Throughout the episode we follow Trish as she discovers her powers and relentlessly trains to become a hero.  But as we soon find out, Trish’s decisions last season and her unflinching determination have pushed away nearly everyone important in her life.  She also discovers that being a hero requires a lot more than just punching people.

We follow Trish immediately after last season with her exercising and testing her new abilities.  One particularly poignant scene early on in the episode was when she was in the park training and doing parkour.  After a lot of failed attempts Trish manages to perform a flip and is elated when she lands.  But she looks around and doesn’t have anyone to celebrate with.  This sets the tone for the rest of the episode of Trish pursuing these goals on her own without anyone to confide in.  And Rachael Taylor does a fantastic job portraying Trish’s loneliness and unbridled determination throughout the episode.

The only person in Trish’s life who pays any attention to her is her toxic and selfish mother.  For the past two seasons Dorothy Walker has been depicted as a delusional and selfish stage mom who only seems to care about Trish’s career rather than her wellbeing.  But this episode actually digs a little bit deeper and portrays the character in a slightly different way.  Now that Trish is on air again, we see that her mother appears to take a little more interest in her daughter’s life.  She fights to keep Trish from being fired and convinces producers of the show that Trish can handle difficult caller situations on live TV.  We also see that Trish is comfortable letting her mother take care of picking outfits and all the boring stuff that she doesn’t want to do.  Of course this is all selfishly motivated, but it’s a side of Dorothy that we haven’t seen before.

Trish and Dorothy actually seem to get along okay when they’re working together on the TV show.  That’s probably because it’s when Dorothy is the most comfortable and happy.  But she can’t recognize that it isn’t what Trish wants out of life and that’s where her failure as a mother becomes so apparent.  Dorothy doesn’t want Trish to have a career in television because it’s what’s best for her daughter, she wants it because that’s what will make her happy.  However, their relationship seems to be okay while working on this new show because they can both focus on what they want.  Dorothy can yell at interns and pick outfits and Trish can go crime fighting.  Hopefully going forward Trish will be able to balance the two better than she does in this episode.

It’s clear that Trish prioritizes her crime fighting over everything else which is why she carelessly disappears for a few days.  After her training, Trish decides to go hunt down Andrw Brandt who had his sister attacked so he could get a valuable sculpture he believed she wrongly inherited.  Even though Trish likes playing the hero, she seems less than enthusiastic about the investigating part of hero work.  It’s not very exciting and she spends a lot of time waiting for something to happen.  But like with everything else she’s willing to put up with it so that she can stop criminals.  However, she doesn’t use that time to contemplate the ramifications of what she’s doing.

For the entire episode Trish is operating in a morally gray world with an incredibly black and white mindset.  She believes that she’s stopping criminals, but as Malcolm points out to her things just aren’t that simple and don’t always work out the way you expect.  Trish appears to look down at Malcolm who in her mind is helping guilty people avoid justice.  But Malcolm reminds her that the only reason they’re having this conversation is because she’s guilty of assault and hired him and Hogarth to sweep the case under the rug.  Trish believes that her actions are justified despite the most important people in her life telling her that what she’s doing is dangerous and could cause more harm than good.  Even though Trish’s choices are questionable and she has a lot to learn, she’s a very complex character and a great part of the show.

VERDICT

5 AirPods out of 5.

After the cliffhanger from the first episode, it could have been very boring to spend the entire second episode focused on Trish.  However, they did a great job of making her training and budding hero work very compelling.  It’s also nice that she’s not being portrayed as an expert.  What made this episode interesting was that she kept failing.  She tried to stop the mugging and got recognized forcing her to give the thief a huge payout.  She got a job which she needs if she wants to support herself, but she blew it off at the first chance she got to prioritize her stake out.  She also failed to reconcile with Jessica even after a traumatic injury.  But despite all of these setbacks Trish continues to push forward and refuses to give up.  And that’s why an episode focused on a character who makes frustrating choices can be great, because the show acknowledges that the character has a lot to learn.

ONE-SHOTS

  • A nice nod to Trish’s costume in the comics and she seemed just as enthusiastic about this costume as Jessica did about her comic-accurate costume back in season 1.
  • It’s really sad that Jessica only saw the angry version of the email Trish wanted to send.  That scene was very realistic in the way Trish kept revising what she wanted to say.  She was writing it more to get her own emotions out rather than as a message she was planning to send.
  • Since season 1 Malcolm has definitely gone through the most changes.  Even though he seems somewhat unhappy with his job because it forces him to do unpleasant things, it’s nice to see the character working towards what he wants.
  • When Trish was training in the park there were a few moments where she made some cat-like moves.  Almost like a cat out of hell…
  • This episode was also Krysten Ritter‘s directorial debut and she did a fantastic job!