I like to say each episode is an issue of a comic book instead of a graphic novel.
Indeed; it has a very different feel from any of the other Disney+ MCU series so far. Last week’s episode (the court case against Titania) had no action scenes in it at all; this week’s episode had the short fight that Titania picked with Jen.
I don’t mind this; I like the show quite a bit. But, it definitely is a very different show.
I’m wishing more and more they’d gone a different route for effects. Better CGI but less of it, two actresses shoulderpads and platform shoes, freaking anything. The more I watch the show, the more distracting the CGI becomes.
Which is a shame, because I really am enjoying the rest of it.
I wonder if Titania dropped the camera to spy on Jen. Because it seems like a coincidence that it was peeping at her near where they fought. And who has dancing before the wedding? It felt staged.
It seems to me that they plan for this to be an ongoing series, too. There’s been no confirmation of this, but as the storyline is not world-shatteringly epic (see Loki, Moon Knight, and even Ms Marvel), it can be more episodic, and continue on comfortably in that style without needing to introduce a new villainous mega-arc each season.
Samesies. Not only am I enjoying the “low stakes” nature of the show, but I would be totally okay with the show being completely “no stakes.” In fact, I’d like to see more of the lawyers from GLK&H practicing superhuman law, preferably with D/E-list Marvel characters as their clients, and for every second of screen time that’s not that to pretty much be “Jen goes ________________________, and then superhuman hijinks happen!”, where you just fill in the blank with, “… to a wedding,” “… to a Dodgers game with her dad,” “… to a spa,” “… to the grocery store,” “… on a date,” etc., plus the occasional character development stuff, like Pug being a sneakerhead.
I so felt for Jen when she was told she couldn’t be her new self at the wedding. I had something similar happen to me once, except in my case I found out ahead of the wedding. I cancelled the vacation and threw away the plane ticket.
TBH that didn’t hit for me. Up until this episode she’s been upset when people want She-Hulk instead of her real self. The 180 out of nowhere just didn’t feel believable.
I mean, part of the story is her accepting that both halves of her are her. She wants the right to be both/either at HER discretion, not anyone else’s. (Same way some Muslim women are protesting to wear head coverings and some are protesting NOT to wear head coverings…)
(I mean, if she did show up at a wedding and was She-Hulk and everyone was just goggling at her instead of paying attention to the actual marriage, that would be kind of a dick move on her part… but someone who genuinely liked her enough to invite her to a wedding ought to trust her enough not to be a dick in the first place. It’s like if you know someone who often wears extremely wacky and crazy clothes, or has bonkers haircuts, either invite them to the wedding or don’t. But don’t invite them and also sit them down and tell them they can’t be who they are.)
And it’s clear they just invited her because they thought she’d just be a warm body or a doormat. “Just Jen”, basically.
Yeah, but you know she’d turn, breaking the fourth wall, and mutter:
“Snakes…why did it have to be snakes?!?”
To be fair, Sidewinder (or whoever the hell is running the Society these days) can retort “It’s great for marketing!! Why should the heroes be the only guys with t-shirts and action figures?”
I feel so bad for y… wait, you couldn’t attend as yourself? Or they didn’t want the super-hero-costumed version of you?
If it was that they wanted you to attend as your old, original gender, then I’ll stop joking around.
I find it incredibly unrealistic that any woman could meet someone that tried to attack them on the street a few nights ago and somehow become best buds with that person a half hour later because they talked a bunch about how they are now working on themselves. I especially don’t like the insinuation made that “taking radical accountability” for something involves sitting in a room and feeling really bad about it and not like, turning yourself into the police or at the very least, even facing your victim and putting your fate in their hands. It really seemed to minimize what a traumatizing experience that violence towards women can be, even if you are a superhero.
It also felt weird to me that some creep running a sex cult is also cast as this healing guru who is right about everything. Notably, none of the women who we are told are ostensibly funding this lavish estate of his are around when Jen is there because I think it would underline just how creepy and manipulative his entire establishment is and undercut what the episode is trying to do.
I think my main frustration with the series as a whole is it can never seem to pin down what world it wants to live in, it’s a mix of hyper-realistic examination of how feminism intersects with misogyny in the modern world and tropey comic book logic that conveniently drives the plot forward in a don’t-think-about-it kind of way and the two undercut each other because a lot of how we got to a place of modern female oppression is the don’t-think-about-it tropes in fiction.
Realism is not what I think this show is about … it is however pretty internally consistent for the character, which is perhaps more important. Despite being a lawyer, and a Hulk, Jen is mostly conflict avoidant, and wants to be liked by everyone, pretty desperate for approval, to the point of being the go-to door mat during the wedding episode. Everyone knows she will forgive nearly any offense. Titania would only have to give a teary eyed forgive me please and Jen would be happy to count her as a friend.
My WAG is that is exactly the world it wants to live in.
It is an absurdist farcical lightweight bit of fluffy sitcom, that has some significant exploration of those feminism, misogyny, and more serious issues, wrapped inside that slice of Velveeta for we good dogs to swallow, taking the medicine we might not as willingly swallow otherwise.
Well, I did want more D/E-list Marvel characters, and you don’t get more D & E-list than Man-Bull, El Aguila and Saracen. Having never seen Aguila and Man-Bull together in the comics, I’d never even considered the Bull/Matador comedy potential, and now I want them to have their own series… or at least a one-shot.
Power dynamics are weird, and that’s part of what this show is exploring.
The construction workers posed zero threat to Jen. For her, being friendly with her attacker would be like you or me being friendly with a toddler who recently threw a tantrum and pooped on our rug. On the other hand, women are often made to feel that they have to be cordial to their abusers.
The intersection of fictional female superempowerment with real-world issues is pretty dang interesting.
There was a minor Daredevil villain actually called the Matador, who might make a better foil for Man-Bull.
That guy might have been referenced here. His big move was trying to……blind Daredevil with his cape. I do wish we’d heard more about WHY that guy just attacked Jen. You’d think she would ask.
It occurs to me that aomeone who is conflict-avoidant might really like being a lawyer since the kind of conflict encountered in the courtroom is structured and generally ends on schedule (unlike personal conflict).
Here’s my educated guess on who’s behind the Intelligencia website, and who’s been after Jen’s blood:
The Leader. He appeared in the 2008 The Incredible Hulk, is supposed to be appearing in the 2024 film Captain America: New World Order. In the comics, The Leader is a member of a supervillian group, all of whom are known for being criminal geniuses, which is called…Intelligencia.