I’m telling you, if there weren’t literally two more episodes, I don’t know that I’d finish She-Hulk. And that’s a strange thing to say about episode seven, The Retreat, because it was a good episode. Mrs. Know-It-All and I both enjoyed it. I think it’s the perfect version of what the She-Hulk show could be, and what it should have been since episode three at the latest.
Normally I’d go into the full recap, and I will, but it’s going to be a shorter one, because we have a lot to talk about. A lot of this is building toward a fuller series review. When the final episode is done I’d like to sit down, dive deep and tear this thing apart, because I feel like there’s somewhere to go with it.
Three Dates and a Ghosting
The episode starts with Jen and Josh going on a series of dates, and it’s building up to the classic first date, second date, third date. On the third date they sleep together. (She’s very much an “ew” when someone says make love.) And then what else would happen to our misbegotten Jen Walters? He disappears. She doesn’t get a call back. He’s fallen off the planet. She’s been ghosted, or at least that’s how it seems, and I say that’s how it seems because we don’t have the actual facts yet.
From there she gets a call from Emil Blonsky’s parole officer, the guy who monitors the ankle bracelet on the Abomination. It’s the same kind of device as house arrest, except they don’t care where he goes. They care whether he transforms, and the anti-transformation bracelet went off. The parole officer doesn’t have the resources for a full SWAT team, so he asks Jen to come with him, because he’s super paranoid that Emil has turned into the Abomination. He’s terrified to even go near the retreat house, and it’s good comedy.
Doesn’t he remind you of the dude who played the FBI agent in Mr. Right? That’s one of our guilty pleasures. Go watch it on Netflix. It’s a terrible movie and an excellent, wonderful terrible movie at the same time. It’s super contrived, and it’s so much fun. We should review that at some point. Totally different thing. Sorry.
So now we’ve switched from Jen trying to get hold of Josh to Jen constantly checking her phone. We literally follow her car from above, and in about a half mile of driving she’s checking her phone, checking her phone, checking her phone.
The Group Therapy Circle
She gets to the retreat and, according to Emil, he accidentally touched an electric fence, which is probably what set the bracelet off. Either way there’s no sign he transformed, and it’s all good.
Then a couple of folks show up, specifically a guy named Man-Bull and his bromance, his bro-enemy I guess we’d call it, El Aguila. Amazingly funny. He might be a superhero, he might be a villain, but his whole deal is an identity crisis, because everyone thinks he looks like a matador and that seems to trigger Man-Bull. The two of them proceed to tear up her Prius, so now she has to wait for a tow truck, and the retreat is way out there. Emil tells her to make herself comfortable and enjoy the amenities.
She’s hunting for cell service, because remember, she’s worried about Josh, and she ends up in their group therapy session. Everyone in it is working out some stuff. You have a guy who thinks he’s a vampire. You also have people with real powers, like Man-Bull, and El Aguila, who turns out to have a bioelectric sword. He pulls it and it’s dope. So these guys aren’t fakers, per se. Some of them have actual abilities.
Then in walks one of the dudes who mugged her. It’s one of the Wrecking Crew, the guys with all the construction gear who tried to jump her earlier in the season after she got her powers, and he was the one all the way in the back. She hulks out and throws him, and everyone’s like, oh, why all the violence? It’s so funny. They finally get out of her what’s going on, everybody starts opening up a little bit, and it’s a really cute version of what this scene could be.
The Nonsense She’s Supposed to Deal With
Last week I was very, very critical of the storytelling on this show. This week I’m not. Funny enough, last week’s wedding episode was supposed to be the completely enclosed one, and this felt more like a full, enclosed episode than that did. I think it’s because last week was a dangling participle from the Titania stuff. They were still dragging the Titania story across the finish line to get to episode six.
In the comic books, Jen Walters is a superhero lawyer, and the show is leaning toward setting her up the way she is in the comics. But in the comics it’s always goofy. She has to deal with the Frog, or the Porcupine. The DC equivalent is Kite Man, a goofy D-list villain slash anti-hero. Those are the characters she normally deals with. My name is Hot Wheel, I’m a super speedster, and I got a speeding ticket. Now she has to get him out of it in court. Why? Because the law doesn’t designate whether speeding tickets go to vehicles or to anything that moves over a certain speed. Get it? That’s the kind of nonsense you’d see in the comics.
I use nonsense as my way of saying something fun. I always joke that I’m a recovering narcissist, and when you’re a recovering narcissist, anything that isn’t what you’ve got going on is nonsense. It took me a second to learn that. So I say it tongue in cheek: she’s got to deal with all the courty nonsense, especially with superheroes. This episode felt like that, and I enjoyed it.
What Does This Show Want to Be?
Robert Meyer Burnett is a guy I follow. He’s on the John Campea show and whatnot all the time. He tweeted this morning, “what does this show want to be,” and I had to laugh so hard. Yeah, no, I feel you on that.
I believe the Ally McBeal comparison is accurate, even though Jessica Gao has said she didn’t want to do that. Okay, fine. At the end of the day I believe that’s the paragon of what this show should be. You take goofy D-list superheroes, potentially villains once in a while, and you cross them with somebody big.
Oh, and by the way: Daredevil watch, day 17. No Daredevil. Not even a little, man. Not a speck of him, not a breath of him, nothing. We have two episodes left.
Everything I’m saying here I’d happily throw away, rip up and trash, and go along with them, if they just leaned into the legal comedy side. You can call this a legal dramedy, because that’s what it’s dressed as, but what’s on screen is a pseudo superhero show masquerading as a legal comedy. You don’t get enough legal anything, and frankly you’re not getting a lot of comedy anymore either. We chuckled. Giggled is the appropriate word. We didn’t have those hearty belly laughs we’ve had in previous series, or with something like Deadpool. And they’ve backed way down on the fourth wall breaks. I think there was one, when the henchman showed up.
Episode Seven, Bro
I’m not going to spoil the button on this one, because I feel like you all need to see it yourself. It’s at the tail end of the episode, there’s no post-credit scene this time, and it tells you what happened to Josh. That piece is super important, so watch it and feel free to discuss it in the comments.
My problem with it is that it connects to last week’s button, which is a big, comic booky feeling thing, and I don’t care. Episode seven, bro. Last week’s button and this week’s button should have been at the end of episodes three and four. We should know what’s going on by now, and right now I feel extraordinarily rushed.
You have two episodes left, and nothing on this show goes over a half hour. We had 34 minutes this week and we all know they count the credits. You get to 28:15 before the animated credits start. So you’re trying to tell me that in one hour’s time you’re going to wrap up this major point? Either that or you sure as heck are going to have to dump us into something else, meaning whatever the next series is, and I don’t know how that’s going to work. I’ve heard nothing about a renewal.
I absolutely love Ginger Gonzaga, who plays Nikki. She tweeted some weird, off-beat, discount Nielsen list saying She-Hulk’s the number one streaming show, thanks guys. It’s a list with Lord of the Rings and all the rest on it, and She-Hulk’s number one. And I’m sitting here going, clearly this is not a reputable source, because Nielsen already told us flat out that She-Hulk is the lowest rated Marvel thing to ever come out.
I love the character. What they’ve presented us is fine by me. How it’s been presented is what I hate. I like Tatiana Maslany as Jen Walters, I like the character of She-Hulk when she’s being She-Hulk, I like everything happening, and none of it is working, if that makes sense. I feel like it’s spiraling fast. Maybe they filmed this all as a movie and chopped it up, and that’s fine, I get that. But it wasn’t edited well as far as blending the episodes together, and that’s why it’s choppy.
Where the Origin Story Was Supposed to Live
We know for a fact, because these things have come out, that the original version of this series was virtually finished, and episode six was originally where her origin story lived. That’s the story of Bruce and her. Chances are it would have started with a “three months earlier” or whatever, and that was supposed to be last week’s episode.
I was about to say I don’t believe the origin story could have lived there under any circumstance. That’s a lie. I just talked myself into it. It could totally have been there if it was what she was talking to Josh about. How’d you get your powers? Tell me about Jen. Something goofy, and then they go into the backstory.
So someone had to go in, do surgery and re-edit the entire series, because too many things have now moved. You’ve taken a major chunk out of what should have been episode six. I’d rather have had her origin story there, and have that lead into the guys trying to take her blood. Let everything come to a head at episode six, where we learn her origin, find out this other thing and get the bad guy’s motivation. Then you have seven, eight and nine, three solid episodes, to wrap up your story.
That’s not the case, so I have zero confidence they’re going to wrap this up well. I’d like to believe I’m wrong. I really went into this week hoping it was going to be different, and I liked this episode much better than last week’s. They’re still making a lot of the same mistakes.
And if this had come way sooner, it would’ve been a different conversation. I would’ve been okay with Mr. Immortal being the third episode, and I think it was episode four. Bump Mr. Immortal forward, make this retreat nonsense episode four, the cute part of it, and start giving us the premise of the overarching thing sooner. And why wasn’t Jen the attorney for the Mr. Immortal stuff in the first place? Literally, guys, make her the lawyer.
Mrs. Know-It-All on the Phone
I asked Mrs. Know-It-All if anything stuck out that she wanted to cover, and she had one.
“I don’t like the way they made Jen look so hopelessly desperate with her phone. If we’re going to talk about how this is a woman producer and everybody is female on here, which they are really proud of, I’m not proud of how they’re representing women at this point.”
When the two of us were dating, she’d get excited too, because he’s going to text me. She gets it. Jen hasn’t heard from him. But usually after day three you know you’re ghosted and you move on. This seemed very desperate. Jen kept blaming work for why she was hunting for a signal, and then the itty bitty first little bar shows up on her phone in the middle of the group meeting. We covered driving, we covered Josh, and by her count the phone and the driving were maybe the first 18 minutes of a 28 minute episode. All ramp up. Jen is literally in the office for two minutes.
She also wanted to say something about that henchman. Once he showed up she started spewing out theories left and right. The henchman means everybody at the retreat is involved in the whole jabbing her with the needle thing. Then nothing happened. So Jen is getting in the tow truck with Emil standing there, and Mrs. Know-It-All turns to me and says, they’re all going to change once she leaves. They’re all going to be the people who jumped her.
Nope. She got nothing. She got more questions, and you’ll see why when you watch it. It’s unfortunate.
The Verdict
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Episode 7, The Retreat, is a 6 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index, and that’s the number from both of us.
I’m bumping it up from last week. Five is middle of the road and this is a hair better than that. Last week I did a four, because that episode pissed me off. Mrs. Know-It-All landed on six too. “Six out of ten, easy. I was going to say seven, but the whole female thing, I didn’t care for that part.” So it lost the point.
I do find it interesting that on previous seasons I’ve reviewed, like Boba Fett, my scores have on average been very close to IMDb and even Rotten Tomatoes. Right now IMDb has She-Hulk sitting at a five. When I do the series wrap up I’ll give a final score, and I’m purposely going to average all my episode scores to get it. I’m not going to make up an original number. I’d really love to see where that lands.
The episode was good. We giggled. It showed up four episodes later than it should have.
Tell me what you thought of The Retreat, and once you’ve seen the button, go ahead and talk about what happened to Josh. We’re also sitting down for a conversation about the state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Mrs. Know-It-All has a perspective on it after three years of being immersed in all of this. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
