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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