Relationship Spotlight: Jessica Jones & Malcolm Ducasse (Jessica Jones)

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.

Favorite Characters: Malcolm Ducasse (Jessica Jones)

Malcolm!  He, Jessica, and Trish are my Jessica Jones character trifecta – love all three of them for awesomely different reasons.  I liked Malcolm from the first and was thrilled with how his character’s potential expanded (Malcolm-related spoilers.)

Okay, so, on first watch, I was surprised when it comes out that Jessica’s amusing junkie neighbor is under Kilgrave’s control and has been surveilling Jessica at the behest of her disgusting superpowered stalker.  However, I was gobsmacked at the reveal Kilgrave used his powers to make Malcolm take heroin, getting him hooked so he’ll keep coming back for more and Kilgrave can top up his influence over Malcolm.  Even though, by this point, we’ve already seen Kilgrave order people to kill themselves at this point, and we’ve gotten glimpses of the grotesque violation Jessica suffered when she was in his thrall, learning this information hit me hard.  It’s such a horrible thing to do, purely for convenience’s sake, and if I hadn’t already been 100% on-board with Jessica taking out Kilgrave with extreme prejudice (which I was – hard to find too many who need to die as thoroughly as that guy,) this would have done it for me.

Luckily, Jessica’s around, and her deep-down goodness and massive guilt complex mean she’s not about to give Malcolm up as lost.  She gets him away from Kilgrave and helps him find the endurance he needs to get clean, and that’s when we really meet Malcolm.  Not the Malcolm he was before Kilgrave – it’s unlikely he’ll ever completely return to that – but the new Malcolm he now has a chance to become.  One with physical and emotional scars, whose sense of identity has been shaken and who’s been questioning the extent to which he can forge a new path.  Is he forever a product of what Kilgrave made of him?  Can he change?  Even if he couldn’t control himself under Kilgrave’s power, how does he now deal with the guilt of the things Kilgrave made him do?

These are questions that everyone who’s been used by Kilgrave asks, but Malcolm tends to avoid them less than other members of the main cast.  While Malcolm wants to move forward with his life, he knows the only way to do that is by first dealing with where he is right now, and so he asks the agonizing questions and makes conscious choices about how he wants to take back his autonomy.  Before Kilgrave, he was heading toward social work, and after Kilgrave, he puts those sensibilities to good use, trying to help others who’ve been affected work through their confusing emotions about what happened to them.  He doesn’t make too much headway with Jessica, who’s a tough nut to crack, but he doesn’t stop trying to help her, and when Jessica tracks down a number of other people who’ve been victimized by Kilgrave, Malcolm helps facilitate a survivors’ group where they can get together and discuss their experiences.

I really like this last point.  Malcolm becomes fiercely loyal to Jessica, going through a ton on her behalf, but for him, it’s not all running around helping the superhero stop the evil villain.  It’s also about the human element of other ordinary people who’ve been caught in Kilgrave’s wake and discarded when they were no longer useful to him.  Jessica can be so focused on the big picture that she tends to think nothing else matters, and she can get nasty to others as a result.  Malcolm is the one who takes her to task for this, reminding her that the small, individual pictures are important, too, and that, while it’s vital to find a “cure” to their very dangerous problem, the difficult process of healing that follows it can’t be ignored.