Make Sure You're Totally Refreshed On IGH Before Watching 'Jessica Jones' Season 2

Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe in the theaters has two types of superheroes. There's the kind who are "powered people" because of something that was done to them, and the kind who turn themselves into vigilante justice-doers through sheer effort of will. So it is in Netflix's MCU, though on a smaller scale. There are those like Daredevil (sheer effort of will), and those like Jessica Jones (powered people). All we know about Jessica is that she might have been made by "IGH." What is IGH on Jessica Jones? Could they have been the same people who made Kilgrave or Luke Cage?

IGH is the only real lead we have going into the second season of Jessica Jones, and even that is circumstantial. In Season 1, Trish begins to dig into Jessica's origins, asking questions about what happened to her, and those are the initials she finds.

We know as a teenager Jessica was in a horrific car crash, where her parents and her little brother were killed. Somehow, Jessica lived. We know she was in the hospital for a number of months with no family whatsoever. Trish's terrible mother, Dorothy Walker, adopted Jessica as part of a publicity stunt to help her daughter's show in the ratings. We also know that within a couple of months of Jessica moving in with the Walkers, her powers began to show themselves.

When Trish goes digging, she finds a small folder of documents Dorothy hasn't bothered look twice at since Jessica arrived. It includes documentation that Jessica's hospital bills were all paid by a mysterious company called "IGH." Who were they, what did they pay for, and could these have lead to her powers? Or were they, as Dorothy put it, just a business looking for a charity write off?

Jessica seems to have little memory of the car crash or the aftermath in the hospital. All we know is she was normal before and came out powered afterward. Luke Cage's story is the same. He went to prison and was put in a hospital where they were running experiments on prisoners. When he came out, he was powered. Kilgrave also has a similar story, though his stems from some traumatic brain disease he developed as a child, causing his parents to try experimental therapies. He came out of them with mind control powers. Could all three be somehow connected to IGH?

The link that brought Luke Cage and Jessica together in Season 1 suggests they might have been connected. As Jessica and Luke discuss a little, Kilgrave wanted Luke Cage's wife, Reva Conners, dead. He had Jessica kill her. At first, we're lead to think Kilgrave's anger at Reva is random, or just a murder to prove Jessica is under his control.

But as Luke discovers during his standalone show, there were things about Reva he didn't know. She might have worked for the people who turned him into a powered person. She certainly suggested him for their program, though she might not have known what this program would do. Still, it's hard not to speculate that maybe there was more to Kilgrave's murder of her than we realized. Could she have worked for the people who turned Kilgrave into a powered person? Could she have worked for IGH?

We do know one person who worked for IGH: Dr. Kozlov. He's the doctor who gave Trish's boyfriend, ex-soldier Will Simpson, the "Combat Enhancer" pills which gave him temporary powers. We know there was a whole program where he was feeding those pills to voluntary recruits. Obviously, him working with chemicals proved to at least temporarily enhance regular humans into something resembling a superhero. For all we know, a decade or two ago, he might have been experimenting on orphans from car crashes, or prisoners with no family, or a little boy whose parents were desperate for him to live.

We hope to learn much more about IGH in Jessica Jones Season 2. All thirteen episodes will arrive on Netflix on Thursday, March 8, 2018.