Jen Walters writes her own ending in the She-Hulk: Attorney At Law season finale
Tatiana Maslany's Jen smashes "fourth walls and bad endings" in the first season finale of Marvel's She-Hulk: Attorney At Law
TV Reviews She-Hulk
Well, folks, we’ve made it to the She-Hulk: Attorney At Law finale, and where to even begin? As an episode, “Whose Show Is This?” is a pretty good summary of the season as a whole. Tatiana Maslany shines, and so does the woefully underutilized supporting cast when they’re not being sidelined by big Marvel cameos. It introduces some thoughtful feminist concepts without ever digging into them too deeply. It’s frequently very funny, it pokes fun at the MCU in a highly enjoyable way, and it’s admirably ambitious in its meta-comedy elements, although perhaps at the expense of the story.
But okay, let’s begin at the actual beginning, where everything’s going wrong for Jen. After Hulking out at the gala, she’s in the same high-security super prison Blonsky previously occupied. Mallory arrives to give her legal advice and enjoy it while you can because this is, unfortunately, the last we’ll see of Renée Elise Goldsberry this season. Jen shouldn’t have taken Intelligencia’s bait, but “I was angry, which is how anyone would respond in that situation,” she argues reasonably. To which Mallory reasonably returns: “But you’re not just anyone. You are an out-of-control Hulk.”
And so, Jen takes a plea deal that locks her in an inhibitor cuff, she’s fired from GLK&H (whether that’s because she’s in legal trouble or they only wanted She-Hulk is unclear), and she’s forced to give up her apartment and move back in with her parents. She hasn’t given up pursuing justice against Intelligencia, and luckily Jen’s mom hands Nikki the perfect ammo: a video of Jen circa law school dancing provocatively and smacking her thong-and-sweatpants-clad ass. Nikki cleverly uploads it to Intelligencia and gets invited to the next gathering of the haters.
So while Jen decides to take Blonsky (Tim Roth) up on his offer of staying at the retreat awhile, Nikki infiltrates misogyny dot com. Of course, she needs a masculine spy, so it’s Pug’s time to shine. She sends him into the Intelligencia meeting with one earbud in (Nikki assures him it’s not suspicious because he won’t be the only one. He is, but this poses no problem.) Pug is delightfully reluctant to “be gross,” but is immediately accepted into the group with one, “Females, am I right?”
This attracts the attention of Todd (Jon Bass) because Todd has very obviously been a villain this whole time. (Even Nikki has to admit “that tracks.”) It wasn’t totally clear from Todd’s attempts to woo She-Hulk, but he is indeed HulkKing and the creator of Intelligencia. The bigger twist is that the group’s guest speaker is The Abomination, and this is all going down at Blonsky’s retreat!
Blonsky playing a long villainous game would have been an impactful turn, but he’s just there to make some cash. It’s unclear if he even knows he’s indulging a misogynist group out to get his lawyer, one of many tiny plot holes that litter the rest of this episode. When Jen stumbles into this all at the lodge, everything quickly goes off the rails. Todd reveals his sinister plot and injects himself with her stolen Hulk blood, transforms into a Hulk himself, and goes after Jen. Blonsky, as Abomination, moves to save her, but he gets decked by Bruce, who has suddenly arrived, and also Titania (Jameela Jamil), for some reason, crashes onto the scene. (“God! Does that bitch ever use a door?!” asks Nikki.) It’s complete chaos, and Jen’s not happy: “This can’t possibly be where this season was going,” she complains. “This is a mess. None of these storylines make any sense.”
Now here’s where things start to get really interesting. Cut to: the Disney+ Marvel menu. She-Hulk (whose inhibitor cuff was apparently not that sturdy) busts through her show and decides to swing into Marvel: Assembled. This brings her to the Disney lot, where she’s able to hunt down her own writers’ room. (And at least some of them are actual writers–showrunner Jessica Gao is among those present.) She-Hulk questions the originality of the “bad guy steals my blood to give himself superpowers” plot, but she’s told that “This is the story that Kevin wants.”
Naturally, Jen goes to confront Kevin, smashing some Marvel security along the way. But the MCU overlord is not, as we all might assume, actual MCU overlord Kevin Feige. It’s K.E.V.I.N., an AI bot otherwise known as “Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus.” It’s “the most advanced entertainment algorithm in the world,” a painfully funny-’cause-it’s-true moment (though we and K.E.V.I.N. will “leave that debate up to the Internet”).
Because this is a legal comedy (the jury’s still out), Jen gives her closing argument for revising the finale. She proposes ridding the climax of excess plot and flash and blood (which “seems super suspiciously close to Super Soldier Serum”). All of that, she says, “distracts from the story, which is that my life fell apart right when I was learning to be both Jen and She-Hulk. Those are my stakes, K.E.V.I.N.” Having convinced the robot, she edits the climax and adds in Daredevil, because “a woman has needs.” “Historically, we’ve been light in that department,” K.E.V.I.N. agrees. This is She-Hulk: she smashes fourth walls, bad endings, “and sometimes Matt Murdock.” Ayyyy!
It’s a fun, zany way to give the lead female character agency, by having her literally fix her ending. But… did she actually fix her ending? Returning to the actual climax of her show, there is no climax. Law enforcement has already arrived to deal with Todd and Emil (but not Titania, still an utterly useless and extraneous character to the scene). While Bruce and the Hulk’s blood have been erased from the picture, the other elements of the lodge confrontation remain, awkwardly half-dealt-with.
Sure, maybe Jen was right that the blood storyline is overdone, but erasing it from the finale retroactively undoes a plot that the show has been asking us to care about for the entire season, which is dissatisfying, to say the least. If Todd wasn’t after her blood, why would the Wrecking Crew have been hired to attack her? And maybe simply ruining She-Hulk’s reputation is enough motivation to have hired Josh to seduce her and leak the sex tape, but regardless, the finale feels a little too enamored with its own cleverness to deal with the serious emotional ramifications of that violation.
Instead, Daredevil literally drops from the sky, too late to do anything more substantial than joining Jen at the family barbecue. Don’t get me wrong, it’s delightful, but if Jen was going to rewrite her ending, couldn’t she have included a little more action in that regard? (Matt talking law in the middle of a fight scene does it for us all, Jen!) Bruce shows up back on the scene with his son (!!!), Skaar. (I guess K.E.V.I.N. wasn’t content to save that one for the movie, after all.) And She-Hulk (“The Difficult Diva of Law”) is tidily back to work (presumably at GLK&H, but again, unclear) because she was cleared of conviction “after a criminal conspiracy came to light.” Frankly, the criminal conspiracy seemed pretty clear in the last episode when Intelligencia took full responsibility for the hack. But this show has never let logic, legal or otherwise, stand in the way of a neat conclusion, so why start now?
I’ll end at the beginning: this is an uneven episode to match an uneven season, but there were obviously still many enjoyable things about it. And now that we’ve got the establishing stuff out of the way, perhaps a potential second season of She-Hulk will be able to lean into its strengths without feeling all over the place. (Don’t hold your breath for seeing Jen on the big screen, according to K.E.V.I.N.) If the show proved anything, it’s that there are so many places this character can go. But hopefully not a season-long dream sequence!
Stray observations
- The highly stylized “Savage She-Hulk” opening is a lot of fun (love that they made Mark Ruffalo stand silently in ’70s gear for that). I don’t know about you, but it only made me wish all the more for practical effects She-Hulk!
- And speaking of, great dig about Marvel’s ongoing VFX controversy: K.E.V.I.N. asks She-Hulk to transform back to Jen because she’s “very expensive”—“But wait until the camera is off you. The visual effects team has moved on to another project.” (The project is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever if that little musical cue is any indication.)
- Josh Segarra is this episode’s supporting cast MVP as Pug, making me wish we’d seen more of him all along. “I managed to stay very calm considering I was calling the freaking Hulk himself,” he brags at one point. He very sweetly says, “we always have your back, Jen,” but we really didn’t get to see that friendship develop at all.
- Jen’s awful ex-coworker Dennis goes on TV to claim they used to date and that she was also “psycho,” something he weirdly blames on her grandmother. (An I missing a deep-cut MCU reference there, or is it just a weird misogynistic thing to say?)
- Aww, the posters of Legally Blonde and Erin Brokovich in Jen’s childhood bedroom.
- Bruce is in Jen’s phone as “Smug Hulk.”
- I had a lot of questions about Todd’s plan–Why did he wait until this meeting, so long after obtaining the blood, to inject himself? Why was he able to retain his mental facilities as Hulk?—but by the end of the episode, none of them really mattered. Ah well.
- Speaking of, Todd continuing to try to date She-Hulk’s last episode after obtaining the blood is just a little confusing. It feels realistic that one of She-Hulk’s biggest haters is also into her romantically, but the climax (such as it was) was too rushed to explore that.
- Jen asks K.E.V.I.N. some important questions on our behalf, like, “What’s with all the Daddy issues?” (“Thor, daddy issues. Loki, same daddy, same issues. Star-Lord, two daddies, two issues!”) Also, “When are we getting the X-Men?” Sadly, K.E.V.I.N. offers no spoilers.
- Sorry to everyone hoping for an appearance from The Leader: you’ve Mephisto’d yourselves, I’m afraid. The only greater MCU tease–besides Bruce’s son (!!!)—is Blonsky going to stay at Kamar-Taj. Do you think Wong getting “sucked into another show” just referred to his binge-watching, or will these two pop up in another Disney+ series? As Wong says, “We’re really in an era of Peak TV.”
328 Comments
You thought this show would treat issues like slut shaming, revenge porn etc. with proper consideration or care? Yeah, me neither.
Did you think this was SVU: MCU?
This episode didn’t do it for me. It would have been fine if we didn’t spend a whole season with the blood storyline. It just felt like there’s no resolution. She made a decision about how she’ll resolve it but we did’t get to see how that went. This kind of comes close to ruining the season for me. It kind of says a lot that I was having way more fun watching Nikki and Pug (I love them) than anything else in this finale.
People are saying I’m an incel for agreeing on your point of view. The ending just seemed so random. I hate how the internet has became because I can’t have an opinion about a show like She-Hulk.
lol
As someone who binged it rather than watching it week to week, the blood storyline wasn’t actually that big. The only instances were when the goons attacked her a failed and when it potentially happened after the creep seduced her. I never though he got the blood, because she probably would have woken up if she tried. He cloned her phone, and that is about what he could do.I was surprised when Dude Bro said he had gotten it, and I was wondering how exactly it was done. Even if he had gotten the blood, it was established that the Banner family had a mutation that allowed them to handle gamma radiation. He shouldn’t have been able to become a hulk anyway.If that ruined the episode, it really shouldn’t have. Him becoming Hulk made no sense, which was a big part of why she thought the ending was dumb.
Even if he had gotten the blood, it was established that the Banner family had a mutation that allowed them to handle gamma radiation. He shouldn’t have been able to become a hulk anyway.He had a line to the effect that he had altered the blood to get around that.
Yeah, I’m kind of surprised at how disappointed I was with this one. Tossing out everything in this season for one big “Haha, the Marvel Cinematic Universe™, am I right, people?” wink to the audience just comes off as… okay? What about it?Congratulations, Marvel Property, for noticing the things critics and audiences have been saying about Marvel Properties, but not really offering a solution to that criticism. It’s just lampshading for the sake of lampshading, as if the Family Guy formula of empty pop culture references has evolved to fit into the modern era of meta humor.Not that I was ever expecting She-Hulk to be the MCU’s The Americans, but I was hoping it would have something more to say than “lol nothing matters, see u next billing cycle.”
Kind of like Hope saying “It’s about time” about the Wasp costume, when it’s still only happening at the very end of the movie and you still haven’t solved your lack of female heroes problem.
I’m surprised someone was into Nikki. To me, she just came off as an exposition tool to push Jen in whatever direction the meaningless plot of the week needed. As Jen’s apparent best friend, she didn’t have much chemistry with Tatiana Maslany, and I feel like the actress comes off as badly trying to upstage the lead actress in a lot of their scenes together. Maybe if they bothered to develop their supporting cast and the relationships to each other, the show as a whole would have worked more. I’d’ve liked more of Mark Linn-Baker as the dad.
Yeah, it’s less about the blood storyline and more about the lack of any other resolution. The ideas this series has played with are who gets a say about when Jen is or isn’t She-Hulk, what kind of lawyer Jen wants to be, and more generally what’s the role of the legal system in a world where there are problems that need smashing.
And on the simplest note, would’ve been much better had the ending centered around how Jen plans to deal with those changes going forward. Also, on a strictly personal preference note, would’ve appreciated a sheepish apology from Bruce for either failing to anticipate or failing to prepare Jen for the risks she’d face trying to be a public street-level superhero. Bonus points for not adopting the incredibly cringe Moby AIDS metaphor, but that’s where my mind went first/got stuck, turns out.
I don’t even care about the blood storyline in particular, I just hate that all the issues were resolved offscreen. Especially when Jen specifically talks about what the stakes are supposed to be. It’s like “my life fell apart just as I was learning to be both She-Hulk and Jen” but then cut to her life being fine again without showing how she actually overcame that problem.
Yes, I think that’s the ultimate failure of the finale for me. If the show was about her life falling apart, and then her putting it back together again, then show that.
(Don’t hold your breath for seeing Jen on the big screen, according to K.E.V.I.N.)And K.E.V.I.N is not part of our universe. We have Kevin instead.
I enjoyed it a lot. I think a lot of people are waaaay overthinking this show which is for the most part a breezy comedy with feminist theory snuck in here and there. I enjoyed her absolutely obliterating the fourth wall more completely than anyone since Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. This was super fun. This is not Captain America:Winter Soldier or an Avengers movies, don’t take it so seriously, it is not meant to be taken excessively seriously.
You said exactly what I have in mind. People have been taking Marvel WAY too seriously now, it’s gotten very toxic.
lol yah there was this dude at my job last year that took it to such a toxic level every phase 4 project the next day he’d be like “I fucking hated it” and then after the second No Way Home trailer he’s like “they really fucked up by not showing Tobey Maguire”. Like shit man lol.
I was out on the 4th-wall smashing of the climax until we got to K.E.V.I.N. I don’t know why I enjoyed that bit as much as I did (a reveal that Feige suffered some calamity and had his consciousness uploaded to a computer, kind of like Arnim Zola in Winter Soldier, would have been even more fun), but I did. And Tatiana’s thumbs-up to the viewers when she asked K.E.V.I.N. about when are we finally going to get the X-Men was delightful.
The KEVIN reveal was spoiled for me by the subtitles being on, so by the time we got to him, I was already a little over it.
Ugh, the subtitles indicated K.E.V.I.N. was an acronym before the reveal?Way to screw the hearing impaired (or people who just want to watch with the sound down so they don’t wake the baby or something), closed-captioning people.
oof I didn’t have them on but that’s super annoying to learn.
Subtitles do this a lot— they often have the character name if there’s multiple people speaking off screen, so a reveal that a person is actually “so and so” all grown up or whatever later in the movie is much less of an impact, it’s like if in The Empire Strikes Back anytime Vader spoke it said “LUKE’S FATHER: I am altering the deal…” it can be infuriating. Most recent example I saw was with No Time To Die and Rami Malek’s character (even though it’s an earlier reveal, it is still clearly not intended to be known until a particular scene). I don’t know what idiots are writing the subtitles, but I guess they assume everybody has scoured the IMDB casting list before watching a movie, they need to get better at masking stuff that is clearly intended to be a reveal via name/spelling (it is not always this way, but it seems common for like Disney+ and Prime to do this, sometimes they’ll actually use like “MAN” or “MYSTERIOUS FIGURE,” so really it depends on who the captioner is).
I’m always fussing at my kids to turn off the subtitles or closed-captioning because of this (none of them are hard of hearing or in any way NEED to read the lines while watching the show). With comedies, it frequently ruins the timing by displaying punchlines before we get to see/hear the characters’ reactions.
I have a complex relationship with them. I can have a bit of trouble hearing so they can be helpful in movies with a lot of action (where the volume just seemingly randomly varies)— but I’m the same way with movie comedies and especially something like RiffTrax or MST3K, where timing is everything. My wife speaks English extremely well, but it’s still her 2nd language, so I mostly leave them on for her.
Apparently within a day (?) of the finale airing they went back and changed “K.E.V.I.N” to “Kevin” in the subtitles because they saw people complaining about this online.
Tatiana’s mugging to the camera with the cracks about X-Men and smashing Matt Murdock were fun, it was nice to see her get to let loose more. Still hoping she gets a better part to really show off her comedic chops.
I swear to god, I read your comment three times before I realized you wrote “Tatiana” and not “Titania.” I was like, is one of us insane??
Hahah, understandable. I’ve been doing that all season. Maybe I need to use their full names to differentiate between Tatiana Maslany and Titania Influencer (??).
Nothing more breezy and comedic than some slut shaming, cyber bullying and revenge porn, amirite?
Nazis and terrorists are serious issues too, but cap and iron man fought them. Marvel was founded on fictional characters dealing with real world issues.
I don’t remember modern Cap comics to portray Nazis and terrorists as comic reliefs, no.
I don’t remember the revenge porn being comic relief here either. In fact it was the only time things turned dramatic.
Unless you watch the entire finale, where the perpetrators are treated like comic reliefs rather than actual villains they most definitely are. But sure, whatever. This plotline is going to be forgotten in season 2 entirely, so who cares.
But I guess the writers put the same amount of consideration to this plotline as to writing a scene where Jen (the protagonists) beating uncouncious some random security guys working at Marvel, because that’s what heroes do.
I only wish she’d beaten the shit out of the writers too.
“But I guess the writers put the same amount of consideration to this plotline as to writing a scene where Jen (the protagonists) beating uncouncious some random security guys working at Marvel, because that’s what heroes do.”Yea that was jarring for me too, especially since they were ostensibly people in the “real world” it made the “innocent security people get beaten to a pulp by the hero” trope feel extra cruel.
You’re really upset about this eh?
Here’s the deal. I can crave pizza one day and tacos the next. I can watch 10 hours of football one weekend and then not be up for it the next. I can read non-fiction heavy stuff and then pick up the latest Reacher or Bosch the next.
Some days, I need Winter Soldier. Some days, I need She-Hulk. It’s all OK. We’re all good.
I’m a ridiculously easy MCU grader. It never fails to amaze me that I see things like fucking Leapfrog on screen. Or that I see a Daredevil not only unafraid of the red costume, but unafraid of the YELLOW costume!!!! (Any other oldsters remember the pathetic attempt at a backdoor pilot for DD in one of the old Bixby TV movies? Black DD and Kingpin without a shaved head. We’ve come a ways…)
Rex Smith as DD and John Rhys Davies as the Kingpin!
Poor Lou looks like what Hemsworth looks like BEFORE he goes on his “Shit, I’m playing Thor again” workout routine.
“(Any other oldsters remember the pathetic attempt at a backdoor pilot for DD in one of the old Bixby TV movies? Black DD and Kingpin without a shaved head. We’ve come a ways…)“It happened with Thor too.
This episode went beyond the fourth wall. This was the biggest smashing of the fifth wall since the Red Dwarf guys found a typewriter that wrote their reality.
This show is indicative of basically everything wrong with the MCU, creatively bankrupt gender swapped character, over-reliance on mediocre cgi, meta humor, bashing men…Yawn, can superheroes be over now please?
Let us know when you touch a boob with permission. Then you can join this chat.
You see the shit this dude is whining about on the Jezebel thread?These have to be some of the saddest, most low-energy fuckers on the planet. Literally anything to avoid looking oneself in the mirror and growing into something other than a mediocre shitbag.
Why? My mommy lets me donate to Amouranth with her credit card with all the other little incel boys so we good, fam. She told me not to pay bullies like you any heed when she was down here in the basement refilling my Mountain Dew and Cheetos trough. What’s your excuse for being a loser nobody wants to fuck?I bet She-Hulk could rip your dick off with her super pussy. Now there is an episode I’d be happy to see!
It took you til the last episode of a show about the Hulks cousin to realize you were bored of superhero properties?
no just the last nail in the coffin.
Lol surprised you hung in this long.
The show pretty perfectly captured the She-Hulk comics IMO – this is the exact sort of thing you can imagine happening there.There were aspects of the season I didn’t like as much but by and large it was pretty consistently entertaining and funny.
Yes, I was glad to see them go so hard on the fourth-wall breaking, like the Byrne run of the comics did (but adapted for TV/streaming in a way that I thought worked well).
I really enjoyed the scene before Jen breaks the fourth wall in this one as it has just about every common trope in superhero movies possible. Villain randomly gets superpowers, side characters show up out of nowhere, Bruce and Abomination decide to fight over a simple misunderstanding, etc, etc.
All of that put together was definitely a “They had me in the first half, not gonna lie” moment for me. Jen had already done a quick, “Is this really the way the story is going?” moment a little earlier, so I was a bit suspicious, but it sure seemed to me —even up through Bruce arriving— that they were really committing to this whole thing.
while the blood storyline was present (for the viewers) for the majority of the season, Jen just learned about it and ended it as soon as she could.
True. She realized this was her show and just shut down that plotline.
i like this line of thinking. but still, our experience of the show (and its payoff, or lack thereof) as an audience is just as important as jen’s. if not more so, since she’s a character here for our entertainment!
The issue with the massive 4th wall breaking of Jen rewriting her own story (which happened repeatedly in the comics) isn’t that it happened, but that the series used the device so sparingly up to that point that going all in on it in the finale didn’t land as well as it could have.Gao has said in interviews that her original intent was to have Jen breaking the 4th wall constantly like in the Sensational She-Hulk comics, but that was all walked back quite a bit in the writers room apparently. So instead of a series where that’s a constant aspect they ended up having the finale be the first time Jen goes full bore 4th wall breaking reality. I get what they were trying to do, but I can’t help but think there was a lot more fun and commentary to mine if Jen’s 4th wall breaking and constant meta reality breaking narrative was established from the start, rather than that being the finale where shit goes 4th wall bonkers. They would’ve been better served by being bonkers throughout the series.
I was initially disappointed in the way the blood storyline panned out, but I’ve been ruminating on it and realized the best way to look at it is: She-Hulk used her superpowers to stop a villain’s scheme.We don’t find it disappointing when Thor uses lightning to stop his villains, we don’t find it disappointing Dr Strange uses magic to stop his villains, and well, like it or not breaking the fourth wall is one of She-Hulk’s superpowers and once the villain enacted his endgame of turning himself into a Hulk she utilized that superpower to rewrite the show and stop him. There’s no cure to being a Hulk so the only way to stop him at that point is to undo it from ever happening.
So basically SheHulk is the most powerful superhero to ever live. Shit the Avengers could’ve skipped all those time travel shenanigans and let her rewrite reality!Dear Marvel, if there are no stakes you don’t have a real story and we will stop caring.
Royal “we”
You realize that characters and objects with the power to rewrite reality have been part of the MCU canon for most of its run, right?
No they couldn’t. First because “She Hulk” didn’t exist then, and secondly, because there’s no evidence she can do that outside of her own show. In her show, the stakes are personal, as she explicitly calls out.
The only thing I would change on that plot line is to take away the two second shot of the fancy needle that was supposed to pierce She-Hulk’s skin. They could have left that subtextual with Todd’s purchase of the Wakandan spear. If they had left it just a drop more ambiguous, it would be very easy to handwave away that the whole blood-stealing plot was a man-child’s fantasy and never actually executed.
How is it her superpower? Her breaking the fourth wall is a storytelling convention the character uses. Not a superpower. To clarify for you.
Also, we never see Josh take the blood. His texts to HulkKing indicate he got it, but the way the scene plays out it works as simply being manipulated by a scumbag guy for humiliation. The Wrecking Crew scene can still stand, since they weren’t successful anyway.
Blonsky clearly did not know the group he was speaking to. It was canned bullshit meant to sort of apply to any group. It wasn’t a plot hole. It was a cognition hole on your part.
Yes. It was perfectly non-specific.
Anyone who has spent six months in corporate land has seen one of these speeches.
fair enough–i can see how his non-specific language is enough of an explanation. i guess thinking back on it, it’s more of an issue that there’s a lack of resolution between jen and blonsky. he’s become a trusted confidant for her at this point, so the fact that he’d collude with this group (even in an accidental roundabout way) is a minor betrayal. but maybe that’s getting too in the weeds with it!
I got real, “What’s In Your Backpack?” vibes from George Clooney in Up in the Air as soon as he started speaking.
Blonsky, and the visual representations, were definetely just spewing, “be your best self,” style pablum that could apply to just about any sales convention held at a Marriott Inn. Which is supposed to narratively give him an out for hosting this group. Even still, that makes him seem pretty stupid for not even vetting who he his hosting. We’re also to believe he’s going all Abomination for this group for cash without questions? How does that even work? Earlier in the season, as soon as his inhibitor thingy is removed authorities are notified instantly. It amounted to a fairly clumsy way to get all the characters of the series in the same place.
Well yeah, that’s why Jen was complaining. I liked the ending, it kept the show light and fun. Maybe I’m just into Jessica Gao, because the whole “this big dumb fight scene doesn’t even matter so let’s skip it who cares” felt very Rick & Morty to me. Let the stakes be wavy and the shenanigans wacky, this show is not that deep. We have oodles of content now so not all of them have to be.
“We’re also to believe he’s going all Abomination for this group for cash without questions? How does that even work? Earlier in the season, as soon as his inhibitor thingy is removed authorities are notified instantly”In the courtroom drawings during the end credits we see Emil putting his inhibitor onto his chicken (Princess Silk Feather?).
Which is one of many issues with the finale. They traded one version of “major setpiece gets in the way of the emotional climax of the story” for another
Why was the event being held on his own property then? I’ll accept that any inconsistencies in the big Lodge confrontation can be explained in-show by the “writers” having contrived a finale that “doesn’t make any sense,” but still.
Couple of explanations:
1) He has to, for parole reasons, stay near there, so he advertises it as a package deal – get a great lodge/conference space and a reformed supervillain as a guest speaker
2) Even if he doesn’t have to stay there, he’s got to pay the bills on that place somehow.
Also, the lack of cell signal for the most part meant that maybe it helped to cover the repeated failure of his own inhibitor. Also, an earlier episode established it had a pattern of “failing” so he had something of an alibi for his public speaking engagements there.
Why was the event being held on his own property then?Probably because he’s now a self-help guru on house arrest at a retreat with a meeting hall. Convenient.
I’m 90% sure a condition of his parole was house arrest, that would explain why. Plus, he could charge extra for his speaking appearance if it’s his venue.
I honestly wasn’t sure either if he was in on everything and the whole retreat thing being an act, or that’s just his character now, so I really thought that it could have been purposeful when everything first blew up, but after she rewrote the ending and he was just sitting there chilling, I figured it was all real. Still, I definitely wondered the same as MKC did.
I’m glad they didn’t character-assassinate Blonsky after the great work Tim Roth did all season to make him sympathetic or at least non-villainous. The finale’s development remains a contrived way to place him on scene, though. His ignorance of what kind of meeting he was hosting makes him more oblivious than he should be (either that, or he’s on board with misogyny. I prefer to think he’s just extremely oblivious. The first option wouldn’t even track with his personality so far).I’m happy for the post-credit scene that at least salvaged him by relocating him to Kamar-Taj – even if that in turn causes Wong to break a criminal out of jail, which is not a great look for the Sorcerer Supreme. But oh well, the pairing has mad potential for future appearances.
I’m waiting for the Madisynn, Wong & Blonsky show.
Were you not aware that the intro for this episode was a virtual shot-for-shot remake of the intro for the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk TV series? Because you completely failed to mention it. So I’ll just curse you for being a millennial now. Goddamn millennials.
I was hoping for a Ferrigno cameo
He cameo’d in both Hulk movies. Yeah he should have been a security guard in the office.
He also did voice work for the Hulk in Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, & Age of Ultron.
His son is Hourman in Stargirl, by the way. (I just learned on WP that his mother’s maiden name is Green, which is sort of funny in context. Lou Sr, you don’t have to marry the color you wore!)
I don’t know, I’ve never even seen the show, and I recognized it within seconds. The cues are unmistakable so long as you know the show existed, and how could you not?
but the climax (such as it was) was too rushed to explore that.
So then like basically every other MCU show…I mean, I get that this was supposed to be an episodic sitcom rather than a long-form movie like all the other shows, and that’s great, but I wish they had leaned into that more and not had any sort of overarching plot and just done like a typical romantic shenanigans cliffhanger like every other sitcom.
That’s actually an interesting point. I think every single MCU show, even the ones I liked, have had bad season finales.
Every single show at the end of the second to last episode, I’m always like, there’s so much left to wrap up how can there only be one episode left???
I haven’t had many problems with most of the finales, but measured against the usual complaints, I think Hawkeye had a particular good one.
I didn’t love the Loki finale, but I can’t say it felt rushed.
I’d go to bat for WandaVision’s finale being pretty good. The two big showdowns were solved via a trick and a philosophical debate, with a largely bittersweet ending that suggests trauma isn’t something you can wrap up in a miniseries worth of episodes.
Of course, I think the Doctor Strange movie ruined a lot of what made WandaVision good after the fact.
The trick & the debate were both excellent moments. Monica really got shafted in the post-lockdown rewrites, though; her scenes in the finale are all pretty bad.
IMO the only exceptions are Loki and Ms. Marvel. But I understand lots of people feel differently about the Loki finale in particular.Hawkeye’s was the most disappointing to me because the rest of the season was so good.
I waited until last week and binged it. It was a good fast watch. The finale was okay and fit the show though it was very odd while watching.I guess she’s rich now? She should’ve gotten a hefty settlement if they actually were convicted of crimes against her. She’s likely got her own firm and plenty of money for being a Superhero.
Between suing Todd and suing her old firm for wrongful termination, she probably has enough money to do mostly pro bono.
I don’t know if DD and She-Hulk ever hooked up in the comics, but then again, those characters were written before anyone knew Tatiana Maslany and Charlie Cox would have enough chemistry to cause spontaneous pregnancies across the world.
Man, definitely the best comment on here! Freaking hilarious 😂
she’s fired from GLK&H (whether that’s because she’s in legal trouble or they only wanted She-Hulk is unclear)Since GLK&H stipulated that Jen would have to be She-Hulk while leading their “superhero law” division, I think it’s pretty clear that being unable to be She-Hulk clearly negates her usefulness to the firm.I had a lot of questions about Todd’s plan–Why did he wait until this meeting, so long after obtaining the blood, to inject himself?He said something about having a lab analyze and isolate whatever, so it wasn’t as simple as “let’s inject this complete stranger’s blood into my body.” Although I was kind of hoping we’d see him hulk out, then immediately die of radiation poisoning since he doesn’t have the Banner family’s unique DNA that keeps gamma radiation from killing them.
I admire Jessica Gao’s restraint in not titling this episode “KEVIN Can F**k Himself.”
K.E.V.I.N. Can Feige Himself
I wanted to like the show more than I did. It has the potential to be a breath of fresh air, but I feel like it never fully committed to what it wanted to be.Hoping it gets a second season!
Not sure how I feel about the extensive 4th wall breaking in this one. On one hand, I liked the Byrneian nature of it and some of the meta-jokes landed well (see: K.E.V.I.N.). On the other hand, the length of the Marvel Studios sequence felt extremely self-indulgent and the appeal-to-god resolution really undercut any emotional payoff from the finale.It’s nice to have a fun and breezy Marvel TV series, I liked the half-hour format, some episodes were very funny and Maslany is impeccable … but as a whole season it’s been a little disappointing. I’m hoping the team get a 2nd go around where they can script and edit things a little tighter.Also the 70s Hulk intro pastiche was fantastic.
The 4th-wall breaking got old in the comics. Part of it is that Byrne got pretty high on his own supply there for a while. Also, it was hardly a feminist success, with Byrne drawing her like he was using one hand to draw and one hand to whack off.
There’s also the question of how it works for crossovers. Ideally, when Jen goes to another show or movie, she plays by those rules. When she has visitors like DD and Wong, they get to show a lighter side.
It’ll probably be limited to some mild camera jimming in future team ups
I like the Byrne run and think it has some things going for it in terms of making a woman as the main character without having her be a mother, maiden, or crone primarily defined by her relationship to a man (in spite of the She-prefix and its assorted baggage). I also liked the 4th wall stuff more there than I did in the show, on the whole.But, yeah, the cheesecake gets real iffy. The past is a foreign country, one in which comic book publishers put pretty green ladies in underwear on the cover to sell issues. So it went and, really, still often goes.
Jennifer said in the first episode that it wouldn’t be a typical Marvel show. She outright edited her own show to prevent it from turning into the usual bloated ending mess. Honestly it’s great that she was able to use the fourth wall to retcon a season-wide plot.
I think a lot of people missed that this show went all in on taking shots at viewer expectations and predicted the internet reactions from certain outlets. Ending with the lead going “Nope, not having this crap” makes it center the focus right back on Jennifer rather than breadcrumbs for future movies like the rest of the D+ shows.
i’m with you on all of this—i really enjoy the meta element of lambasting misogynistic and easter egg-heavy fan culture, and her ability to do her own retcon is great. it’s the lack of wrap-up *after* the retcon that bums me out. she took agency from KEVIN, but she didn’t actually gain agency *in the story*–she reenters the plot and everything’s all wrapped up. but YMMV on this for sure. i’m still processing it i think!
How does the MCU create any tension, any drama whatsoever for us to care about, when the characters can just hand wave away any bad things they don’t like by breaking the 4th wall or time travel? Just further proof that the new phases are not really leading towards anything meaningful.
Yeah, like that’s going to happen in every show…
You’re aware, right, that these stories are fiction? None of it leads to anything “meaningful” except for the reaction it creates in the viewers. This show was painfully explicit about what was at stake. It was not the fate of an imaginary world, something that few of us have any experience with and mostly provokes little reaction beyond “whoo! yeah!”. It was one woman coming to terms with making very different parts of her life work together and becoming successful in a world that often tries to tear successful women down. That’s something that a lot of us can relate to.
…and her answer was basically acting like an omnipotent version of Veruca Salt? Says a lot about contemporary feminism.
One character can do that in her own show. That doesn’t mean it extends to the entire universe. And the time travel they employed in Endgame is not widely applicable to other situations.
It isn’t like She-Hulk does the 4th Wall break to solve every situation. This was a specific callback to the times she’s done it in comics and it was specifically towards the one storyline that didn’t actually fit the season or the show that Jennifer stated her series would be in the first episode.
It’s hard to even decide if the phases are leading towards anything meaningful when we’re back in a phase 1 equivalent that is meant to establish a new generation of heroes and villains as well as the overall state of the post-Endgame world. The big difference is that the world is so big now and the inclusion of Disney+ shows means that a lot more is capable of being done in each phase. People are wanting massive plot and world-changing events like we’re
back in phase 2 when that isn’t how Marvel Studios worked.
So far this phase we’ve had a lot of setup. A looot of setup.
Loki: Setup the Multiverse and KangFalcon and the Winter Soldier = Superpower black market, treatment of post-blip refugees and politics, U.S. Agent, Val, new Captain America, setup for the new Falcon.
Spider-Man = Cut ties with Stark, more multiverse shenanigans, leftover symbiote. MCU Matt Murdock.
The Eternals = Overall backstory for everything on Earth, Celestials, possible source of a new wave of superpowers.
Shang-Chi = Eastern Magic, alternate dimension full of mystical creatures. The Ten Rings.
Wandavision = The Darkhold, occult magic. Vision 2.0.
Doctor Strange = Wong as Sorcerer Supreme, America Chavez, more multiverse, Clea, incursions, occult magic.Hawkeye = Kate Bishop, Echo, Yelena, Kingpin, his wife a confirmed Shield agent, his general retirement, the reveal that there are items missing from the Avengers compound in Endgame, more on the black market.
Moon Knight = Egyptian Gods becoming active among mortals again
Thor = Greek Gods becoming active among mortals again. Sif’s return. Thor actually taking up responsibility instead of avoiding it. Confirmation that Valhalla is a real thing and that slain Asgardians are there (even though Odin probably isn’t going by the rules stated to Sif).
Ms. Marvel = Damage Control’s new role as an enforcement agency rather than disaster recovery/cleanup. Another alternate dimension full of humans. first reference of mutants. She-Hulk: Accords confirmed repealed, a look at how empowered people are being integrated into society including laws, the first case of Kamar-taj magic being in U.S. Law, Skaar, Blonsky, more Wong. MCU Daredevil, several minor C/D-list characters, references to more mutants.
I think thats everything so far, not including What If?. That is a lot of setup for multiple ongoing plot points and we still haven’t gotten BP2 or Ant-Man 3’s contributions, though I believe Namor is confirmed as the MCU’s first officially labeled ‘Mutant’ (native to their multiverse) already.
Meanwhile the franchise as a whole has had to slow down and make unexpected changes thanks to world events, actor deaths, politics, licensing, and business deals. Both Wandavision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier were confirmed to have had their last few episodes change due to the pandemic and health restrictions. All of this is also done while dealing with a fanbase that includes people perfectly willing to launch incredibly vocal online hate campaigns on the people starring in their films/shows based on political ideologies.
tl;dr, people just need to be patient. Phase 1 took 4 years and included 2 movies that weren’t even intended to be part of a greater storyline since that didn’t even officially start until Iron Man 2. The infinity stones weren’t even officially mentioned until Age of Ultron in phase 2. We’re just hitting the 4 year mark for phase 4 and that is including several years of a pandemic slowing everything down.
It’s not the same though. It’s being done at an exponentially faster rate and with an established ‘algorithm’ firmly intact that limits and stipulates until everything is a xerox of a xerox of a xerox. Yes, even the ‘different’ stuff. I’ve heard the argument made elsewhere and it’s an apt one. MCU is a big prize heiffer in shark infested waters. The big D execs have the same bloodthirsty avarice glint in their eye that Marvel did back in the 90s trying to cash in on the collector market with variant covers and endless cross-promoting ‘events’. We need the equivalent of the OG Image Comics to come along put the power back in the hands of passionate creatives and shake up the status quo. The Mouse employs some pretty ruthless assassins though, shhhhh.
To be fair, there aren’t many places where an equivalent of the OG Image Comics could come from to make movies or shows of the same impact or the same draw. The OG Image (and Spawn, which probably was the defining comic for Image then) really only worked in the 90’s because of how edgy the comic culture mindset was. McFarlane has been trying to get another Spawn movie going for a while now but honestly, its not even a franchise that lends itself well to film. The animated series on HBO was great though. WB just turned into a total mess but they’ve been in a financial downwards spiral since before the MCU was even a thing. They got ate by Discovery who seems to only care about $$$ to the point where they’re outright destroying archives of content for tax refunds and canning films that are mostly completed.
Fox got ate by Disney.
Amazon has The Boys but is essentially having to rework a good chunk of it considering how the comic wound up.
Netflix’s live action attempt got canned after the first season though. Invincible seems more like a straightforward adaptation.
Sony is clinging desperately to Spider-Man characters since they still have the rights but keep shooting themselves in the foot with studio interference to the point where the only standout thing they’ve done is Into the Spider-verse, which was from their animation division (I do fear for the sequel now that the original was such a success). Venom had potential and technically all the MCU Spider-Man films are from them just with Marvel Studio’s oversight. Which could explain why No Way Home was just hours of Peter being the dumbest guy in the film while also ending in a way that the Marvel didn’t need to explain a future lack of Spider-Man in the MCU should Sony threaten to pull out again. They also have Ghostbusters and Jumanji franchises still ongoing. I think they’re still technically recovering internally from the massive losses Final Fantasy: Spirits Within caused.
Universal has repeatedly failed to even get a cinematic universe off the ground with their Monster franchise. They honestly should’ve just kept going with Dracula Untold instead of trying again with The Mummy and letting Tom Cruise turn it into a film all about him rather than Sofia Boutella’s Mummy. They do own Syfy though so the potential for a good tv series is there.
Paramount is still going all in with Transformers while doing a soft reboot/sideboot with the Bumblebee movie and films for other Hasbro properties. They could do something on Paramount+ but they seem to be avoiding risks entirely. Oh, and Star Trek but the future of those films is iffy too.
Maybe Tyler Perry’s Studios? Though he seems incapable of creating anything that requires more work than a play or soap opera.
I dunno. Maybe it’s time to give romcoms or westerns another go?
Does Yellowstone count as a western? It’s doing really good for its demographic.
Musicals, baby!
Yeah it’s a bit of a weird ending but I really enjoyed seeing her character really wielding agency to turn off all the convoluted crap she didn’t want. Very fun
No one is missing that. It’s not exactly subtle. People are questioning if all the too cute meta moves actually serviced the story or the character (or frankly, the talented actress that never truly got to feel like her story was the center of her own show).Covering yourself in preemptive anti-misogynistic internet chatter armor doesn’t automatically make the show you’re making actually good. Putting a bit more thought into Jen’s conflict, her arc, a real antagonist would have gone a long way. It’s pretty obvious they came up with the payoff first….and then worked backwards.I liked this episode a lot because it was fun and clever and different (and actually let Maslany show off her charm and chops) but it also reconfirmed how lame and directionless I thought the season was as a whole.
Agreed. All of these people saying that there should have been more action in the finale weren’t paying attention during the rest of the season where Jen told us that she didn’t want to be a superhero, that this was a legal show and not a Marvel action show.Jen using the legal system – and her fourth-wall breaking ability – to resolve all the plots is exactly what She-Hulk in the comics would do.
If you look closely at KEVIN’s caemra section they designed it to look like it is wearing a baseball cap like Feige always wears.
It’s been reported that Jen is gonna be in the two Avengers movies, at the very least.Also wouldn’t be surprised if she pops up in Deadpool 3 either.
Have Deadpool be doing some “talking to the audience” and then Jen pops in and says “Hey, stop copying me. I was doing that years before you showed up.”
So is Wong basically just taking everyone to Kamar-Taj now? America Chavez is already there and it’s implied Ned Leeds will be trained and maybe Monica Rambeau?
Well, Wanda killed like 85 percent of the wizards so…
Right, but America Chavez has powers of her own outside of sorcery, and Abomination is Abomination..
Best guess? JLD or another Thunderbolt type (Roth and David Harbour would be hilarious together) visit there at some point.
and most importantly, Madisynn
They’re saving Madisynn for Kang the Conquerer. She’ll get him to stop terrorizing the world with a martini, Squirrel Girl style!
Wong let Katy in on important info he was giving Shang Chi, so I think Akwafina might be an Avenger, now too?
Of course Katy’s an Avenger too. Everyone’s an Avenger! But seriously didn’t you see her training with a bow for like two seconds? That totally made her an Avenger.
I’m being sarcastic but I really do think that’s what Marvel’s playing at with her.
Wong was talking about this to the parole board. After Kamar Taj got smashed by Wanda, he realized as Sorcerer Supreme that having just sorcerers as a resource wasn’t enough to defend Earth against up and coming threats (obviously). So like everyone else, with 3/6ths of the OG Avengers dead or gone, he’s decided to form his own Super Team…
Everyone in this thread is missing the obvious subtext. Wong is the MCU’s latest attempt at inclusivity. The wedding he referred to earlier was between him and Rintrah, the Minotaur who was at Kamar-Taj, and they are both in a throuple with Abomination.
Would watch
Wait, why Monica?
Because I can’t remember exactly what happened at the end of WandaVision, I thought maybe she went there?
I believe the last we saw of Monica at the end of WandaVision was when a skrull tells her that Nick Fury is in space. There’s no mention of Kamar-Taj or anything like that.
I can’t argue that. I forgot the details of stuff a while after a while. it just seemed plausible since Wong seems to be taking everyone in now.
Omg I HATED this show.And I’m ride or die marvel.What was the point of this entire show? Does Gen Z get this?Are millennials not supposed to get this anymore?I cannot comprehend what this entire season was even about or what the point of She Hulk as a character is…what function is she serving…Im lost. I’m going to go rewatch Eternals with a double feature of X-Men Origins: Wolverine to clear my head. Reset the low bar.
Ah, got a lil’ incel dingleberry hanging in the comments. Always good for a slice of that ULTRA pathetic pathos.
Yeah, I wasn’t familiar with its work before I responded.
As I said to you before, these have to be some of the saddest, most low-energy fuckers on the planet. Literally anything to avoid looking oneself in the mirror and growing into something other than a mediocre shitbag.
I agree that Jen defying and retconning a cluttered, predictable ending leads to a cluttered, rushed ending instead, but yeah overall I forgive it. Skewering K.E.V.I.N. and the algorithmically-designed finales earned this episode a LOT of goodwill for me.
Blonsky should have been either in on the Intelligencia, or duped into appearing. Willingly attending their conference and willingly breaking his parole makes very little sense if he’s truly reformed. Him being in on the plan tracks too – his big beef with Bruce in his first appearance was that someone so weak was accidentally given all of that power, and then squanders it.
Very glad Todd injecting himself with Jen’s blood was retconned. They’ve established that the Hulks have enough gamma radiation in their blood to kill people, and only a familial genetic quirk turns them into super-powered green giants. Ingesting a single drop is enough to instantly poison Stan Lee in the first Hulk movie. Everything suggests that you’d need some real super-science to go from “we’ve got Hulk blood” to “we’ve got a serum that will make you into another Hulk.”
Glossing over how Todd turned that radiation-laced blood into an actual formula is fine, of course, because now it didn’t happen. However, I’d LOVE to have seem him inject it into himself and then suffer severe medical consequences, just like how a lot of internet know-it-alls accidentally poisoned themselves during COVID because they “did their own research” etc. That Venn diagram seems like it would overlap with the Intelligencia.
The charges against Jen seemed a little trumped-up tbh (surely she broke a lot of stuff but no one was even injured in her mini-rampage), but I’d buy it since she’s a Hulk and the government is perpetually gun-shy of supers going rogue. But those charges being dropped is weird. She still did all that stuff she was arrested for, didn’t she?
And where the HELL is the comeuppance for the guy who actually seduced Jen, made a revenge porn video with her, and stole her blood?
Anyway, Matt meeting Jen’s family (including Bruce!) was really warm and nice and made me happy for both him and Jen. As did Jen’s “smash Matt Murdock” joke. Nice to see a non-chaste romantic interlude for two likable characters in Marvel, in which there aren’t really any downsides or tragedies. Especially for Matt!
Given Matt Murdock’s romantic history, She-Hulk would be about the only person capable of having a relationship with him and not get ‘fridged.
Just like every MCU show, there are a few places where ONE extra line of dialogue in a couple of places might help.
“I just rent this place out to cover overhead, Jen. I didn’t know who these morons were.” (Assuming Mary Kay isn’t correct and I’m wrong and Blonsky knew what he was doing and is part of it)
“Oh, the D.A. was up for making a deal when we pointed out that he would be jailing a woman for smashing a screen where her illegally recorded and filmed sex tape was being played and women voters might have a few thoughts about that…”
“That Josh guy is in the wind. Some actor Todd hired. We’ll find him.”
100%.
Damn, that’s just the nature of this show. If someone just put some thought into the scripts as much as you did for these few problems, it would have been so much better. Maybe actually funny, too.
The fuck out of here, incel.
Every MCU show has this problem. Even the acknowledged best of the lot – WandaVision – could benefit from two more lines here and there.
Sure, but I think a bigger problem with Wandavision was spending too much time indulging their sitcom format (you could start with episode 3 and not miss any plot), and shoehorning Monica Rambeau’s origin story, a disservice to her character and the show in general. They could have spent that time on making the villains better.
“I just rent this place out to cover overhead, Jen. I didn’t know who these morons were.” (Assuming Mary Kay isn’t correct and I’m wrong and Blonsky knew what he was doing and is part of it)I would have liked a line like this, but it wouldn’t change the fact that Blonsky didn’t do his due diligence in vetting the people he was working for. “Oh gee, I didn’t know I was hired by a bunch of immoral monsters” doesn’t make it much better.
Can he really vet them though? There’s no service and no WiFi at Blonsky’s compound, so he’d have to leave that to whomever is booking his speaking gigs, and assuming he has something like an agent doing this, the responsibility would rest solely on them.
There’s presumably at least a phone. So that his agent could, like, tell him about the event. And he could ask “Okay, so who am I speaking for?” Not even out of “I need to make sure they’re not, like, Nazis” but so that he can plan what he’s going to say. Sure, you could argue that he doesn’t care, it’s just generic pabulum that works for anyone, but that undercuts everything they’ve been doing with Blonsky’s character this season: the whole purpose of his retreat is as a place for self-examination and mindfulness of how what you do affects others. For Blonsky to then turn around and not even care who he’s talking to, to give them generic self-help tidbits without even taking a moment to learn what their deal is, makes no sense.And then on top of that Blonsky would presumably want to know whether the people he was going to be speaking to were actively evil.
I’m just trying to give the benefit of the doubt to Blonsky however I can justify it— he’d need to have a landline I assume, because these are being booked. Like you said, it makes no sense why he’d do it with the character development they’ve given him over the season, so I’m just going to chalk it up to the writers trying to put everything all at once in that finale and not thinking too closely about whether or not Emil would actually do the engagement.
I suppose you could handwave it by saying that that wasn’t the real ending, so it’s fine that it was nonsense, because the “real” story is Jen saying “no, I don’t want this ending,” and making her own. But I didn’t think it landed very well, for two reasons: One, she didn’t point out all (or even most) of the ways in which it made no sense. A lot of it did, in fact, make sense, based on what the show had shown us so far: Todd stealing her blood to get superpowers, for example, was (more or less) set up.Two, while Jen’s convo with KEVIN where she rewrites the ending was funny, the ending she gave us didn’t really flow from the rest of the season. It’s one thing to break the fourth wall and rearrange where a story goes, but to give us a story that isn’t actually based on anything we’ve seen before is… baffling.
I think he’s the guy in the watercolor court sketches with the panicked expression during Todd’s bit.I thought he was pretty charming at the time so the whole “actor I hired” bit seems like such a weird non-solution. Either he has his gross convictions and is a true believer, which is unpleasant but does represent the two-faced ability for people to navigate the world while having disgusting beliefs… or he’s some random guy who was agnostic on the issue and still willing to go along with the clearly gross and illegal premise.I feel like maybe a few more lines here or there hand waving in the aftermath could have helped deal with some of the side characters and the illusion they have inner-lives. (That said, that mostly goes towards Titania.)
I think Blonsky has been doing speaking engagements as Abom the entire time. They reference his inhibitor malfunctioning multiple times in the retreat episode, so he clearly can turn it on and off. As for the speaking appearance he wasn’t necessarily duped, but he wasn’t in on it. I assume he is just making money as a motivational speaker, and he was probably just booked and didn’t know what Intelligencia was (would be in character for him to be unplugged from internet culture) and didn’t bother vetting them. The stuff he’s saying before all hell breaks loose is just meaningless platitudes that could be used for any group of people.
“Blonsky should have been either in on the Intelligencia, or duped into appearing.”He was duped into appearing – this was in the episode.He comes in and gives a speech so generic it could fit most gatherings of people no matter what their beliefs. It’s quickly obvious that he isn’t *with* Todd’s group. Especially when Jen shows up – he is pleasantly surprised to see her, not shocked and afraid – he doesn’t know that this group has anything to do with her/She-Hulk. And he literally protects her when Todd (in Hulk form) takes a swing at her.I mean, this was pretty obvious.
absolutely loved the show. thank you to everyone involved including former jez writer kara brown! proud!
Pretty decent series. They tried to thread the needle of being a sitcom while also being the typical Marvel show with stakes. It wasn’t perfect, but they got it done for the most part. I feel like if they had a couple more episodes that emphasized the sitcom aspects more over the Marvel stakes, it would have been better (especially if we got more of the side characters like Pug and Nikki). It looked like they were getting there with some of the episodes in the middle but then had to snap back into the larger narrative. Somewhere from 10 to 12 episodes instead of 9 would have given this series the boost to go from good to great
A couple of episodes to hang out with an amazing supporting cast would have gone a real long way to making this series great. While I really enjoyed the show and admire the attempt to do a sitcom, it turns out you really do need the extra time for the characters that ~24 episode seasons allow when doing a standard comedy. These shorter episode orders are for tight plots not for wacky hijinks.
4/6 OG Avengers have kids now. Fifth was forcibly sterilized and currently dead. The last one hasn’t fucked since 1943.
So she changed it from a bad ending to another bad ending. OKAY.
I haven’t really been reading the AV club’s reviews of She-Hulk, but are they really just 90% recaps of the show now? This was a tough read.Anyways really enjoyed the finale and thought that this was in the A- range overall! This was a very She-Hulk episode and captured the character very well.
Everywhere does recaps now. The age of decent online reviews – or at least at the AV Club – might well be done, it’s easier and probably cheaper to pay someone to regurgitate the plot of something we’ve all just watched and then add in a few token criticisms or plaudits. Slap on a few bullet points and submit, then on to the next series you’re contracted to do that week. Hey, it’s a living.
TV reviews are really just unlabeled spoiler spaces now, another AVClub mainstay that has fallen by the wayside.
We should start reviewing/grading reviews to vocalize how we as readers feel about this problem. Seriously.
Definitely not on the level of the TV Club glory days, but this is actually better than the first few reviews for the show which were 99% recap. At least this writer is offering more commentary on the themes of the show/episode as whole. The other one seemed to be writing as they were watching.
We should start reviewing/grading reviews to vocalize how we as readers feel about this problem. Seriously.
I haven’t really been reading the AV club’s reviews of She-Hulk, but are they really just 90% recaps of the show now? This was a tough read.Pretty much. One of the authors recently referred to their review as a “re-cap” (there’s still a grade!) and I was like “noooooo be better!”. If I’ve watched the episode, why would I read a recap? Why would I want to read a written account of the episode I’ve already seen but with no insight (and also misses a bunch of obvious plot points)? Well, I clicked on it, that’s on me.
Since AV Club cleaned house and moved to LA they’ve farmed out a lot of the writing and it seems like they are more interested in publishing content quickly rather than well (‘cause Kinja). I mean, yeah, it’s an article about She-Hulk, but I read two paragraphs, realized it was content-less and skipped to the comments.
We should start reviewing/grading reviews to vocalize how we as readers feel about this problem. Seriously.
I actually think these recaps are for people who feel they dont have time to watch the show so these authors are just dictating it to them in written form. It’s the type of people who need to know every detail of a film before they see it or people who beg for everything to be spoiled in the trailer.
I think it’s as Dookie Monster said—the directive seems to be churning out content quickly, so the writers don’t have time to spend on deeper thought and analysis of a show. I mean, they’re barely doing any weekly TV reviews anymore, at least compared to how many shows are on now and what they used to offer. I remember seeing a comment elsewhere that said the writers back in the day treated the Newswires as a necessary evil, with the implication that reviews, features, etc. were the meat and potatoes of the publication. Now it’s sadly the opposite.
On the one hand, I’m kind of disappointed that the show’s ultimate villains were a room full of dickheads I wouldn’t give the time of day to on Twitter. On the other, I loved the full-4th-wall ingenuity of the finale. I had to look up Skaar, as I had no idea what that was about. But overall, a nice end to arguably one of the best MCU/D+ series thus far.
She also smashes sartorial statements. “Yeah, so I periodically turn green. I’m gonna wear a purple suit! Fuck you!”
“THAT’S IT! You people have stood in my way long enough! I’m going to clown college Marvel Studios’ offices in Burbank!”
Audience: “I don’t think any of us saw that coming.”
This episode was kind of a dud. It wasn’t awful, but it certainly wasn’t great either. Just “meh”.They spent the season establishing stakes, only to have Jen yell cut when things were getting good. The episode ended with everything suddenly ok again, because Jen says so.I honestly would rather forget this show now. Bring on another season of Moon Knight or something.
LOL at this episode being “a dud” when the main character literally breaks the fourth wall, exits the episode, and talks to the writers.
I thought/assumed this was a ten-episode season and that we’d get another episode after this one to give a sense of the new status quo after this episode’s shenanigans. I assume I must be wrong there, but that feels like a shame to me.
She did fix her ending. Off-screen. It’s one final gag; remember, she asked KEVIN on the way out what the most cost-effective way to deal with the rest of the episode would be. So the entire climactic fight scene gets skipped and we’re just assured it did happen and it was very cool and everyone got an entirely well-deserved and logical ending, shut up, writers are expensive too.
this is my favorite interpretation of the hasty wrap up so far—i guess it just went over my head, but it would have been fun if they leaned into this even more
She Hulk fans have Stockholm syndrome.
Also, they show the trial in the end credit paintings.
A subtle gag was that right after she said “most-cost effective way” they made an immediate smash cut to having everything be resolved. Very hulkian.
Did they fight though? I like your explanation but wish they’d played up the “yeah that totally happened” more because I am honestly confused. I took Jen “editing” the finale with K.E.V.I.N. to mean Todd didn’t inject himself with the blood, Bruce didn’t fall from space to join the melee, etc. She just… crashed the meeting and got Todd arrested? And then Emil got arrested too for secretly transforming into Abomination for his speaking engagement? But Titania still showed up for some reason. And Daredevil showed up “to help,” which could indicate there was a battle.Ok, I’m leaning towards a big fight still happened, but I don’t think it’s very clear.
There was no fight in Jen’s rewritten ending. As she has said multiple times this season, this is not a Marvel superhero show, it’s a legal comedy. Jen wanted to resolve all the plots through the law, not by punching someone. In her new ending she doesn’t punch Todd, she sues him and has him arrested.
I am curious how the whole confrontation played out in your head. What did Todd get arrested for, illicitly filming her and releasing the video? And she got all the evidence to the authorities and they got an arrest warrant in hours through meta story magic? If so, why did all the police show up to arrest his dweeby ass for a non-violent crime? If all the cops were there for Emil, how did they know he was transforming when he seemed to have done it covertly many times before? And then Titania and Daredevil just showed up to hang around and watch them get arrested because of more meta hand waving?The show is probably much more fresh for you, but I don’t think it makes sense either way. I suppose you can meta-handwave away all the problems so it makes sense in-universe, but it doesn’t make for a satisfying story.
I love that they undercut our expectations of a CGI-heavy final battle. Screw it, Jen’s right, we’ve seen this before on all the other shows and movies. We already know how that plays out and the important part is how it affects her. She lampshaded that the final battle was a silly concept and skipped to the character resolution parts. A+ meta
“The highly stylized “Savage She-Hulk” opening is a lot of fun (love that they made Mark Ruffalo stand silently in ’70s gear for that).”Mary Kate, is at all possible you don’t realize that this opening was a shot-for-shot (and medium and font) recreation with Maslany of the opening titles of 1978-82’s “The Incredible Hulk”? Oy.
sadly, it’s entirely possible!! it’s before my time but i wish i put two and two together before publishing 😅 i still love that they made mark ruffalo stand silently in ’70s gear for it!
Guess videos are blocked now.
Kinja is eating youtube videos.
Before your time? If you want to be a media critic you should be familiar with cinema and TV looooong before your time. Obviously it’s not possible to have watched everything, but you’re critiquing a Hulk show, that the MCU has made call backs to from the start. Where do you think, “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” came from? Not to mention, the trailers showed some of those shots and the internet was awash with how they were direct recreations from the TV show opening. I certainly wouldn’t say you need to be well versed in the Incredible Hulk TV show, but not knowing it’s willdy memed opening is strange. You didn’t even question the opening of the episode? It didn’t occur to you that this is an obvious recreation of something else? Why would the show be recreating a late 70s early 80s look otherwise?
Yeah an Easter egg would be a quick shot of Bill Bixby on a TV screen. This was obviously a shot for shot remake of something. Why did they think Ruffalo was dressed in 70s clothes? Just lol random?I guess my standards are high but Id expect a review of Halloween Ends to have at least a Wikipedic knowledge of John carpenters original. Wandavision must have been a complete mystery.
Did…did you just seriously make a point of condescendingly telling a woman how to do her job because she didn’t know a piece of trivia you do, on her review of a show about a woman having to do her job to the backdrop of douchebags on the internet being hypercritical. I almost feel like this has to be a bit, because no one is this unaware.
What? For one, on the show, the douchebags on the internet weren’t being “hypercritical” of Jen. They were misogynistic douchebags attacking her for simply being who she was, not her job. Me pointing out that someone reviewing/critiquing media should be familiar with the source material, or pop culture in general, has nothing to do with the writer’s gender and everything to do with the writer’s job. There literally isn’t a single other review on the internet that didn’t know that was a recreation of the opening of The Incredible Hulk TV show. It’s not a “piece of trivia.” It’s a very well know pop culture opening that filled social media after the first trailer of the show dropped many months ago, so age is no excuse. I wasn’t faulting Carr’s obliviousness to a well known TV opening because she is woman, so you can fuck off with bad faith assumption.
Did… did you just weirdly turn this into a sexism issue because the writer is getting criticized for completely missing a famous thing they shouldn’t have as a fan writing about a superhero/Marvel/Hulk show?I almost feel like this has to be a bit, because no one is this insufferable.
Especially considering that it takes no effort these days to bone up on the history of pop culture! “I’m writing about a beloved character, let’s visit Wikipedia and spend 5 minutes reading about the history of said character.”
It’s so goddamn weird seeing a tv show that—along with Wonder Woman—was my first major intro to live-action superheroes and was such a huge phenomenon for me as a kid be relegated to “that was before my time” by a professional media critic. God, being old is a mindfuck.
Say that ain’t so. Because yeah, he wasn’t dressed “70s”, he was dressed as Bill Bixby as Bruce Banner.
Bixby was DAVID Banner.
David Banner
Reminds me of a review of “Maisel” in Season 2 where they recreated the opening credits to “To Kill a Mockingbird”, (complete with the Elmer Bernstein theme) and the writer thought they were imitating Wes Anderson! (Head. Desk.)
Well, as long as we’re going back in time, having K.E.V.I.N. spelled out like that and the general shape gave me real “The Black Hole” flashbacks to B.O.B. and V.I.N.C.E.N.T.
And how I slept with the fucking light on for a week after Maximillian killed Norman Bates.
That show ended 40 years ago. Not everyone is going to immediately identify a pop culture reference from the Reagan administration.
Yeah you can’t expect a professional pop culture reviewer to be familiar with a show about the Hulk when when reviewing a show about the Hulk.
It’s an easter egg for a reason; some people will get the reference and some won’t. If your requirement is that every reviewer should be a dyed-in-the-wool fan, well, I hope that works out for you.
I never watched the original Hulk series and it was very obvious to me it was referencing it, just by the language used. This is as subtle as a Hulk smash.
when you are the writer/reviewer… YEAH… you should know. Or put in some effort to research. Dont make excuses for the drain circling
It’s an easter egg for a reason; some people will get the reference and some won’t.Easter egg? It’s not subtle, it’s a complete shot-for-shot recreation of the original show’s opening, a show that was wildly successful and a huge part of 1970s pop culture. Many viewers who didn’t grow up with The Dick van Dyke Show or The Brady Bunch or Bewitched still got the references in WandaVision. Sure, not every casual viewer watching Disney+ is going to get it, but this is the AV Club – self proclaimed “pop-culture obsessive writing for the pop-culture obsessed”. It’s fair to call out when a writer whiffs the assignment (it is something a decent Editor should have caught). It’s not an epic mistake – it’s just a show – and just another daily reminder that AV Club has become a pale shadow of its former self.
Why stop there? Should the reviewer have knowledge of the 1960’s The Marvel Super Heroes cartoon? After all, the Hulk is in it. There’s another animated series from 1982-1983. What about the six TV movies released from 1977-1990? The character’s also appeared in 10 published novels and a podcast too. Make it all a requirement!
Well, if you’re going to write about a subject, it wouldn’t hurt to have a passing knowledge of its history in media, especially one as huge as The Incredible Hulk show. Because unlike those additional media appearances you mention, The Incredible Hulk show smashed into casual pop culture for generations. It’s like writing about Batman (or Batgirl) and not knowing there was a wildly popular Batman TV show in the 1960s (that also featured Batgirl).
I get what you’re saying, time thins these references out. Just watch a Looney Tunes from 1940 and there’s going to be some reference to 1920s pop culture that 95% of viewers now will miss. As a kid I watched Long Haired Hare a zillion times before I watched Fantasia and got the Leopold reference.
So yeah it’s ok the author wasn’t familiar with the old show’s iconic opening, sometimes fresh eyes provide a welcome perspective. But this being a website focusing on pop culture opens the door to criticism
when something very popular goes over a writer’s head – it was a blatant homage, not an easter egg. And if an Editor actually read through it, they could have said “hey, your take on this is off – check out this link”.
*there were only 3 Incredible Hulk TV movies released from 1988-1990, the 1978 pilot and follow up “Married” were 2-part episodes were later packaged as a TV movies.
Editors at the AV Club? There are still people listed as “editors” on the Staff page, but I’m pretty sure they’re just vanity titles. The closest thing to an actual editor here would probably be someone’s iPhone autocorrect.
The show might’ve ended 40 years ago, but it’s had a lasting effect on pop culture. It’s a show that STILL gets referenced in one way or another on in other TV shows. It’s like MASH in that regard.
For example…
Other than a character named Hawkeye and being set in (I think?) Korea, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about MASH. Some things just pass people by. Getting upset about someone not recognizing a reference to a show that’s older than most people engaging with the MCU is a bizarre hill to die on.
A baby was screaming on a plane and my wife joked “will you shut that chicken UP!” I was blown away because I know she never watched MASH, but apparently Seinfeld referenced it an episode which was where she got it from which then made it less funny. Unfortunately the chicken did not shut up.
I was born 4 years after that show ended & never saw a single rerun of it, & I still got the reference.
They should hire you.
When you’re getting paid to write for a popculture site, at least MINIMAL research should be put in. Hell 30 seconds on reddit would have done.
How dare you, that was a Carter administration reference!
Mostly.
I mean, it wasn’t just a show from 40 years ago, it was a major superhero/Marvel/Hulk milestone. You know, the thing we’re all fans of, writing about.
I was surprised the review didn’t start out by discussing how freaking amazing that opening was! But it makes sense that the reviewer wouldn’t recognize it. Can’t believe that show’s 40 years old.
Pop culture site does not understand pop culture. News at 11.
It wasn’t shot-for-shot. It was a mix of recreated shots from the old show and others in the same style that only pertain to She-Hulk. Like, Bill Bixby didn’t chat on the Internet (clearly) nor had a date with some guy. Conversely, Jen doesn’t look at her own tombstone.
So, uh, the decision to make the head of the misogynist organization gay was definitely a gear shift. Thought we were done with that particular stereotype but guess not
Did I miss something? Or is this a joke that went over my head?
He said another guy was attractive, so therefore he must be gay.
The math checks out
Pretty sure Todd was not gay. He says that Pug is hot but that is more of a “dude-bro” admiring the handsomeness of another “dude-bro”.
“distracts from the story, which is that my life fell apart right when I was learning to be both Jen and She-Hulk. Those are my stakes, K.E.V.I.N.”
I wish the show realized that, then. They had 9 episodes- more than any other MCU series besides Wandavision- to cover this, and they did not use their time well. And even still, the series concludes by handing Jen everything she wants without actually solving her problems on her own (or even being a hero). If the finale is unsatisfying, this is why.I did quite like popping out of the Disney+ menu. That was amazing. And going to meet the writers was fun. But it’s remarkable how the blood, Hulk, Titania, just nothing went anywhere. So I still wish there was a way we could have this meta moment, but still resolve the plots better. I heard they actually had to re-shoot the finale, so that may have something to do with why it is the way it is.
this sums up exactly how i feel too!
Yeah, pointing out that some of the storylines from the previous 8 episodes were bad does not absolve them from being bad. Doesn’t matter how cute and meta it is.The blood, Titania, HulkKing, her legal work, the Wrecking Crew… all of it felt completely siloed off from each other. Things were introduced and would disappear for multiple episodes at a time. When Jen met with Todd in last week’s ep, both my wife and I were like are we supposed to remember who that is?
Yeah it was very comic book like.Which is good since it’s a comic book show.I had no problem remembering Todd…?
You must have an amazing memory to remember a character who was featured multiple times in multiple episodes— like OP, I frequently need to be reminded who characters are, which is why I needed to watch the title card each time to remember who Lady-Hulk (?) was.
Ouch you were so close, the lead is ‘Hulkess’, not ‘Lady-Hulk’.
GalvaTron Guy was obviously calling her “Lady Hulk” as a reference to the Intelligencia guys talking about the Jane Foster Thor and calling her “Lady Thor”.
Yep and I was riffing on that!
I’m so glad that someone else is saying this. I said it on the io9 review and a commenter implied I was a misogynist who just wanted stories to fit in little boxes.
Like, y’all, I just want writers to not include eight episodes of weak plotlines just so they can have their nineth episode say “lol, weren’t those plotlines weak?”
Agreed – even though this show makes fun of the Marvel formula, it succumbs to the same issues that plague later era Marvel movies – there seems to be a more cohesive but longer story that was chopped up, and what we’re watching is mended-together chunks.
I mean… where else would the blood plotline go? They were stealing her blood to create an evil Hulk… and they did. They just skipped over the big boss battle. That’s it.
I liked the 4th wall aspect of Jen re-writing her own ending. It harkens back to Byrne’s run where she would often argue with him about the story which ultimately ended with her throwing him out a window. The problem I had though, is that, until the finale, this level of meta 4th wall breaking wasn’t a mainstay of the show like it was in comics. So devoting so much screen time in the finale to finally committing to it didn’t gel with the rest of the series, where it was used pretty sparingly. Gao said in a THR interview that she loved the comics for the meta narrative and how Jen would override the writers to take control of her own story. She went on, “It was tricky finding the balance because if I had my way, she’d be breaking the fourth wall every other sentence,” and, “Everybody had to pull me back a little bit more from it.” It now seems like everyone should’ve let Gao do that because, not only could that have been quite fun, but it would have made the ultra 4th wall breaking of the finale feel more organic to what they were trying to do.
I get what you’re saying, but I did enjoy that, along with the homage in the beginning, they went all-in on the meta aspect in this episode. It was fun and felt like a more defined comedic voice, so I do agree that they probably should’ve let Jessica Gao indulge in that more. At least they eased us into it a bit with the more extended fourth wall breaking in the second to last episode (“why are you still here? oh, next episode is the finale?”).
Agree. The meta-third-act was the highlight of the entire season for me (along with the cheesy 1980s alternate-opening). I completely thought “This is what the show should have been all along, all the time!”. Then it could have been both funny and groundbreaking.Instead, we got a hodgepodge of disparate elements, several of which didn’t work at all (it’s undeniable now that the writers didn’t care for the legal angle in the least. They don’t even seem to know what “closing argument” means). What’s worse, most of the supporting characters were tragically underserved (I’m legit mad for how poorly was Jameela Jamil used), without this translating into a deeper exploration of the protagonist and the themes connected to her, which were only paid lip service.
My Internet was glitching out and making the show freeze earlier while I was trying to watch so I legitimately thought it going to the Disney+ menu was real.I agree they didn’t use their time well to really hammer home the emotional stakes. The only one that really worked on that aspect was when she was stuck on Emil’s farm. Also I grumbled about this before, but what a waste of a talented cast!! I did crack up at Titania showing up randomly, but kind of wish they’d had a throwaway line of what she was doing there. Was she trying to help Jen or fight Jen or did she just want to fuck some shit up?
“I did crack up at Titania showing up randomly, but kind of wish they’d had a throwaway line of what she was doing there.”Titania randomly showing up was a comment on how most Marvel shows have all the characters from all the various plots throughout the season just show up in the finale, whether they should or not. Jen literally discusses this when talking to K.E.V.I.N.
Meh. The way the story was resolved just didn’t work well enough that “haha, meta!!” could excuse it. They could lampshade the trope and still have it make a bit of sense, but this was a very minor quibble I had.
Even though it was nine episodes, each was only a half hour, so we don’t spend as much time with She-Hulk as we do with Falcon and the Winter Soldier in their six hour-ish episodes. If anything, I feel like this finale warranted a longer running time to at least see Jen’s version of the climax played out, which might have strengthened it and the series overall.
All of that is incredibly consistent with the John Byrne run, in which baroque, elaborately set up plotlines were often deflated with no looking back.
Full support for a different ending from the massive brawl that started to kick off, but if you’re going to break the fourth wall that dramatically, you need to be a much, much funnier show. God bless Tatiana Maslany for giving it her all throughout this entire series, but seven out of nine episodes were a waste of time and patience, and none more so than the finale. I found it utterly insufferable, except for Matt’s cameo. (As Matt, not as Daredevil; him dropping out of the sky in order to just stand there was deeply dumb.)Mind you, yes, I totally agree that Practical Effects She-Hulk was great. We’d’ve been so much better off if they’d gone down that route instead of Dodgy CGI She-Hulk. Having said that, the show would probably have got complaints of a different form… Maybe Marvel should’ve just been nice to their VFX team.
Serious question for MCU fans who don’t like She-Hulk: Are you sure you’re getting stoned enough before each episode? This finale was genius. The first two minutes alone justified the whole series.
I wish the made the men’s complaints a little more message board accurate, like:“Yo, now I hear they’re making Black Panther a woman.”“WHAT??”
Am I the only one that got strong Clone Club vibes from that dancing video?
At first I literally thought they used that actual clip from OB when they were looking at it on Nikki’s phone.
I liked how the final shot was like a throwback to sitcom season finales: Boyfriend finally meets the parents and it’s a hoot! And here comes cousin with son/new character! Tune in next season to see more of the wacky Walters+ family!
So glad they brought Mark Lynn Baker back in!
Needs more Cousin Balki
Him spraying the reporters with the hose was a highlight, even during a drought.
Really enjoyed this! Such a fun show in the often self-important and overly serious MCU. No world ending massive stakes, and the first real half hour comedy procedural that worked for me largely thanks to the fab Tatiana Maslany
Overall I thought the season was fine. The humor succeeded mostly, particularly the dynamics between Jen and Nikki and Jen and Daredevil as well as when the show itself was skewering Marvel (one of my favorite lines from any Marvel movie is Bruce asking, “wait… so there’s an Ant-Man and a Spider-Man?”). But it failed in telling a cohesive story. Many of the scenes just seemed like random skits, especially with all the cameos. I liked the finale though and was thinking the same thing as Jen (seriously? They’re going to have the HulkKing guy inject himself and get powers now?!?) until she paused and went to talk to the writers which was a nice way to subvert expectations.
I’d still like to see more Madysynn(?). Bonus points if I never have to see that Titania character again though.
Apparently the show-runner said that if they had known how great Madisynn would be and the public’s reaction to her they definitely would have brought her back for the finale.
This episode was horrendous, because it was so smugly obnoxious. “We’ll use Jen’s fourth-wall break to poke fun at ourselves, despite the fact the digs mean literally nothing as they have zero impact on anything. ie We’re aware of our expectations/faults but don’t do anything truly interesting about them.”Now, don’t get me wrong, Tatiana Maslany is 100000% delightful in her little quips and winks to us during the KEVIN bit, but uuurrgghhh commenting that it’s a mess but then still ending in a less chaotically messy way was awful. Todd really was HulkKing? Terrible. I didn’t expect The Leader but c’mon, having the most obvious suspect being the baddie was disappointing. Everything else up to the big fight was ace, though, especially the reveal that the meeting was being held at the retreat and that Emil was involved. I honestly thought to myself “Oh no, Emil, I really thought you’d changed!”And he had! THAT was decent misdirection. Pug going in and being visibly uncomfortable with everything but still managing to ingratiate himself: excellent. Matt Murdock popping up? Sure why not. Hulk’s son? Eeeehhhhh.
Apparently someone didn’t understand what show they were watching and wanted a typical Marvel superhero show.
I liked it as a stand alone episode but I think the season over all was disappointing, mainly the middle episodes. They did a good job of setting up the premise of the series with episode 1. The Daredevil episode was good.It feels like the writers didn’t know what they wanted to do with the series and were throwing anything they can think of into it. While the sillier storylines are chuckle worthy, none of them are really that funny. They had some fun characters like Madisynn and Blonsky’s support group but the stories and jokes weren’t that funny. And they did a pretty poor job of handling the more serious subject matters. They brought up something as serious and dark as revenge porn and kind of glossed over it. So Jen is going to sue Todd, but what about Jason? And the incredible harm that can do to someone’s life?
The finale has a stupendous subversive sequence. Unfortunately when we return to the main narrative, the climax has already happened. Todd is in cuffs with no explanation of why he was arrested. We were robbed of seeing Jen destroy him without hulking out! So it does still suffer a bit from a typical rushed D+ finale. They still could’ve satisfied viewers waiting eagerly for fisticuffs had they not made the Wrecking Crew & Titania so pathetic.
Although I was worried going in, She-Hulk: Attorney At Law managed to avert my worst case scenarios. I can’t wait to watch Daredevil: Born Again & moan every week She-Hulk doesn’t guest star!
https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2022/10/13/did-she-hulk-attorney-at-law-pass-the-bar/
“So it does still suffer a bit from a typical rushed D+ finale.”Ya, thinking about it now I realize they just ended up trading one type of set piece for another
The why the f not of this makes me miss legends even more. (not a dig at this ep, loved it, but I miss LoT)
I still enjoyed this finale; it’s certainly far from the worst finale the Disney-era MCU has produced thus far (that honor goes to Falcon & Winter Soldier, imo), but I would say this is the one instance this season where they overdid the meta thing. The occasional wink and nod or bit of exposition at the 4th wall is fine, but doing it for that long and that explicitly just sucks all the life out of the thing for me. That said, I do enjoy the commentary about the MCU’s habit of dropping the plot off a cliff in exchange for flash and bombast in the final frames, but the further issue here, as you said, is that they replaced the flash with… not much at all. A neat bow on everything, here’s a potential Planet Hulk teaser, hi Wong!, see you all later.
Before Wong referred to a wedding and the next episode was a wedding…then here they talk about another show…were they doing crossovers and thinking two shows were going to air at once? So many small plotholes.I was also surprised retroactively to find out the scene with K.E.V.I.N. W.A.S. the climax. That wasn’t so bad, but it wasn’t made clear, I was waiting for a courtroom summation or something also…I dunno what…apparently neither did the writers.
In this case the meaning of “sucked into another show” was “started watching a new TV show and lost track of time” not “literally sucked into the events of another Disney+ show”
“I was waiting for a courtroom summation or something also”Although it wasn’t technically done in a courtoom, this is literally what Jen does to K.E.V.I.N. at the end of their interaction.
I enjoyed the finale and found it satisfying. The fact we don’t get much closure on the ‘villains’ or the ‘wrap up’ is par for the course with most legal dramas, which just feature a check-in to confirm everyone got their due [process]. All things considered, the show promised us a light legal show in the Marvel universe and that’s exactly what we got.
I laughed when she asked about the X-Men and K.E.V.I.N. replies that he can’t talk about it now, one of his “eyes” winks at us.
I wouldn’t be too critical of anyone not recognizing the original hulk intro. Just happy now that it dislodged the fact that Patrick Duffy (could remember) starred in the Man from Atlantis (could not remember, but recalled seeing him swim in a poorly lit fashion) around the same time. Not everyone watched Planet of Vampires when they were six. Which, for the record and a long time, I thought was a Dario Argento movie. Saw an actual She-Hulk attorney for hire ad on a bus in my neighbourhood! 1-800-SHE-HULK. It’s exclamation marks and fourth wall thumbs up all the way down after that.
I gotta say, Goldberry is a side character. I like her too but dang if every review hasn’t been all “Where’s Poochie” this whole time. Imagine writing like LOST reviews and every one is just “Where’s Boone? I know this is a Hurley episode but dammit where’s Boone?”
That’s what happens when you cast a Tony-winning star in a tiny role: people think you can’t have just cast her as Heroine’s Other Colleague for no reason, right? RIGHT?
Broadway doesn’t pay very well. This probably paid great, and didn’t require a lot of time. Simple as that.
That explains why she took the part, but doesn’t explain why they offered it to her.
Seriously. I liked that character and the actress was good, but the reviews acted like this was an A-list actor who was wasted in this role. This was an enjoyable recurring character that was never intended to be in the regular supporting cast.
I haven’t seen anyone mention it yet, so maybe I’m nuts, but I would SWEAR that footage of Jen partying in college was in fact the scene of all the clone sisters dancing together from Orphan Black! Am I wrong?
It was reminiscent of it, but nah that was new footage. I did think she looked like Cosima at first. If it were that clip it would’ve had Alison doing this little jig in the corner!
I literally thought it was that OB clip at first as well.
When packing up from GKL&H, if they they’d only had a somber shot of Jen leaving her office while playing the “Walking Away” music from “The Incredible Hulk” …Missed opportunity really. 😉
I will say I did love K.E.V.I.N.’s hat.
I’ll end at the beginning: this is an uneven episode to match an uneven season And yet, we were content to give it a B- or better for every episode.This finale reminds me of both the original Wayne’s World, and the court episode of the Clerks cartoon. Not to compare this show to those, which were both superior in every way you could think of. Wayne’s World had an extraordinarily dark ending where Wayne fails, Cassandra ends up with the villain, Wayne’s house burns down, and Garth’s life hangs in the balance. I was upset. And it was just a fake out. None of the rest of the ending matters, the bad one was just a fun way to fuck with the audience.In Clerks, they just use the courtroom setting for gags. The outcome of Dante’s trial never really mattered, they were always going to return to the status quo with a fresh premise. So once they were done telling jokes, instead of write anything resembling a plot resolution, they do this insane sequence that’s explained as the original ending was lost and replaced by whatever the Korean animation studio could put together, which was a bear driving a car, people riding in a Transformer getting crushed when it changes into robot mode, and Tom Cruise defeating the fat rat tyrant enslaving all the Korean animators after Dante and Randall and their Pikachu fail to stop him. It’s random, hilarious chaos, and it works because none of the rest of the episode took the trial seriously either.Wayne’s World’s real ending is just a quick wrap up. The plan succeeded, roll credits. It would be disappointing if it wasn’t such a relief compared to the dark, fake ending. I took that story as seriously as the movie wanted me to, and then they prepped me to have a non-ending by showing me an ending I didn’t want. Clerks showed me that nothing mattered, and then they showed me the full potential of what something that doesn’t matter could be. She-Hulk wanted to do both of these things, but ended up succeeding at neither.They finally got me to care about the story in the previous episode. What Todd did was gross, and completely outside of the vibe the show intended to have. I wasn’t happy with the blood plot, and the whole MRA douche meeting was just testing the amount of toxic male fandom finger wagging I could take, but the plot was more organically leading to that confrontation than just what we were given (less so all the ‘enhanced’ showing up for no good reason). Todd will have an off screen trial and that is all we get for our trouble. Remember when Riley punched Parker on Buffy? I needed that.Random side note: the writers room scene felt dishonest since Jessica Gao was hired to be head writer in November 2019, so it seems likely most of their meetings would not be in person, but in Zoom calls.
Yea I absolutely hated the “she has agency to write her own ending, but we don’t see how we get to that ending”. I understand what they wanted to do but we finally got a female superhero facing real world stakes that many women face (running the gamut of bad dates to revenge porn) and the only way to solve that was this confrontation with K.E.V.I.N. It just felt lazy to me.
“Todd will have an off screen trial and that is all we get for our trouble. Remember when Riley punched Parker on Buffy? I needed that.”This resolution is the entire point of the show, and Jen’s arc. She has come to terms with being She-Hulk, but she does not want to be *just* a superhero. Her main power is the law – she is much happier using the law to get revenge on Todd then just hitting him. Suing him and putting him in prison is much more satisfying for her.
Gotta say, I did not expect the show to pull a Blazing Saddles with the ending and end up on the backlot. I agree with the critique that it undermined a season’s worth of character work though. It reminds me (in a bad way) of The Simpsons’ “The Principal and the Pauper”; it’s one thing to not take anything seriously, but to ask the audience to invest time in story and character and then effectively mock them for doing so by undermining all of it can just be kind of obnoxious. One of the reasons Saddles got away with this same trick is that the whole thing is openly a farce, but She-Hulk was more of a straightforward comedy with some breaking of the fourth wall, up until suddenly it wasn’t.Honestly, the biggest problem is that the show is part of the MCU. As a standalone, taking this approach probably could have worked – but once it tied into the MCU (with many crossover characters and storylines), there are certain expectations that come with that. It’s not just that we’ve invested a few hours into Jen & Co. – it’s that we’ve invested far more hours over many years into the whole project. The suspension of disbelief for the MCU always came with a few winks – it is a silly franchise based on kids’ stories, after all – but even so, it asks us to care about characters like the Hulk and Wong (and Daredevil). We’re supposed to take their stories seriously and care about their well-being, but it’s a lot harder to do so after seeing that commitment undermined this way. The MCU approach allows for a lot of tonal flexibility between projects, but that flexibility isn’t infinite, and I feel like this went too far. If we spend the entire next Avengers movie wondering why Jen doesn’t show up and invoke a deus-ex-machina to kill Kang (or whomever), that kinda kills the sense of drama and stakes.Maybe if the episode were 10-15 minutes longer, and had both a little more time building to the big climax and spent a bit more wrapping up the storylines and giving the characters some actual catharsis, it could have worked better, but instead it felt glib in the wrong way. I respect the writers for taking a big swing – it was a risk, and I did like that they lampshaded the fact that there’s a clear Marvel formula. They wanted to do something different, and in that regard, they succeeded. I just wish they had found a way to do it that didn’t feel like they were insulting the audience for caring about the entire MCU and its characters and stories in the process.
Blonsky playing a long villainous game would have been an impactful turnImpactful? Maybe.
Good? NO.
Yeah I’m glad they didn’t ruin his character by making him evil again. Why would he bother with this whole retreat lifestyle. Although I’m not sure why he’d be so worshipped by this group. First, he was an enemy of the Hulk (who they love) then he’s some ‘beta male’ self help guru.
Intelligencia would see Emile as (a) a man, and (b) someone who earned his powers (volunteered for an experiment in the military).And I wouldn’t say these guys *love* the Hulk. They just hate seeing a female get her powers from him “through nepotism”.
Mostly enjoyed the episode and the season, except for that meta-sequence. It didn’t hit me as cute but rather tone-deaf and lacking self-awareness. If you are contributing to something, something pretty bad, don’t make it into a bit. Fix it. You are pretty much the industry. Don’t make jokes about it, stop that behavior. I’m pretty sure the CGI studios especially did not appreciate that knowing wink in their direction while still suffering from unhealthy habits Disney is making the new standard.
Also, pointing out that the proposed ending was dumb and lazy then replacing it with something dumb and lazy (while admittedly a bit more fresh and a shade more interesting) did not leave me a satisfied viewer. Entertained, sure, but not satisfied. Slightly newer, a bit tastier, but still trash food.
The ending recognizing a bad plot and going meta to correct it is She-Hulk 101 right out of the comics.This is like complaining that a Batman movie has Batman be dark and brooding.
I know a lot of people here are mad/annoyed with this write up and while I agree with most of the points, let’s be civil and keep in mind the circumstances. Yeah I am not going to blame the writer, I know she’s relatively new and probably working under not great conditions and just trying to fulfill
what the “higher ups” demand of this site these days, which is mostly
junk. I’ve been there. It’s a tough balance. Let’s cut her some slack.
Some constructive criticism is fine I think but let’s not get nasty.
I miss old AV Club too.
But that loss isn’t on the writers. It’s on Herb.I mean, unless you’re Sam Basanti then yeah skewer away!
“relatively” is a key word here, Mary Kate Carr has been here for at least a few months by now. There’s a point where ur not new anymore.
I had a lot of questions about Todd’s plan–Why did he wait until this meeting, so long after obtaining the blood, to inject himself? Why was he able to retain his mental facilities as Hulk?—but by the end of the episode, none of them really mattered. Ah well.That was entirely the point, this convoluted drawn out plot ending in a villain monologue was 100% cliché and Jen points that out and has it erased because it’s “from every superhero story ever.”
To try and sum it up, I feel this needed to be a much smarter show to be so self-referential in the finale.
Breaking the fourth wall might work in a comic but it really doesn’t in an established universe where this isn’t a thing. To have a character, who has been interacting with “our” Hulk, Abomination etc, suddenly talk to the writers, see clips from MCU films and so on, makes absolutely no sense. An extremely messy and lazy finale does not suddenly become good because the writers acknowledge it’s messy and lazy.
Uh, when it first happened in the comics it was done “in an established universe where this isn’t a thing”, and it worked just fine. As it did here.
Yeah, there were multiple times in She-Hulk’s comic where another hero would guest-star and She-Hulk would talk to the reader and the guest-star would not understand what was happening? “Who are you talking to? What do you mean, ‘we’re in a comic book’?”
This does make sense, just like it did in the comics. She-Hulk would often talk to the readers/writers and it worked because *she* was aware that she was in a comicbook. When other heroes guest-starred in her book they didn’t know what she was talking about or who she was talking to, and it worked there, and it would work here. I really wanted a scene where Jen was talking to the audience in front of Matt/Wong/etc and they said “Who are you talking to?”
The sexist bro behind it all getting Jen’s blood sort of confused me and I apologize if this was explained and I missed it or otherwise covered here in the comments- doesn’t Bruce tell her early on that her DNA, like his, has a component that allows her to deal/process with Gamma Radiation, hence her surviving and becoming a Hulk? Therefore, how can anyone else just inject it and automatically Hulk out? Of course that may be the “lazy writing” Jen herself protests about, but I am curious if anyone else noticed that and also had an answer for it.
I think it’s part of the last writing Jen critiques, as well as her cry of “none of these storylines make any sense”But they do handwave it slightly when Todd says he had his lab “synthesize” her blood. Not sure what this actually means but I think the implication is that the process somehow made it safe for him to use. It’s barely a justification though so it’s good they scrapped it.
I’m more concerned about how heavy Jen is sleeping if someone can stick her with a needle and draw a decent blood sample without her waking up. Was that dick so good it put her in a temporary coma?
It’s the MCU – they can easily have a needle that painlessly takes a blood sample from someone.
One may as well opine that “a wizard did it.”
Titania, still an utterly useless and extraneous characterJust like influencers in real life!
I didn’t like this. As mentioned, the new ending wasn’t an improvement on the hack ending, and the fourth wall breaking went too far for my tastes. At a certain point, you can break the forth wall so much you lose any tether to reality, stakes or me giving a shit. They pulled a Gremlins 2. I don’t like Gremlins 2 either.
There’s a lack of discussion about K.E.V.I.N.’s “face” being topped by something resembling a black ballcap, which was a hidden Feige-reference within the 4th-wall evisceration which I genuinely appreciated.Loved the NBC/Hulk show reference* (which is its own easter egg, since Marvel created Jen Walters to prevent a female spin-off of The Incredible Hulk, a la the Bionic Woman to the Six-Million Dollar Man). Genuinely appreciated the character work by Nikki and Pug (though I would have liked to have seen Pug doing something lawyer-ly at some point during the season). Didn’t expect to see Daredevil a second time in the season, either….the Young Avengers-fan in me wanted it to be Emperor Dorrek showing up with Bruce during the family (even though Hulkling isn’t actually related to Bruce; there’s still Secret Invasion to set up), but other than that, I really enjoyed this season, and will have to wait patiently for a second season (dream-sequenced or otherwise).*-As long as we’re acknowledging that Mary Kate isn’t old enough to remember the live-action Hulk TV series, are we taking bets on whether she placed Mark Linn-Baker as Cousin Larry from “Perfect Strangers?” I don’t think I’ve seen him on my TV since that show ended, but he was kinda perfect as Jen’s dad.
I don’t think I’ve seen him on my TV since that show ended, but he was kinda perfect as Jen’s dadHave you watched The Leftovers? Watch The Leftovers.
Cousin Larry was perfect casting. Wish he was in it more.
Okay, so, my theory for Titania showing up at the climax (and still being present after Jen’s edits) is: After the wedding fight, she gained respect for Jen. When she saw that these Intelligencia pricks were set on taking Jen down, she used her influencer powers to get the location of their meeting so she could support her rival. Strong women supporting each other against boorish men, even if they have conflict between themselves, fits in well with the show’s themes.
Titania doesn’t seem like the type to turn the other cheek, but I agree that her showing up to support would fit in with the show’s themes. She *was* throwing around random Intelligencia dudes. My headcanon is she still has a lot of rage, her influencer senses were tingling that some shit was going down, and she showed up simply to wreak havoc. Her bursting through a wall with no explanation is funnier the more I think about it though.
lame – from start to finish.
Anyone else notice that K.E.V.I.N. also had a baseball cap?
I feel like this show is trying to have it’s cake and write a thesis on The Hero’s Journey too.
It reminds me a bit of Rick and Morty, they share a or some writers, right?
My only problem with Pug is that his voice sounds like it is coming from another person. Like an old Cinecitta film where everyone is looped as a matter of course because the on-site sound is crap.
Somebody actually commissioned this series.
“The highly stylized “Savage She-Hulk” opening is a lot of fun (love that they made Mark Ruffalo stand silently in ’70s gear for that).”Even more fun if you’ve seen the opening to the 1978 Incredible Hulk TV series!
“but if Jen was going to rewrite her ending, couldn’t she have included a little more action in that regard?”This goes against the whole point of Jen’s arc that solves her problems through fighting. She doesn’t *want* to be a superhero. She has learned that she does want to be She-Hulk but she doesn’t want this to be a typical Marvel action show. She still wants this to be a legal comedy. Jen doesn’t want action scenes – she wants legal scenes.