Another
check in the win column for Marvel friendships.
I liked these two right away, but by the end of season 1, I adored
them. All of Marvel’s superheroes need
friends who can tell them the truth and keep them grounded, and Jessica really needs that. Despite all the craziness going down, Malcolm
definitely fits the bill (spoilers.)
At the
start of the season, Malcolm is glorified background in Jessica’s life, the
comic junkie (by which I mean “humorous drug addict,” not “comic book
enthusiast”) who lives in her building and has a hard time keeping track of
which apartment is his. In the brief,
absurd moments when we see him pop up, Jessica appears to have a surprising
level of tolerance for his blissed-out spaciness – maybe because she knows
she’s not a paragon of stability herself – corralling him where he needs to go
and getting impatient when she doesn’t have time to deal with him, but still,
grading on her social-skills curve, remarkably pleasant.
Things
get real when Jessica makes a devastating pair of discoveries. First, she learns that Malcolm is under
Kilgrave’s thrall and has been spying on her for her superpowered stalker. Horror, anger, revulsion – the whole nine
yards. But she also finds out that
Malcolm isn’t a junkie Kilgrave picked up.
He’s a junkie Kilgrave created;
knowing the effect of his persuasive powers wouldn’t last long enough to keep
Malcolm continually coming back, Kilgrave made him shoot heroin, got him hooked
on it, and has been luring him with more to get him to return for a fresh
whammy. As furious and disgusted as
Jessica is when she discovers that Malcolm is spying on her, it kills her to
learn that Kilgrave wreaked so much damage on someone’s life and body purely to
get to her. She still blames Kilgrave
for what’s been done to Malcolm, of course, but she places a lot of blame on
herself as well, simply for being the reason Kilgrave did it. That feeling of guilt mingles with her
determination not to let Kilgrave destroy everything he touches, and so she
grabs Malcolm and keeps an eye on him while he goes through withdrawal. She doesn’t take the choice of using away
from him, but in her prickly Jessica way, encourages him to make the right one.
From
there on out, Malcolm is Jessica’s guy.
He’s similarly messed-up from his guilt over the whole experience, and
like Jessica, his encounter with Kilgrave has left him beating himself up and
questioning a lot. What he does
know is that Jessica helped bring him back to himself, she plans to take out
Kilgrave, and he doesn’t want her to do it alone. He doesn’t have a lot of skills directly
applicable to superhero work, but he helps in other ways. He smooths things over when Jessica tries to
bulldoze her way into situations. He
gives Jessica the emotional support she says she doesn’t need and tries to help
save her from herself when her plans get really desperate and ill-advised. He only puts up with her crap to a point,
particularly when she pushes people away or when she’s derisive about other
people’s pain. He tries to make her talk
through what she’s going through, because he’s going through it too, and he
does his best to make her see that she can’t take everything on herself –
either the risk or the guilt. Jessica, of course, spends much of the season
not listening, shrugging him off, or snarking at his attempts to get her to
open up, but just the fact that Malcolm is there is a big help to her. Because when she’s finally ready to hear what
he’s saying, he’s got her back.
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