Jen Walters writes her own ending in the She-Hulk: Attorney At Law season finale

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.”