When Jennifer Walters ultimately does join the Avengers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, she’s going to be so set. After this week’s episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, she got the therapy that characters like Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker so desperately need. Waiting for a guy to text back led Jen to confront her issues with She-Hulk head on. Before she gets the “assemble†text, however, she’ll need to deal with the Big Bad slowly emerging at the end of this season. Can the HulkKing make their way to the stage, please?
The episode opens with a rom-com-esque montage of dates between Jen and Josh after last week’s wedding meet-cute. They’re eating tacos! They’re doing awkward goodbyes! They’re exchanging emoji-filled texts that are so unfunny you know they like each other! Meanwhile, she’s killing it at work. Jen finally seems to have found the balance she’s been searching for. She’s the opposite of a traditional superhero: She-Hulk by day, Jen by night. Then Josh spends the night and she doesn’t hear from him for three days.
On Sunday, she finally gets a call. Unfortunately it’s not from Josh. It’s Emil Blonsky’s parole officer, who tells her that the inhibitor device malfunctioned and asks if she wouldn’t mind coming with him as backup in case. Jen heads to Blonsky’s retreat “Summer Twilights,†where the former Abomination’s seven soulmates are conspicuously absent. Instead, Blonsky has a support group going for reformed supervillains all amazingly pulled from the pages of Marvel comics that includes Man-Bull, El Ãguila, Porcupine, and Saracen. (Anybody notice the loose connection between most of these characters? In the comics, they’re associated with those pesky street-level Marvel heroes who used to live on Netflix. Moving on …) Man-Bull and El Ãguila total her car while working through some of their own issues … so Jen is stuck on the retreat for a few hours.
It’s another self-contained episode in a new location. There isn’t even a subplot, really. It’s all Jen. I’m loving the world She-Hulk has created, but I do wish we saw more of the workplace part of the world. The lack of courtroom scenes doesn’t really bother me. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was about a lawyer too, and Rebecca Bunch rarely practiced the law. But her co-workers were part of the show. As much as I enjoy spending time with She-Hulk’s idiosyncratic low-level super-people of the week, I would just like to see more of Pug, Nikki, and Mallory.
Jen wanders around the retreat in search of a bar — the kind on her phone — and into Blonsky’s meeting, where she officially meets Saracen and Porcupine. They’re all working through some things. Man-Bull feels threatened and triggered by how much El Ãguila resembles a matador, and El Ãguila resents that people assume he’s a matador when he identifies as a swashbuckler. Porcupine is scared to take his spiky suit off. Saracen is fixated on vampirism? It’s unclear what his deal is. Is he a vampire? He doesn’t burn up in the sunlight.
Last to join the group is Wrecker, the leader of the group hired to obtain Jen’s blood in an earlier episode. It was so long ago that Jen breaks the fourth wall to demand a mid-episode “previously on†and refresh our memories. She attacks him, and the group invites her to sit in on their session and work out their differences in a productive way. They also call her out on checking her phone every few seconds, a clear indicator that she has some of her own stuff to work through as well.
Jen quickly tells the gang the situation with Josh, then unloads on the group therapy and says out loud via monologue the theme that has been building for weeks on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. Becoming a superhero has given Jennifer Walters confidence in some ways, but taken it away in others because everyone in her life seems to prefer She-Hulk. Jen’s great as is, but when people see She-Hulk they forget and stop caring. She compares She-Hulk to a high-school friend who’s cooler than you and gets all of the attention while you fade into the background. Jen has become her own DUFF! Even when she does transform into her taller, stronger, and more conventionally attractive self it’s not satisfying because the adoration she gets doesn’t feel as if it’s hers to receive. It feels like everyone in her life has been given permission to say that they didn’t actually like her for who she was — which is probably not true!
I’m not a huge fan of how this breakthrough for Jen comes via help from a bunch of aggressive men, and not someone like her actively supportive best friend Nikki, but I guess sometimes you do need to hear it from an objective source. Can we trust this motley crew of baddies? You’d think that if the Wrecker really cared about Jen he would tell her the name of his boss and warn her that people are still after her. When Saracen tosses out that maybe Josh wanted her blood, Wrecker shuts him down. But while that seems like a joke about Saracen thinking he’s a vampire to everyone in the room, we the audience know that Wrecker knows someone literally does want her blood. Please, for the sake of Jen’s trust issues, tell me that was a plot hole. I kinda wanna like these guys!
At least we know for 100 percent certain that Josh is no bueno. The end of the episode flashed back to three days earlier, when Josh left Jen’s apartment in the dead of night. As you may have suspected last week, he’s working for the guy behind both the Intellicencia website and the secret lab experiments that require Jen’s Shulky DNA. Not only does Josh text HulkKing emojis that indicate he has the sample, but he copied her phone and took a picture of her while she was sleeping naked. (With flash, too. This dude is risky.) So they’re going to do experiments on her blood and, I presume, leak her photos? Ahhh!!
Legal Pad
• The retreat members razz Jen over the language she used in her last, increasingly desperate texts to Josh, but they should be razzing her over her use of punctuation in the initial text: “That was fun. I can’t stop smiling.†Not a single exclamation point?? Is she dead inside??
• El Ãguila is a mutant in the comics, and you may have mentioned Blonsky calling his lighting sword (cool) a “bioelectricity.†Flagging that for the X-Men detectives.
• As mentioned earlier, the members of Blonsky’s group are, in Marvel comics, associated with the street-level heroes who appeared onscreen in Netflix’s Marvel shows. Man-Bull first appeared opposite Daredevil. Porcupine is, in addition to a Fantastic Four villain, a Daughters of the Dragon (Misty Knight and Colleen Wing) antagonist. El Ãguila fought Power Man (a.k.a. Luke Cage) and Iron Fist. One of a few Marvel characters named Saracen, the one who is not a vampire, is a Punisher villain. With Matt Murdock’s arrival still imminent, that is interesting.
• The tow-truck company is called Slott Towing, a reference to She-Hulk comic writer Dan Slott, who has also done a lot of writing for Spider-Man, Iron Man, and recently The Fantastic Four. In fact, if you squint you can see that the tow-truck driver’s name tag says “Dan.â€
• Some of the names in Jen’s cell phone, like Wendy Jacobson and Adam Kimmerlin, are Marvel Studios employees as well.
• Early in the episode, Nikki tells Jen that she’s been nominated for “Female Lawyer of the Year.†That has to be fake, right? That’s a trap? Please say it’s a trap, and She-Hulk is going to get attacked while attending a gala. That’s like … the best part of any Batman movie.