Entertainment

This New 'Jessica Jones' Character Plays A Major Role In Hogarth's Life & We're Into It

by Ani Bundel
Netflix

The first few episodes of Jessica Jones Season 2 are filled with red herrings. One of them actually survives the early introduction and starts to become an important character in the back half of the episodes. Her name is Inez, and unlike some of the other throwaway red herrings from the early episodes to keep us from figuring out who Janet McTeer plays, she doesn't fade into the background. Who is Inez in Jessica Jones? Warning: Spoilers for Jessica Jones Season 2 follow.

Inez starts out a red herring for a red herring for a red herring. She's the distraction to keep Jessica away from Janet McTeer who was a red herring for Dr. Karl. (This is the problem with Netflix bloat.) After McTeer kills Cheng's friend, Inez is sort of a dangling thread, a witness who didn't really see anything, who Jessica wants to keep safe just in case.

In order to do the latter, she puts Inez with Jeri, who she assumes will put the witness in a safe house. (After all, that's what lawyers do with witnesses.) But Jessica doesn't take into account that Jeri is actually in too deep at work with her illness to be able to get a safe house, so instead, Jeri puts her up at home.

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That's where the trouble starts. Inez wants Jeri to buy her expensive clothes, she wants to eat delicious food. She's obviously a user. And Jeri knows it... at least at first. And yet she lets the woman stay there because she likes having an attractive, lithe woman around. Obviously, Inez shouldn't be trusted though because the moment she sees things coming to an end she starts ransacking Jeri's jewelry... until she finds the meds.

That seems to change Inez's mind. She was, after all, a nurse before she was homeless, that's why she was at IGH. And she recognizes the drugs that Jeri is desperately paying through the nose to get and that it means she has ALS.

That's when Inez tells Jeri about Shane, who she claims was also a patient at IGH. His accidental superpower side effect from being brought back from the dead was the ability to heal.

Now, from the beginning, this sounds weird and wrong. The powers that Jessica, her mother, and the Whizzer had powers that made them super-something. There no such thing as "super healing." So what exactly is happening?

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Shane certainly seems believable at first, or at least he's really good at the voodoo and the acting. But when Inez says to Jeri "this doesn't always work" alarm bells should have started going off. If there's one thing about Jessica's powers (and the Whizzer and Alisa), it's that they never fail.

When Jessica meets Shane in Jeri's apartment there's something off about his memories of IGH. There's a bad smell to it all, and the sense that Jeri is being taken for a ride.

This only gets worse when Jessica finds Dr. Karl and discovers, to her horror that he swears there was no such person as Shane at IGH, and no one ever had healing powers. From there, it's only a matter of time before Jeri comes home to find the place ransacked.

But Jeri doesn't go down like that. She tracks down Inez and Shane, and she gets into Inez's head. She's done some digging and proves to Inex that Shane's been holding out of her, cheating on her and is conning her as much as he is everyone else.

Then she hands Inez a gun and waits for the denouement. It only takes a few hours. As Inez sobs hysterical over killing Shane, Jeri smiles and calls in the sound of gunshots. Revenge is sweet.