[Ed. note: Full spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again season 2 episode 6 below.]
Jessica Jones is back.
Daredevil: Born Again season 2, episode 6, “Requiem,” begins in a quaint house in the suburbs. We see a little girl playing alone while her mostly unseen mom is just offscreen. Suddenly, a handful of guys in riot gear — Mayor Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF) — descend upon the home, only for the still-unseen mom to beat the crap out of all of them. A grenade is even thrown in the house and the girl picks it up and looks at it. After the AVTF agents are defeated, we see that the mom is none other than Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), who then takes the grenade away from the girl, cautioning her that it’s not a toy, and tosses it away.
This marks the first time we’ve seen Ritter as Jessica Jones since 2019, and it seems quite a bit has happened since then.
When we last saw Jessica, it was during the series finale of her Netflix show. After struggling to deal with her best friend turned supervillain, Trish (Rachael Taylor), Jones finally apprehended her, and Trish got locked away in the aquatic superprison known as The Raft. Jessica then planned to leave New York City for Mexico and retire from superheroics, but she reconsidered at the end and decided to stay. She’d previously given the keys to her private eye firm, Alias Investigations, to her ex-assistant Malcolm (Eka Darville) to run the place, and the finale never confirmed if she was going to return there or not.
Not long after that, Avengers: Infinity War took place. We don’t know whether Jessica was blipped away by Thanos, though it doesn’t seem relevant at this point.
What we do know is that Jessica has a kid: Danielle Cage, the daughter of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, just like in the comic books. That character eventually becomes Captain America in the comics, as she has both her mom’s super strength and her dad’s invulnerability, but if that’s in the future for this version of the character, she’s still got a ways to go.
Luke Cage (Mike Colter) is not in the episode, but when Jessica meets up with Daredevil (Charlie Cox) in the city later, she tells him that Luke is working for some shady people. This likely means his time running the nightclub Harlem’s Paradise, established at the end of Luke Cage season 2, ended a while ago. We also know Cage is returning for Daredevil: Born Again season 3 thanks to recent set photos, but his return this season hasn’t been confirmed.
As for Jessica, despite moving to the suburbs, it appears she’s kept in touch with Daredevil and is fully aware of the resistance he’s leading against Mayor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). With the death of Fisk’s wife in the previous episode, it seems Kingpin wants to leave no stone unturned in his anti-vigilante crusade, which explains why his task force attacked her home (despite it appearing to be outside of the mayor’s jurisdiction).
Danielle appears to be about elementary school age, so it’s possible Jessica has been living outside of the city for a few years, likely to keep her daughter out of harm’s way (especially if she’s parenting solo while Luke is otherwise occupied). Her daughter may not be the only reason why Jessica settled down, though. She also mentions to Daredevil that her powers have been on the fritz.
Still, her super strength is reliable enough for her and Daredevil to take on some AVTF agents in a warehouse and destroy a bunch of military-grade weapons that have been stashed there by Fisk. The fight scene is brief, but still pretty fantastic to see the two of them fight side-by-side in live-action for the first time in seven years.
While we know Jessica Jones will be back next season alongside Luke Cage and Iron Fist, it’s unclear if we’ll see her again in Daredevil: Born Again season 2. By the sound of things, Jessica wants to stay out of the war that’s clearly brewing on the streets of New York. Then again, she’s said that kind of thing plenty of times before getting dragged back into a fight.
