She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Episode 1 Review - A Normal Amount of Rage

Full disclosure: I’ve seen the first four episodes of this series and there are more heavy-handed “Men, eh? Tch!” situations coming up. Some of the messaging in this show is as subtle as a boulder being thrown your way. She-Hulk’s men are often thinly drawn and repugnant. Its women are mostly smart, strong, and girlbossing it! Which is of course something I support, but it does feel like a rather rote narrative when trying to introduce a badass character who identifies as a woman in the year of our lord 2022. It’s not just that this vibe feels dated as all hell, it also speaks to how far behind the MCU is with female superhero representation that it feels the need to catch up in such a lazy and clichéd way.

Anyway, Nikki tells Jen that, no matter what, she always has hulking out in her back pocket, and Jen breaks the fourth wall to take us back to the day she got a Hulk infusion from her cousin, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). The bulk of the premiere then focuses on Jen first learning to cope with her powers, and Bruce testing her limits.

We see the two catching up several months earlier. Jen and Bruce are pretty close, with more of a brother-sister relationship that makes for some fun banter between them. Their car veers off the road after a Sakaaran Class-A Courier Craft tries to intercept them, and Bruce’s blood ends up dripping into Jen’s arm wound. Bada-bing, bada-boom, we’ve got ourselves a She-Hulk! Jen is not like Bruce, however. She is able to control her Hulk situation a lot more easily, she is still basically herself when in Hulk form, and she has no intention of being a superhero.

Ultimately, Jen is determined to go back to her life and career as a lawyer, but it’s not long before she’s hulking out in court against a rampaging Titania (Jameela Jamil).

There are plenty of MCU connections in the first episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and most of them are weaved in via Bruce filling in some Phase 3 gaps for us. We find out that the Stark-built hideout in Mexico was where he worked on integrating Hulk and Banner to create Smart Hulk during the Blip, and he and Tony used to sit around there drinking while Tony complained about Steve Rogers.

Bruce references his origin story as Edward Norton and several moments in The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron while discussing how he was historically able to transition from Banner to the Hulk and back again. He also mentions his fully hulked-out two year stretch on Sakaar, though we get no closer to finding out what the denizens of The Grandmaster’s stomping ground want from him this time. Ah, and we find out that Steve Rogers did not “die” a virgin. Hard to know what to say about that one, so in the words of bro and bot king Zack Snyder let’s just go with “canon.”