She-Hulk: Attorney At Law, Season 1, Episode 1: A Normal Amount of Rage
Okay, yeah, this most recent Disney+/MCU show had an... interesting public reception. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law faced a rather odd problem. The character itself is very derivative of one of the more iconic Marvel heroes despite She-Hulk being probably one of the oldest characters that is a 'iconic Silver Age character but genderswapped', plus having several whole well-defined comic-book runs of her own. Plus, her show is billed as a comedy with fourth-wall-breaking moments, so... it is a bit odd.
I have said in my reviews of Daredevil that courtroom drama is never my thing as far as genre fiction goes, and both the comedy and the fourth-wall-breaking stuff... yeah, I felt like they didn't quite go far enough with it if they had wanted to introduce it at all. And while I feel like the amount of what the kids nowadays describe as 'cringe comedy' isn't exactly as bad as social media made it out to be, I would also admit that some of the jokes didn't exactly land.
And as far as the CGI goes... eh. Maybe it's because I'm kinda old, or I never really try to pause each frame to count the skin pores on She-Hulk's skin, or maybe I just have a very high tolerance to uncanny valley CGI... it looks all right. Some of the ones in motion are rather off based on MCU standards, sure, but I wouldn't really think that it's anything to raise a fuss about.
Unlike She-Hulk's immediate predecessors Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight, which were both only tangentially tied to the MCU, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law feels more like a show that ties in intimately with the superhero side of the MCU. It features Bruce Banner/Hulk as a major supporting character for a huge chunk of this episode, and I really do feel like the Bruce and Jennifer scenes are the best part of this episode -- or, really, the three episodes of She-Hulk that I've watched at the time of writing this.
The two of them have such a great catty-cousins dynamic to them which I felt was refreshingly done, and the fact that Bruce very pig-headedly wants to be a superhero mentor to Jen; while Jen wants to pig-headedly just return to her lawyer career as soon as she has the barest control of her transformations... both Hulk cousins have pretty great points to their arguments, with Jen having a great point that being a superhero really isn't something good to aspire to and that Bruce might be projecting a bit too much of his efforts; while Bruce... well, he's dealt so much with all the angst he's been through, and he's not wrong in that anyone who has their amount of power and none of the responsibility could easily be the next Abomination or whatever. While there's a huge amount of helicopter-parenting (helicopter-cousining?) involved, it's clear that the two of them care about each other a lot.
And I do really like them arguing with each other. Yeah, there's a "women suffer more than men" speech tossed in there, but it's probably one of the better-integrated ones of these sorts of things because it's weaved in seamlessly to Jennifer and Bruce arguing about controlling their anger. Jen notes just how many aggression she has, especially in a workplace where many of her male co-workers don't respect her. Agree or disagree with the comedy of the show, but the acting done by She-Hulk's actress Tatiana Maslany is pretty great.
The show also quickly showcases that She-Hulk and Hulk are similar but not exactly the same. Bruce is perplexed that Jennifer is able to control her transformations a lot easier and faster than he is... though in addition to having a mentor, Bruce is also surprised at finding that Jennifer doesn't have an 'alter' -- Jennifer is already stable from the get-go, unlike Bruce and Hulk who were fighting over their mind pre-Endgame. Oh, and Jennifer's ability also gives her a bit more regeneration abilities, which ends up giving her blood that heals Bruce's Infinity-Gauntlet-shattered-arm.
Speaking of which, I also like that this universe's Bruce Banner isn't stupid enough to do a blood transfusion to his cousin, and the blood transfusion happens by accident when Jennifer was trying to grab Bruce out of a car crash and Bruce's blood literally splatters into Jen's open wound, triggering some werewolf-esque transformation sequence before Bruce finds her and calms her down.
Again, perhaps it's because I'm not actually all that interested in the lawyer-y stuff, but the episode is bookended by two scenes of present-day Jennifer Walters and her buddy Nikki Ramos, who's handling a court case. Jen keeps insisting to the audience that this is going to be a show about lawyers and how she's a "lawyer first, Hulk second"... but of course, this is a superhero show. And supervillain Titania crashes the court-room at the end of the episode, which ends up causing Bruce and Nikki's words to Jennifer to ring true. She's forced to Hulk out to beat up Titania.
And, well... credit where credit's not due, I genuinely didn't realize that... well, that's it for the She-Hulk vs. Titania fight. I thought that this episode's fight scene was the introduction and the second episode would have a proper brawl, but, well, the fight here really isn't all that impressive. The two Hulks tossing rocks around felt far more oomph-y than the actual superhero/supervillain fight! I guess there's something to say to immediately and forcibly rip off the band-aid and have the world (and not Bruce in his island bar) show Jennifer Walters that, yeah, she has to be the She-Hulk now. The whole episode has been Jennifer ignoring and denying the fact that her world has changed. Except, well, she is a superhero now, like it or not.
Anyway, it's... it's a fun enough first episode, I feel, that doesn't feel tiring to watch at all. Again, most of what I love is the talk between Bruce and Jennifer throughout the main body of the episode. Lots of fun moments like Bruce just casually mentioning moments from Thor: Ragnarok or Avengers: Endgame or Age of Ultron or Incredible Hulk, all of which make the show feel like it's actually drawing from the franchise's rich continuity. Some really great moment even from Bruce himself, where it's clear that despite his strong front, poor 'smart' Hulk is still processing the death of one of his closest friends.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- The Savage She-Hulk, or Jennifer Walters, is the cousin of Bruce Banner/Hulk. After getting injured by a mob hit which was directed at her father, Bruce was forced to give Jen a blood donation, which gave her the ability to transform into the She-Hulk. While originally just being a minor supporting character to the Hulk and associated characters, the 1989 Sensational She-Hulk series redefined the character as one of the first few Marvel comics characters to break the fourth wall, sometimes addressing the reader at times.
- Titania, a.k.a. Mary MacPherran, is a supervillain who gained powers during the events of the crossover event Secret Wars, where she and her friend Marsha Rosenberg were given metahuman powers by Dr. Doom, becoming Titania and Volcana. Since her debut, Titania has basically graduated into becoming She-Hulk's recurring villain.
- Bruce calls his merged post-Endgame form "Smart Hulk", likely a nod to "Professor Hulk" which the form is based on.
- The starship that knocked Bruce and Jen's car off is one of the Sakaar ships used when our heroes were running away from the Grandmaster's minions in Thor: Ragnarok.
- The post-credits scene has Hulk note that Captain America fucked a USO girl in 1943, which would line up to the time when a pretty girl flirted with him during the USO tour in The First Avenger.
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