"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Relationship Spotlight: Jessica Jones & Matt Murdock (The Defenders)



The team interactions is my favorite part of The Defenders, and I think Matt and Jessica in particular are my absolute favorites.  It’s a dynamic that shouldn’t really work but totally does, and I’m down with any future Marvel Netflix show that wants to find an excuse to have these two share screentime (a few Matt-Jessica-related spoilers.)

Jessica and Matt meet first in the “real world” rather than the superhero world.  At least, at this point, it’s known who Jessica is and what she can do, so when she’s brought into the police station, they know they’re questioning an enhanced person, but Jessica first meets Matt the lawyer, not Daredevil the hero.  There’s a bit of supporting-character crossover to get the stars to align for Matt to show up on the scene as her attorney, and even though he does his job quickly and efficiently to get her out of an undesirable situation, she doesn’t want anything to do with him.  Of course, when she catches him pulling parkour moves in an alley, that’s a different story.

Both are suspicious of what the other isn’t saying, and that leads both to keep an eye (so to speak) on the other, until both wind up in the show’s first unintentional team-up against the Hand.  Due to the circumstances, Matt ends up fighting without his suit (but still trying to be incognito,) and Jessica is the first in the group to twig that he’s really the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.  When Matt wants to pull away, nervous about protecting his secret identity, Jessica is the one who convinces him to stay.

On paper, it seems like the makings of either an odd couple or love/hate dynamic, because despite some deep similarities, they’re pretty different people.  Both are a mess, but Jessica wears hers openly and uses it to keep others at arm’s length while Matt is super-repressed, pretending he has it all together when there’s a darkness in him he can’t always control.  They seem poised to butt heads, and there’s definitely a certain combativeness to their vibe.  Jessica gets in Matt’s face when she thinks he needs to get over himself, gets to know him better by pushing his buttons, and snarks freely at him on all matters, especially his Daredevil suit.  Matt, in turn, gives nearly as good as he gets (nearly – sorry, Matt, but nobody snarks like Jessica.)

When it comes to the work, though, they make a pretty superb team.  It’s noteworthy that, in a superhero show, one of my favorite sequences is completely devoid of action:  it’s the one-two punch of Jessica and Matt investigating the architect together, both playing to their own strengths as they interview his daughter and find important answers to questions about the Hand’s plan.  They’re remarkably in sync, they get good results, and they do so without losing the fun back-and-forth between them.  They kind of just fall into it like they’ve been doing this for a while, and without a lot of fanfare, these two people with very confirmed trust issues find themselves working alongside one another.  (It’s interesting that Jessica and Luke’s past history would lend itself to making them a natural duo and, given the mutual Hand connection, the same would be true of Matt and Danny, but when the dust settles, the most prominent partnerships are definitely Matt-Jessica and Luke-Danny.)  Don’t know when we’ll get to see them together again – if it won’t be until whenever The Defenders comes back or if there will be any guest appearances in the next seasons of Daredevil and/or Jessica Jones – but I’m ready for it.

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