*Spoilers for episode 9.*
Just a heads up, I wouldn’t be able to say too much about this episode without discussing what happened in the previous one. After a pivotal episode 9, we’re looking at its fallout here.
Jessica thought she finally got one over on Kilgrave. He was in her custody, imprisoned in a way that he couldn’t compel anyone to do anything without Jessica’s oversight. But at the last, crucial moment, everything went wrong. Now, Kilgrave is in the wind, and the characters are split between those who are trying to scramble together a salvage of the situation and those who are reckoning with their past actions. Jessica has discovered an unexpected ace up her sleeve, but she’s not sure how far she can go in wielding it.
Episodes like “Sin Bin” are the ones that get people buzzing (or at least they did, back in the days when new episodes came out once a week and everyone watched them at the same time—this show came during the early years of the “I’m only up to episode 6, no spoilers!” era.) As such, an episode like “1,000 Cuts” might seem like it doesn’t measure up. It doesn’t match the excitement of Jessica facing off against a caged Kilgrave and his dramatic, last-minute escape. But you can’t keep building the stakes indefinitely. That’s how you wind up with stuff like billions of Daleks in the sky in a Doctor Who season finale—it’s unsustainable. Instead, you need to reel the tension back just a hair.
Not that the episode isn’t tense or action-packed. But rather than an explosion, it’s a series of smaller bursts as characters regroup and try to figure out where they go from here. Trish and Malcolm both work to help in what ways they know how. Between the two, Trish wins this round, as she keeps her eyes on the prize and takes care of some important business while Malcolm makes some guilt-driven rookie mistakes. Meanwhile, Jeri realizes just what Kilgrave is capable of, and an unstable Simpson rejoins the mix as a wildcard presence.
In the middle of it all is Jessica. You have to admire her tenacity. She’s come up against Kilgrave multiple times now with a variety of different plans, and she hasn’t managed to pull out too many decisive wins. But for all that, she keeps wiping off her bloody knuckles and going back in for more. This is a big difference from the Jessica who wanted to run in the first episode. She’s in a tough position here. Although she’s found a small measure of control she can wrest back from Kilgrave, she still knows how much damage he can leave in his wake. In a classic abuser move, he likes to threaten to hurt other people for “look what you made me do” reasons, and so, no matter how Jessica might be able to protect herself, he’s still a dangerous man to tangle with.
Speaking of Kilgrave, David Tennant once again cleans up hard. His scenes with Jeri in the first half of the episode are really good, and there’s a great mid-episode encounter with Jessica. Man, he’s just so reprehensible. It’s very effective, though, to see how confident he is about his assurance that he’s not the villain here. I know they say every villain is really the hero in their mind, but it’s not often that I see an actor pull that off so convincingly. And, as with so many things involving Kilgrave, it’s at once horrifying and pathetic. Horrifying that he can say with complete sincerity that he’s never killed anyone (because he just compels them to kill themselves or one another, after all,) pathetic that he’s so deluded that he thinks, amid his extortion and emotional torment, that he’ll get Jessica to genuinely love this.
Side note: there’s an odd moment in this episode where Kilgrave says, “Well…”, much like the Tenth Doctor does. It’s weird, because Tennant’s inflection in that moment sounds just like the Doctor (albeit with a slightly posher accent,) and yet, I still see/hear nothing but Kilgrave. Good for him.
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