evil-doers deserve”.  She targets victims of Erik’s blackmail, one of whom helped Jessica sabotage the case against Sallinger, but she doesn’t go after Sallinger himself right away.

It’s not a well-executed descent into villainy, and it again leads back to The Villain of the season being a personal conflict that Jessica is dealing with.

The whole thing is just...nblegh.

[agentsmiths]

Gregory Salinger in Marvel’s Jessica Jones: Season 3 (2019)

[drpepperhateblog]

I know I’ve said it before, but Sallinger is such a fascinating villain. One of my favorite things about him is that he is powerless. Sure, he outsmarts Jessica and Trish at times, but he can never outmuscle them. The only times where they come close to “winning” over him is when they try to beat him at his own game.

Trish, in a sense, loses when she murders him later on, because she does it by using her powers (and because it’s one of the “point of no return”-situations, I’d argue there are two actually, but more on that later), and solidifies herself as a villain, because Sallinger isn’t able to defend himself.

During their conversation she also does everything to try to instill fear in him, the way everyone else has made her feel afraid through the years. Sallinger is a horrible mass murderer, a monster, but he is right about one thing: Trish kills because it makes her feel powerful, not because of actual justice.