Warning! Spoilers ahead for the season finale of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.
Jen Walters’ story comes to a head in the season 1 finale of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, “Whose Show Is This?,” now streaming on Disney+. After being arrested by Damage Control at the end of last week’s episode, Jen loses her job, her home, and her superhero privileges. As Titania, Intelligencia, and the Abomination all rear their heads, Jen begs the titular question and decides to take control of the episode. Director Kat Coiro opens with a hilarious homage to the ‘70s Incredible Hulk intro, then maintains that sharp style and self-aware silliness for the remainder of the episode.
Head writer Jessica Gao’s script doesn’t waste a second of its runtime. It instantly picks up with the legal consequences of Jen’s attack on Intelligencia before succinctly pulling together story threads from the whole season. Jen is locked in Emil Blonsky’s high-tech Damage Control prison cell, moves back in with her loving, wholesome parents upon release, and goes to Blonsky’s wellness retreat for a mental health break. The A-plot and B-plot quickly intersect as Nikki uses an embarrassing video of Jen that Jen’s mom showed her to get invited to an exclusive Intelligencia event, where she sends in Pug undercover.
This event happens to be taking place at Blonsky’s retreat where Blonsky himself has been hired to give a speech. So, when Jen goes down to Blonsky’s “speaking engagement” to talk to him about her problems, she stumbles into a hate rally being held in her honor. As it turns out, the lecherous Todd Phelps is the creator of Intelligencia and the true identity of “HulkKing,” and he collected Jen’s blood so he could turn himself into a Hulk. Bruce comes back from Sakaar to save Jen, and Titania crashes the party (literally) to join the action. Just when the finale is getting too messy, Jen breaks the fourth wall to clean it up.
“Whose Show Is This?” is the series’ most meta episode by far. It gives the first season a hysterical Blazing Saddles ending. Jen stops the climactic battle right as it’s about to kick off and jumps across the Disney+ library to an Assembled behind-the-scenes special so she can talk to the production staff at Marvel Studios. This brazen fourth-wall-breaking and acknowledgment of the filmmakers recall John Byrne’s Sensational She-Hulk run in which Jen would argue with Byrne’s creative decisions and reach out to the editor, Renée Witterstaetter. Byrne’s final issue saw him locked in a closet while Jen and Witterstaetter searched for a new writer.
After charging behind the scenes, Jen goes straight to the She-Hulk writers’ room to ask her creators, “What kinda stupid finale is this?” When the writers tell her it’s the finale that “Kevin” wants, she demands to speak to him. After beating and gouging her way through Marvel’s security guards, Jen barges into Kevin’s office. Just when viewers are expecting a cameo appearance by Kevin Feige himself, Kevin turns out to be a content-creating A.I. called “K.E.V.I.N.” (Giving this A.I. a baseball cap was a nice visual touch.) In the ensuing argument with K.E.V.I.N., Jen brings up several common criticisms of the MCU – from the franchise’s penchant for action-packed climactic battles to its lack of female representation – before completely reshaping the episode to avoid those pitfalls.
It was a bold move for the show to spend weeks setting up ongoing plot threads like Titania’s campaign against She-Hulk and Todd stealing Jen’s blood so he could give himself superpowers, only to throw all those storylines out the window at the behest of the title character. But it works spectacularly in the context of She-Hulk. With all the story threads coinciding at the site of a big battle, the She-Hulk finale was starting to shake out the same way as every other season finale in the MCU. But when Jen starts altering the ending of her own story, a la Wayne’s World, it takes a turn into truly unique territory.
When all the self-aware fun is out of the way, the finale resolves Jen’s character arc as she tells a reporter outside a courthouse that she’ll continue to help good people and fight bad people both as a lawyer and as a superhero. The episode ends with one last sharp satirical jab as the reporter asks a gender-biased follow-up question: “Tell our viewers, who are you wearing today?” Jen arguably has more agency than any other female hero in this franchise. When male characters start taking over her show, she literally climbs through the fourth wall, confronts the writers, takes her grievance up the chain of command to the head honcho of the studio, and retools the entire episode to suit her own vision.
On the whole, She-Hulk has been one of Marvel’s most inventive, idiosyncratic shows to date. Some episodes might have been more eventful than others and a few storylines ended up being redundant, but this wonderfully self-aware season finale has stuck the landing and cemented She-Hulk’s place as an MCU project like no other. K.E.V.I.N. might have been joking when he told Jen, “See you on the big screen,” but hopefully, fans will see plenty more of She-Hulk in the future.