I apologize for delaying the final review, as I’m sure you were all just anticipating it by the second, but unfortunately…midterms called upon me to take the mantle of a student once more. Still, I’m here and I’m giving you precisely what you want: My honest opinion on She-Hulk’s Episode 9 finale. And boy, oh boy, I did not like this one at all.
I knew it would be a bad finale all along, and it looks like a lot of people online seemed to agree that it was weak. Plus, there are new reports that seem to show that there might not be a second season of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, which just seems to prove that the She-Hulk writers didn’t prove the “haterz” wrong as they were hoping to.
But let’s just get into the synopsis of this awful episode:
Synopsis
Our episode starts out with Jen in jail after attacking an evil Redditor (Intelligencia, this will actually be relevant later before becoming irrelevant again, just wait). Her friends come to visit her and Mallory tells Jen that there’s a plea deal that she can take to get out of jail.
Now, the thing is, I know that jail sucks, but one would think that Jen would try and fight back against the imprisonment. Maybe she’d try to get some connections to get her out instead of a plea deal, but no. Jen doesn’t do that. In her Jen-like fashion, Jen decides to just give in immediately and not try and fight back against the injustice she’s been put into at all. She takes the plea deal, which gets her out in exchange for her not being able to transform into She-Hulk anymore.
She loses pretty much everything. Her job is gone. Her house is gone. She has to move back in with her parents. The news is squawking all over her yard. I guess that she faced some consequences in this episode, so one would anticipate that there would maybe be some character growth from this, right?
Wrong. Like every other problem Jen faces, she just kinda…doesn’t do anything to stop it. She gives in. I really don’t understand how we’re setting up a hero like this, but I guess it is what it is. The writers don’t seem to care about making Jen a good character at all.
Now, Jen’s friend and paralegal, Nikki, decides to infiltrate evil Reddit and submit an embarrassing video of Jen twerking in college to the group. The leader, Hulk King, invites Nikki to the event obviously not knowing that she’s Nikki and that she’s a…wait for it…A WOMAN!
Yeah, the whole Intelligencia meeting is just men complaining about women, but their complaints were basically just stuff taken off of the internet and put into a script, so it sounds really cringe when you hear it out loud.
Whatever.
Nikki dispatches Pug to go into the meeting because he’s a man and she tells Pug to get in on the conversations and pretend to be like the evil Redditors. Pug, being the nice man who supports women, feels apprehensive but eventually joins in on the whole thing.
Now, enter the leader of Intelligencia. Hulk King. The man with all the evil Reddit power…
This guy! Todd Phelps! The weirdo!
What a twist, amiright?
I saw it coming from a mile away but whatever.
Anyways, turns out he’s orchestrating the campaign against Jen/She-Hulk the entire time! And he organized everything!
At the meeting, they bring Abomination/Emil Blonsky to give a life coaching session which I thought was probably the funniest part of the episode. It also gave us a reason as to why Blonsky’s ankle inhibitor thing was malfunctioning a bunch. He turns into Abomination to give his life coaching sessions apparently.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about Jen! She decides to go to Blonsky’s cult farm to try and heal her mind and spirit and ends up finding the Intellgencia meeting with Blonsky giving the speech. She obviously gets mad and decides to fight. But it turns out that the blood taken from Jen was used by Intelligencia to make a Hulk serum that Todd takes to become a Hulk himself!
And then the most chaotic and stupid moment in any MCU project ever occurred.
Titania smashes through the wall to fight. Hulk shows up to fight. Long story short, it’s a mess.
She-Hulk then breaks the reality barrier big time and goes to Marvel’s filming HQ to try and get the ending changed. There, she meets the writers who tell her about Kevin. Now, we obviously are led to believe that they’re referencing Kevin Feige, right?
I turned on captions and found out it’s K.E.V.I.N., so actually, yeah, it’s a robot. An AI that writes the scripts and stories.
She-Hulk goes to K.E.V.I.N. to complain and gets the ending changed. Daredevil shows up for some reason, Blonsky goes to jail (but then Wong breaks him out at the end, surprise surprise), and Intelligencia gets sacked. The end.
Oh wait, Hulk shows up and he has a son. Booyah! In your face!
I’m sorry, what?
Why the Twist Ending?
I guess the writers realized that their story sucked or was too cliche, so they decided to do one of those little quirky jabs where they try to act self-aware that their story sucks. This is probably one of the worst tropes in writing. I don’t care if it happened in the comics, I’m criticizing it anyways.
I’ve never found this trope to be funny because it destroys any form of immersion I could have felt from the episode. I immediately found myself wanting to stop watching when Jen broke through my Disney+ menu. Hahaha, so funny.
I didn’t like the ending of this episode at all. I had no clue what was happening. Why it was happening. What was going on. Nothing seemed cohesive.
Titania was played throughout the series as if she were a joke, despite actually being a formidable opponent for She-Hulk in the comics. Every character was boiled down to a silly caricature of an online stereotype. The writing was subpar. I’m not sure, once again, how this show actually aired. Quality control must really be down these days.
Overall Thoughts
The finale was overall a very disappointing ending to an already disappointing show. There were some moments in She-Hulk here and there that made be hold out to some hope, but my hope was quickly squashed by the poor writing and the bad storytelling. Every single episode.
Daredevil was reduced to a joke and I’m not sure who approved of the relationship between him and Jen, but I didn’t like it one bit.
Nobody actually faces any real consequences for their actions, but that was a major point of contention in the MCU films where Captain America and the Avengers faced real consequences for their constant destruction and their infighting. There were real stakes to be had.
I know that She-Hulk is supposed to be a comedy, but how can it claim to be that when it’s missing the element of what makes a comedy, comical?
It has to actually be funny.
There were rarely instances in which I laughed throughout this show. Rarely instances where I felt like the characters were relatable. It was all a mess. I’m not sure who this show was aimed for, but I can see that it missed the mark.
She-Hulk’s finale tried to make a jab at MCU tropes, but to be honest, I’d rather see those tropes than whatever mess we were given with this show.
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Zainah Yousef
Zainah Yousef is the author of The Fallen Age Saga and specializes in gaming, social media advice, and reviews. She's been writing all her life and she probably won't stop anytime soon.
