Summary
“A.K.A The Perfect Burger” reintroduces Jessica and her world with the usual tone and attitude, to reasonable success.
Jessica Jones has never liked being a superhero — I think that’s pretty clear. But she has always had a compulsion to help people, so it’s not much of a surprise to see her attempting to do so at the start of the third and final season. The problem is, Jessica doesn’t have much patience. Now she’s a minor celebrity, well-known in New York as being the superpowered, potentially murderous PI with the bad attitude and the drinking problem, helping people isn’t easy. One brief temper tantrum and she’s suddenly viral on the internet. Living up to the “hero” identity is a pain.
She’s not the only one finding things difficult. In fact, virtually everyone is. Jeri Hogarth is gradually succumbing to ALS, and she has some imported death pills for when her dignity starts to erode. But she can’t take them herself. Doesn’t have it in her. She instead asks if Jessica will do it — just slip a couple in her drink when she least expects it, whenever she feels like it’s necessary. The scene is part heartbreaking, part neurotic; Jessica taunts her about it all a little bit, proving that being acerbic isn’t the solution to everything.
Speaking of Hogarth, she now employs Malcolm as an “investigator” whose job is to protect the interests of her rich clients; mostly by shaking down people they hurt or are threatened by. It’s a morally flexible position for a morally inflexible kind of guy. Thus, he’s not all that well-suited to it and starts taking matters into his own hands somewhat, tired of covering for the kind of drunk idiots who make a habit of causing accidents while under the influence.
Trish is missing in “A.K.A The Perfect Burger”; her mother, Dorothy, hires Jessica to look for her. It takes some persuasion, but as we’ll discover throughout this season, Jessica and Trish are pretty inextricably linked. Clues lead to Trish’s new apartment, a step down from her previous one, and basically a hideout where she has been training and learning for some enigmatic purpose — and by enigmatic I actually mean pretty obvious. Now she has powers of her own, she’s turning to vigilantism.
Jessica stakes out Trish staking out someone else; who watches the watchmen and all that. Trish is onto something, but, as far as Jessica is concerned, she’s in over her head, so Jessica intervenes. This goes about as well as you might expect, but it’s early days yet. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Trish isn’t as good at crimefighting as she thought she would be, or that Jessica isn’t particularly good at leaving Trish to do her own thing, either.
I know what you’re thinking: Where is the perfect burger? That comes later. Jessica, true to form, hooks up with a guy in a bar: Eric, a handsome and charming dude who apparently makes the perfect burger. Jessica wants the casual sex first — again, true to form. But a knock at the door interrupts the romance. When she opens it, she’s stabbed by a masked attacker, who promptly flees. “A.K.A The Perfect Burger” ends with her bleeding to death on the floor. Welcome back to Hell’s Kitchen.
