‘She-Hulk’ Episode 6 Review — ‘Just Jen’ Is a Warmup for the Final Stretch of the Season
Following up on last week’s major tease, She-Hulk comes back this week… for a wedding special episode.
Six episodes in, I’m still amazed at how the writers of the latest Marvel Studios live-action series are just making fun of their audience… in a playful way. They knew that, by inserting that Daredevil helmet at the end of episode 5, audiences would rush to go see the next episode, so they decided to have a ball with it, with Jen pretty much laughing at us in the opening moments of the new chapter.
This is not a new technique on television, especially for serialized programming — back in the cable days, most shows would take a detour of several filler episodes before going back to the main plotline right before the Christmas break, or towards the end of the season, to keep their audiences hooked. It’s something that in the era of streaming we’ve forgotten about (even though one could argue Jon Favreau uses it quite a bit in The Mandalorian), but She-Hulk is one of the biggest throwbacks to the mid-2010s television we have, especially in its structure, and this was no exception.
And yet, I must admit that having Jen wink an eye to the audience was the perfect move — otherwise I could have been upset that they planted that seed not to immediately follow up on it, but that fourth-wall break that had Jen saying “If you think this is happening at an inconvenient time in the season, you’re right” is also used to tell the audience “We know what we’re doing”.
Other than that, the episode is just fine. If it weren’t for Titania showing up at the wedding, this would be immediately filed away as a filler episode, and even with the main antagonist of these episodes making an appearance, I have a hard time cataloging it as anything else. Jen’s whole arc in Just Jen is about learning when to be She-Hulk and when to be Jen outside of work, and perhaps about learning to embrace her human form now that she’s already embraced her Hulk form. The setup was perfect, with her friend from high school being upset at the beginning that She-Hulk might be stealing the spotlight from her at the wedding. But that was then undermined at the end, when she was so drunk that she didn’t even remember She-Hulk was actually Jen.
Before I move on though, I should mention that the CGI for She-Hulk in this episode worked much better for me than it did in the previous five. It’s probably because they had more time to work on this one than in the first few episodes, but the character seemed like a bad Photoshop work placed on top of every frame, while in this one, she actually felt like she fit in the frame. I do have to wonder, though: why was Marvel so insistent that the series was released in mid-August, since their Disney Plus programming is basically non-existent until the end of the year save for the Halloween and Holiday Specials?
The other storyline in the episode was focused on Nikki bonding with Ms. Mallory, litigating a divorce case by Mr. Immortal (David Pasquesi, from Veep and The Book of Boba Fett), a character that is most definitely a mutant. If you think about it, She-Hulk is taking the concept of regularizing superheroes in the MCU to the next level — we still have no clue about Titania’s background, and Pasquesi’s character has also come out of nowhere. Earlier this year, Ms. Marvel introduced the concept of mutation as something that is already present in the MCU, so now one has to wonder who else is also a mutant. Moreover, if we are not yet introducing mutants as regular inhabitants of Earth-616, we are essentially devaluing everyone else with superpowers, as GLK&H has a constant stream of clients in their superhuman law division.
This subplot also felt like an appetizer for what’s to come in the last three episodes of the season, as teased by the end scenes, where we learn that She-Hulk has an active target on her back. At this point, it’s almost evident that the true villains of the series will be a group of supremacists who can’t stand the idea of a woman being strong, so they must take her out. That will be a relief because Titania — outside of some clever marketing — is not doing it for me so far. From what we’ve seen, it seems like the show was going to have Abomination as the main “antagonist” of the first three episodes and Titania for the following three. We’ll see what the final three bring us.
She-Hulk will be back next Thursday with its seventh episode, which marks the start of the final third of the season.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
