‘She-Hulk’ Episode 7 Review — ‘The Retreat’ Finally Gives Us Real Moments With Jen
Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer “Jen” Walters/She-Hulk in Marvel Studios’ She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.
With only two more episodes to go, She-Hulk finally is interesting again. After a few lackluster episodes, where the scripts didn’t take the characters seriously and humanity was sacrificed for uninteresting jokes and over-the-top bits, The Retreat finally got us back on track.
With the Titania subplot on the backburner for now, if not over (fingers crossed), Emil Blonsky is back in the picture. I wasn’t completely sure that Tim Roth would return to the series after his last episode, but I am glad they returned to him. This episode combined the two best parts of She-Hulk so far — Jen’s dating struggles and Blonsky. The episode was off to a great start when it followed up on last week’s plot thread, and we immediately relate to our main character as her new love interest ghosts her after sleeping together. The only negative I would give to the opening is that the guy’s heel turn was very predictable, unlike in the last episode, where the two seemed to genuinely enjoy each other’s presence.
One lame excuse to get Jen back with Blonsky later, we get the reunion between lawyer and client, and we see Jen’s car get totally destroyed. The show never explicitly addresses this, but I found this scene yet another showing of how men and women handle anger very differently — had Hulk had his car destroyed as Jen did, those two knuckleheads wouldn’t have lived to tell the story. She-Hulk, however, barely even touched one of them. They were our introduction to Jen’s new therapy group, and even though I couldn’t really stand any of the members of the group besides Blonsky, Tatiana Maslany’s acting and relatability really sold me on this scene and the character as a whole.
The speech never delivered groundbreaking information, and most of what she said was essentially a summary of Jen’s arc up until this point in the series, but the most important thing to me was the fact the writers finally gave her that special moment. The past two or three episodes were a bit too over-the-top and therefore, not very relatable. This scene was a great occasion for the writers to pause for a second, recap Jen’s arc in case people were lost amidst all the nonsense, and pay it off by using the therapy group to help her move on. We can now enter the final two episodes with a more mature character and, while her arc will surely continue, she is now at a point where she can face off against the new antagonists of the show. And she needed that because apparently, she will meet face-to-face with Josh again.
That scene was also used to set up the villain arc in the next couple of episodes, with the (questionable) inclusion of one of the members of the team that attacked Jen outside of her apartment in the fourth episode. They are all working for this mysterious “HulkKing”, this series’ version of Hawkeye‘s Kingpin or Loki‘s He Who Remains — the mysterious man in charge who will probably turn out to be a notable Marvel character. At this point, the most likely candidate is Tim Blake Nelson’s The Leader, who we know is returning to the MCU in Captain America: New World Order. After the inclusion of Blonsky/Abomination in She-Hulk, it seems very fitting to bring in another character from 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. It might also be why the guy from the team was at the retreat center, possibly to watch Blonsky. We shall see, though I expect a reveal by the end of next week’s episode, like what they did in Hawkeye.
(L-R): Tatiana Maslany as She-Hulk/Jennifer “Jen” Walters, Nate Hurd as Man-Bull/William Taurens, Joseph Castillo-Midyett as El Águila/Alejandro Montoya, and Tim Roth as Abomination/Emil Blonsky in Marvel Studios’ She-Hulk: Attorney At Law, exclusively on Disney+. Photo by Chuck Zlotnick. © 2022 MARVEL.
It seems like the eighth episode will be the one that finally brings Daredevil into the fold, so we have that to look forward to. There are a few more scenes from the trailers that we haven’t seen, like people banging on Jen’s window asking for She-Hulk, though that could potentially be from a deleted scene from one of the earlier episodes.
Make sure to come back next Thursday for our review of the She-Hulk episode 8. It will come out the day before Marvel’s Werewolf by Night, so it’s going to be an interesting week for sure.
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.
