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'Jessica Jones' Season 2: With Nuke's Return Heavily Hinted, Here's How He Could Link To 'Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.'

The Defenders may have finished filming, but Marvel Netflix is already hard at work once again, as Jessica Jones Season 2 has officially started production.

By Tom BaconPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Wil Traval's Nuke. [Credit: Netflix]

The Defenders may have finished filming, but Marvel Netflix is already hard at work once again, as Jessica Jones Season 2 has officially started production. Season 1 was a tense, atmospheric psychological thriller, presenting Krysten Ritter's Jessica Jones as a survivor of psychological (and sexual) abuse. But it also set the groundwork for Season 2, revealing a secret conspiracy to develop super-soldiers, and setting up Wil Traval's Nuke as a potential recurring foe. No surprise, it looks as though Wil Traval is set to reprise the role — but it may be a lot more important than we realized...

Wil Traval is on His Way to New York!

Sure, there are a lot of reasons to fly out to New York, but one of them is surely to reprise your role in a show you filmed last year. By all accounts, the cast of Jessica Jones were pretty close, so they'd certainly qualify as 'old friends'.

In all honesty, Wil Traval's tweet seems to be confirmation of what we already knew. Jessica Jones Season 1 set up a second season to explore Jessica's backstory, and expose the secrets of a mysterious paramilitary group called IGH. Nuke is part of that group, and his return was pretty much inevitable.

The Wider Importance of IGH

Clash of titans! [Credit: Netflix]

Back at NYCC 2016, Marvel Television's Jeph Loeb was asked whether there'd be any links between #AgentsOfSHIELD and the Marvel Netflix shows. His response?

"That's a fair question. Here's a fair answer: stay tuned."

IGH may well be the easiest possible link. The acronym is a strange one, and it doesn't exist in the comics. What does exist, though, is MGH: Mutant Growth Hormone. This is a stimulant that temporarily grants mutant powers to non-mutants, or enhances the powers of mutants (sometimes to a dangerous degree). Marvel has often seemed to be using the #Inhumans as their version of mutants (the Watchdogs are essentially the X-Men's Friends of Humanity, updated for the twenty-first century). So, in the world of Marvel TV, it would make sense if IGH was an adapted version of MGH, which actually stood for Inhuman Growth Hormone.

The Secret History of the Inhumans?

A powerful soldier. [Credit: Netflix]

Although Inhumans stayed out of the spotlight until Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 2, we know that some had already revealed themselves prior to us; consider, for instance, the Inhuman child Agent May killed in Bahrain. If this fan-theory is right, then at some point a group of scientists got hold of an Inhuman. They unlocked the secret of the Inhuman gene, and learned to use chemical treatments to temporarily trigger Inhuman powers.

The young Jessica Jones was involved in a car accident, and exposed to dangerously high levels of IGH chemicals. In Jessica's case — whether because she is herself an Inhuman, or because of the sheer quantity of chemicals she was exposed to — the empowerment was permanent. My suspicion is that it's the former, as IGH would surely have monitored her if they'd not already tried exposing subjects to high levels of their combat enhancers. But if Jessica was Inhuman, there'd be no way for them to realize the effect would be different.

Here's the disturbing thing; this suggests that some forces have been weaponizing Inhumans for years. I can fully understand why the Inhumans feared revealing themselves to the world! In the wake of The Incident (the Chitauri invasion of New York), world powers would become fascinated by super-soldiers, and the next arms race would be in enhanced individuals. IGH would no doubt take advantage of this, perhaps relaunching projects they'd mothballed in the past.

All in all, this would be a subtle nod — and if this theory is correct, I'm not sure if Jessica Jones Season 2 will spell it out or not. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if IGH goes undefined, leaving this as a minor nod that makes fans smile. At the same time, though, with Jessica set to explore the mysteries of the company in Season 2, it could well be that we're about to get the most explicit tie-in to date...

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About the Creator

Tom Bacon

A prolific writer and film fan, Tom has a deep love of the superhero genre.

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