She-Hulk: Attorney at Law - Finale - Review

After eight weeks and a plot line that seemed to have no clue where it was going, we finally reached the last episode of this season of She-Hulk. Given the numerous threads that they had going and how the last episode ended off, it was clear that trying to find a balanced ending to this episode and this season was going to be a challenge and it was one that they utterly missed.

Starting off the other side with Jen in the maximum-security lockup made sense, like everything else in the show it seems to skip ahead randomly to an endpoint in a storyline but her being in prison for super villains makes sense, given she went on a rampage. But just as quickly as she found herself in prison, she found herself out of prison, then out of work and then finally out of home, which necessitated her moving back in with her parents. The opening moments of the show were fast paced and having her mother be so completely useless in providing support seemed to just be a stupid point. We saw earlier in the season, that her father was willing to listen and help where he could, something we again saw today with the hose and the lawn, but having her mother be more concerned about herself and her life, just made for a sad impression. Jen deciding to give up the life behind glass, ie her being trapped in the house by reporters and head for the country to visit Emil was a sound decision.

This is the last sound decision however, because from this point everything went completely off the rails and not in a fun way, but more like, what the hell were they smoking when they wrote, filmed and edited this show. Having Jen break the fourth wall makes sense, she does it all the time in the comics and we have seen her do it here often enough, literally breaking out of her own show to wander the Walt Disney Studios lot and crash the writers’ room was just stupid, worse it was beyond pathetic. The show has had issues constructing a single main narrative thread that connects each episode, the blood threat was about the only thing that was driving forward each week, but even that was absent more than it was present. The entire plot about Kevin Feige actually being a robot would have been funny, if it was a skit in a comedy show, like Saturday Night Live, not inside of a show that already had issues trying to establish an identity, other than it being a legally adjacent Hulk show.

Her demands to have things changed was fine, but there was still no ending, much like if you are reading a book and just when all the good and bad guys get their guns out, you turn the page, and the bad guys are getting put into cop cars. I am not saying that we needed to see Jen smash her way out of the situation, because that is clearly what got her into trouble in the first place, but what it needed to do was actually provide some sense of conflict resolution. Her wishing Daredevil was back, purely for a booty call, was funny and the scenes around the family table made for some funny awkward moments, but it was just as out of place as the rest of the scene. The not so subtle mention of the X-Men and the demand to be seen, nudge nudge, came across like that meme with Steve Buscemi saying how do you do fellow youths. Using your own show, to poke fun at yourself, for not yet giving people what you said was coming, is just pathetic and makes me think there is no plan yet for them in the MCU. The most interesting and still random part was Hulk returning, with Bruce just seemingly happening to return to the family homestead, but this time with his son Skarr, a character I never thought we would see on screen.

We must also talk about the CGI in this episode, it was all over the place in terms of its quality, some shots were good, others were ok and then Hulk Todd and Abomination were horrendous. In The Incredible Hulk, the Abomination was just that, disfigured and boney, plus white, but in this show, he is none of those things. In this episode, for some reason he also had a more human face, now in the past people have given grief for that original design looking like a Michael Bay turtle design, though given those movies came out after I don’t think that tracks. But still, that design was far more threatening than this one, this one looked more like Wish.com Abomination, it was just horrible. Todd Hulk on the other hand, looked like someone inflated the Todd character and coloured it green, even though it was barely on the screen, it was a joke and not a funny one.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law started off great, it had a strong character who was not going to go down the, I have powers so I must do good route and better yet, they let the character keep her fourth wall breaking thing. But as the season went on, it was becoming clearer and clearer that there was no real thread that connected the stories, outside of problems a woman has to deal with and while those would have been enough, if they were done right, they were not. This show didn’t end by going off the rails, it managed to leave the station and drive off a cliff and if this is the quality of the Marvel Studios shows we can expect going forward, it might be the end for me, because there is no reason to invest, if the payoff is nothing but getting slapped in the face.

The Score

2.0

The Pros

+Skarr showing up was interesting, but only if its not some stupid plot for the show’s sake and nothing more

The Cons

-There was no sense of a coherent thread behind the episode and worse, the entire season

-The fourth wall break was beyond stupid and served no purpose but to confirm nothing we were watching mattered