The She-Hulk finale takes no responsibility for anything that happened in its own series. You don’t get to see the resolution. It happens off screen, much like the Sokovia Accords, and by the time Jen gets back from her meeting with Kevin it’s all been handled. To me, that was the height of very lazy writing.

It’s Episode 9, “Whose Show Is This?”, and Mrs. Know-It-All and I walked out of it not really knowing how to feel. The log line, and this is literally the log line, is that Jen finds herself in trouble with the law and struggles to pick up the pieces of her life. I was wondering how they were going to pull off a finale in 35 minutes, because that’s what it was. They did 35 minutes.

I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time recapping it, because there’s honestly not much to recap. But you need the shape of it to follow where I land.

Thirty-Five Minutes, Moving Fast

The episode starts with Jen locked up, having these weird fantasy dreams that all look vaguely like the intro to the original Hulk TV show. Clearly post-production was having a lot of fun, and I’m glad everybody did. No, seriously, it was fun. It was totally fun.

Then she wakes up and she’s in jail, the same Raft-style superpower jail the Abomination was in before. She gets released on the condition that she wears the same ankle thing, the one that says she can’t transform. Pug and Nikki come to visit, she moves back in with her parents, and the news is covering everything badly. There’s even a segment with Bukowski, the guy she used to work with, the real misogynist, and he’s on the news going, yeah, you know, we like dated for a little while, she was like a girl before the whole power thing. And you’re like, bro, really?

She ends up going to stay at Emil Blonsky’s place, the retreat she was at before. Meanwhile Nikki and Pug have narrowed down who HulkKing is, and Nikki gets into the Intelligencia website by sharing an embarrassing video that Jen’s mom sent her. Come to find out Todd is the guy heading up this whole thing. They stole the blood.

Pug has to go be one of the dude bros, and it’s hilarious, because Pug is such a woke version of a guy that he has a really hard time doing it. Which I can sympathize with. I can’t imagine trying to be one on purpose. I feel like I could do it by pretending, but it’s hard to imagine being that in real life, because it’s such a character.

And guess where the Intelligencia is meeting. The lodge. The same retreat. Blonsky shows up in Abomination form, so I guess he’s figured out how to break the thing, and he’s doing speaking engagements, strictly for profit. Jen walks in on all of it because she just wants to talk to him. He’s literally been through this.

Then it becomes the whole thing. Todd has her blood synthesized, he puts it into his arm, and he becomes a Hulk. Todd Hulk. At that same moment Titania shows up, Bruce shows up, because the Hulk has to save Jen, and the whole time Jen is going, wait a minute, what’s going on here? She breaks the fourth wall and says, I’m not doing this.

Jen Walks Into the Writers Room

Apparently off screen she takes the ankle thing off, transforms, and then she literally breaks the fourth wall, coming into real life on what’s supposed to be the Marvel Studios campus. I believe they probably did shoot it at the Marvel Studios campus, because a lot of the hallways match how I’ve seen it described.

She storms right into the writers room and berates them about the storyline, and they’re like, oh man, this is all Kevin approved. We had the closed captioning on, and every time Jen says Kevin, it’s the name, K-e-v-i-n. Every time one of the writers says it, it’s K period, E period, V period, I period, N period. So immediately I’m sitting there going, what’s going on?

She heads for Kevin’s office. They send security to stop her, she’s like, seriously, we’re going to do this, and she proceeds to whoop all of the security guards’ butts. It’s great. It’s a very satisfying moment for her.

Then she clearly transitions from a real-life hallway into an entire CGI dump, an area with giant screens all showing various Marvel Cinematic Universe stuff. I guarantee you they did that on the volume. When she walked in I said, yeah, that’s it. It’s a big circle. I bet the floor was probably the only real thing in the whole room.

And that’s when Kevin shows up. You think I’m kidding. It’s literally a giant robot. “Hello, Jennifer.” It’s very HAL 9000, would you like to play a game. He’s got little robot arms. He looks like he belongs in WALL-E or something.

They have a conversation about what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is and isn’t. She tells him this is supposed to be her show, isn’t this supposed to be a legal comedy? He asks what she wants to do, she says she wants to do her closing argument, and he says, I see what you did there. She gets to say I want my show to be this, this, this and this. And sure enough he tells her, all right, you’re never going to make it here again, so that’s fine, I’ll give you what you want. Poof.

The John Byrne Receipt

If you didn’t know this from the comic books, and Mrs. Know-It-All only knows it because I told her, She-Hulk used to do this a lot. She’d bully the writers of her own comic book.

There’s a bunch of issues during the John Byrne run. I think maybe they did it once during one of the subsequent runs, but I know for a fact that during the Byrne run things would start getting more and more ridiculous, Howard the Duck and all kinds of stuff, so ridiculous that she had to literally break the fourth wall, stop and go, what? One time she climbs out of a panel and walks across the advertising page. You literally turn the page and it’s all the ads like normal, but she’s walking across them. She opens up some hidden door and shows up in the artist’s office, and she’s arguing about how she looks. There are other times where she argues with the writer about how he did something.

So I was immediately like, this is clearly their version of that. In that context, I’m down. That was fun. I got it. I like what you guys were doing.

But if I didn’t know that, I’m not so sure. Mrs. Know-It-All said it straight: “Without that context I wouldn’t know what just happened. I would have thought it was silly.” We were both sitting there going, wait, what just happened?

A Scooby-Doo Ending

We were entertained, because it was goofy. That ending was goofy. But it felt like the ending from the first Scooby-Doo movie. It’s the well, maybe that’s not how this really happened, maybe it happened this way.

And by the way, I was mentally prepared for the ending they were setting up. Todd’s a Hulk, Bruce shows up, all of it. I still saw a path where you could’ve gotten to her climactic resolution inside the scenario they were laying out. Then they break the fourth wall and it becomes kind of a condescending commentary. I know it’s supposed to be commentary, the same way Jupiter’s Legacy is a commentary on superhero stories, or Mark Millar’s world and all that. I think I felt insulted, briefly. Then I was like, no, this is okay, whatever.

She even tries to argue it to Kevin. My stakes are losing my family, my job, my dad. And then it’s very anticlimactic. To be honest, it’s a little bit boring. By the time she comes back from meeting Kevin, the police are there, Todd’s being arrested for whatever, and clearly he isn’t a Hulk anymore, so they’ve done away with all that. Then out of nowhere, broad daylight, in drops Daredevil. So you’re like, okay, I get it.

Mrs. Know-It-All’s read was the same as mine. “It was okay. I wasn’t happy with the way it was resolved.”

This was a rather lackluster ending to what has been a rather meteoric season. Last week’s episode was exemplary, frankly the best episode in the entire run. This one is very much a product of everything that’s wrong with the show.

Editor’s Tracks

Now that I’ve seen the whole thing, I’m going to try to dissect how I feel it went down. I’m probably completely wrong, but I can logically follow the path.

They want to do a show. They take some meetings. They meet Jessica Gao, and she has a treatment. The treatment hangs its hat on last week’s episode in terms of what the show wants to be, which is that eventually she comes to terms with who she is and her powers, and she finds that equilibrium between Jen and She-Hulk. That’s where it was going to go, all dressed up as a legal dramedy. They keep calling it a legal comedy. It should be a legal dramedy. And you don’t get much legal legaling throughout the whole series.

There are clear signs of what I call editor’s tracks. It’s a really gross way of putting it. People who use heroin tend to have tracks, which is how you can tell. With editors, you can tell when an edit was finished and then they had to go back in and cut it, because certain things just don’t make sense. Your first run through, you get rid of a lot of fat, a lot of things that aren’t important. When you have to re-edit, it becomes clear there isn’t as much connective tissue.

It was the same problem with the original theatrical version of Batman v Superman. When I watched it in the theater it was very disconnected. Later on, the director’s cut had all the connective tissue back in, and the story made more sense.

Same concept here. I would’ve loved to see the version before they moved the origin and did some of that shifting around, before they took away more of the fourth wall breaking. I feel like that was probably closer to the version Jessica Gao actually intended. This feels very much like the studio got hold of some things, wanted to make some changes, and probably brought in a couple of writers. Hell, Brian Michael Bendis was probably there throwing his two cents in as an advisor. A lot of people give some input, and then you’re stuck with what you get.

Where That Leaves Us

I’ll watch a second season. I don’t know if I’ll do another review show on it. I might do a series review. I like the character of Jen Walters and She-Hulk, but it all feels very pedestrian at the moment. I’m not impressed. This, to me, is the first major fail from Marvel for me. We’ll see.

Mrs. Know-It-All put the whole season in one breath. “It started out promising. We were excited in the beginning, we were really excited. And then instead of going up, it just fell. It bottomed out. And then it got our hopes up last week.” As a fan of the movies and the TV of Marvel, she feels very let down, and she told me that if she didn’t have me, she’s not so sure she would’ve continued on.

The Verdict

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Episode 9 lands at a 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

That’s mine, a 7.0, for just this episode. Mrs. Know-It-All is at a 7.5, because she did laugh, and she couldn’t do anything higher than that.

For the season, we add up the scores from all nine episodes and divide by nine. I’ll tell you precisely: mine’s a 6.72222, and I’m rounding it up to a 7. Hers was a 7.1, which rounds down to a 7. So the average for the series, for both of us, is a 7 out of 10.

That can look like it’s not bad. The problem is you had highs that were an eight and lows that were a four, and there’s a nine on the board too, from the second episode, I think.

What’s really funny is you can actually watch the evolution of this review show across the season. The first episode was just me by myself, and I threw a giant score graphic up on the screen. As the show progressed we got the lower third you see now, with all the fun little stuff.

Overall, man, it’s what it is. Your mileage may vary.

What were your scores, and how did you figure them up? I’d love to know what worked for you, what didn’t, what you liked and what you didn’t. One ask: this isn’t about being sexist, so keep it respectful and come with actual thoughts. “I think the show sucks” is fine. “I think she was awesome” is fine. No problem either way. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.