1x10 AKA 1,000 Cuts

3.5/10. This was, if you will pardon my french, a shitshow, especially afer how good the last episode was. The plotting was contrived, the acting was off, and the character motivations were haywire.

Let's start with the worst part. Robyn has been an unpleasant character from the moment she's been on our screens. Sure, to some extent that's the point, but it takes any story involving her down a notch from the getgo. She's a very broad character on a show that aims for something approaching naturalism even as it depicts super-strong heroes and mind-controlling villains. While I appreciated Malcom's dliemma (his character has quickly become one of my favorites for his quiet earnestness and strength despite what was done to him), giving Robyn such outsized characteristics and personality quirks just made it hard to have sympathy for her even in what should be a situation filled with pathos for the character.

And my god, how ridiculous was it that this crazy woman is able to not only rally the troops to go after Jessica, that it happens to coincide with Malcolm baring his soul, and that they just so happen to show up at Jessica's when she has Kilgrave on lockdown and things are otherwise fairly stable. The concept of the misguided outsider thinking the hero is the real villain, and that the villain is the victim, thereby freeing the bad guy and unraveling the hero's good work, is such a tired cliche in superhero stories especially. Channeling that story through Robyn was a poor choice especially, and it was all too convenient that it happened when it did. It seemed as though the writers said, "we need something to upset the applecart here, and this is just random enough to do it."

Speaking of convenient, I'm apparently one of the few people who's enjoyed the Hogarth-Wendy-Pam triangle this season, but Pam showing just at the right time to unintentionally kill Wendy was a bridge too far. There were tons of ways you could have had Pam realize that Hogarth is full of crap and realize that she was trying to use Kilgrave to get Wendy to sign the papers without ending up in this contrived, all-too-on-the-nose morality play where Pam ends up in jail. The scenes with just Hogarth and Wendy were actually pretty solid. The combination of Wendy's disgust and woundedness worked, and the "death of a thousand cuts" setup was tense. But the utter plot-convenience of how it ended up, especially with the hamfisted scene in the jail afteward, were facepalmingly bad.

And then what was with crazy Simpson? I mean, I get that he's taking some strange super solider pills, but his going all crazy Riley Finn seems unmotivated. His killing Detective Clemmons and torching the place felt out of character, and even if you can sell it as a Jekyll and Hyde situation with Dr. Koslov's pills, I just didn't buy the actor's performance. The insane incarnation of Simpson just seemed kind of goofy, rather than a deranged extension of the character we already knew. I don't know what to make of him.

Then the flashback with Jessica Jones in the dreamy past was so strange as well. Again, it was an extraordinarily blunt way to deal with the idea that she and Kilgrave look back at things differently. Plus I nearly died of ugh when Jessica said, "I'm all ears." And then we have some weird setup where Kilgrave's dad is trying to make a vaccine and has to use Trish? It's fine in principle, but it all goes so fast and strangely.

Then, of course, there's the end with Hope. I actually like the idea of Jessica allowing lots of collateral damage from Kilgrave's continued existence because Hope is a symbol for her -- of herself, of innocence, of a way she can make herself right with the world, and I like the idea of Hope rejecting that because she's much more pragmatic, her wounds are fresher, and she can't imagine what kind of life she can have now anyway.

But ye gads, did we really need this sort of complicated SAW-like set up from Kilgrave in the restaurant. There's a point in most seasons of Dexter where after the show has spent a great deal of time introducing characters and setting up cool conflicts, you get these more and more elaborate and convoluted setpieces as the cat and mouse game continues and the show keeps throwing more and more balls into the air. I think we reached that point here, and it's not a good look for this show, especially if, as Dexter did, it struggles to stick the landing after all the insanity it invokes.