Contributor, The A.V. Club. Caroline Siede is a pop culture critic in Chicago, where the cold never bothers her anyway. Her interests include superhero movies, feminist theory, and Jane Austen novels.
That unexpected sense of lightness Erik described back in “A.K.A Hellcat” is exactly how I felt going into Jessica Jones’ series finale. That’s not just because Sallinger was officially off the table, although that’s definitely a big part of it. It was also the lightness of knowing that the series was freed of the…
Back in my review of Jessica Jones’ first season finale—the wrap-up to my first ever Marvel Netflix binge-review experience—I wrote about how conflicted I felt about Kilgrave’s death. On the one hand, it felt like the right thematic capper for the season and for Jessica’s arc. On the other hand, I…
After the big reveal at the end of “A.K.A Hero Pants,” my first thought was that I’d love to go back and rewatch the previous two episodes to track Trish and Erik’s arcs through this new lens. Thankfully, “A.K.A Hellcat” puts in the work for me! This episode is part clip show and part magic trick reveal. It travels…
Not only is “A.K.A Hero Pants” a compelling episode in its own right, it retroactively makes the previous episode more interesting too. Not the Sallinger parts, of course, those are well past saving. But it turns out we didn’t have the full context for the emotional arcs Trish and Erik were…
The good news about “A.K.A I Did Something Today” is that Jessica very much feels like herself again. She’s once again faced with an impossible, impossibly frustrating scenario, but she approaches it with intelligence, empathy, and ruthless practicality, rather than the one-note petulance that…
If you start an episode with a serial killer sending clues via Snapchat (sorry, InstaYap), it’s really hard to end it with the brutal murder of one of your main characters. “A.K.A Camera Friendly” is an absolute tonal mess, one that ranges from unintentionally goofy to unearned in its gruesome…
In our flawed criminal justice system, there’s unfortunately often a factor that’s more important than guilt or innocence: Narratives. How you spin a story, including how you spin it in the publicity around a case, can be as important as hard evidence. “A.K.A The Double Half-Wappinger” is all about…
For most of its runtime, “A.K.A Sorry Face” feels like a season finale. Erik’s kidnapping provides a high-stakes time clock. Jessica and Trish use their investigative skills to track him down and burst in just in time to save his life. It takes Jessica and Trish teaming up to take down Sallinger. They turn him over to…
Gregory Sallinger has a law degree. That’s about all the justification we’re given for why Jessica is adamant about treating his case differently than pretty much every other case we’ve ever seen her handle. Just a few episodes ago, she was pinning Andrew Brandt with a car to get him to admit to…
As someone who avoids watching trailers or reading too much about these Marvel Netflix shows ahead of their debuts, I was feeling smugly confident that Erik would turn out to be this season’s Big Bad. A charismatic man hitting it off with Jessica immediately set off all my mental red flags. But unless there’s another…
“A hero is strong. A hero is invulnerable. A hero has a goddamn spleen.”
Rather than pick up with the stabby cliffhanger from the previous episode, “A.K.A You’re Welcome” flashes back to fill us in on how Trish Walker went from instinctively catching a dropped cellphone back in the second season finale to becoming a full-on vigilante hero. This is an entirely Trish-centric hour, and we…
“A.K.A The Perfect Burger” opens with Jessica Jones on a beach in Mexico. True, she’s wearing her signature ripped jeans and combat boots, and she’s there working a case, but the sunny locale speaks to the slightly sunnier vibe that characterizes this season premiere. The lighting is brighter, the…
From awarding innovative new work to saluting talented performers young and old, the 73rd annual Tony Awards got a lot of things right. The mythic folk musical Hadestown took home eight trophies, including awards for director Rachel Chavkin and composer Anaïs Mitchell, the only two women nominated…
Does love at first sight exist? How do you balance commitment and loyalty with the pull of true love? What are the most appealing visual locations in London? Those questions have anchored hundreds of romantic comedies over the years, but they’re trotted out in a slightly new fashion in 2005’s Imagine Me & You, a…
Sitting around chatting with some friends after dinner recently, I mentioned there were a handful of Netflix original rom-coms I was planning to catch up on before writing this piece. It turns out everyone else in the group—people who aren’t paid to follow pop culture for a living—had already seen them all, and were…
It was probably always too much to expect “The Quest For Peace” to be able to put a full-throated exclamation mark on Supergirl’s stellar fourth season. There were just too many dangling threads to resolve to leave time for the kind of emotional storytelling that has always been Supergirl’s bread…
Midway through The Sun Is Also A Star, a cynical teen complains that all poems are about one of three things: love, sex, or the stars. While you could certainly quibble with her literary analysis—especially given that she’s speaking to a teenage poet whose influences range from Emily Dickinson to Tupac Shakur—her…
If you’re looking for bang for your Supergirl buck, “Red Dawn” more than delivers. This is an almost preposterously overstuffed episode; one with game-changing events on so many fronts it’s hard to keep track of them all. It doesn’t all work and much of it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, but “Red…
