Review: She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, "A Normal Amount of Rage" | Season 1, Episode 1
An engaging premiere nonetheless offers less-than-normal understanding of the show it will become
“What is the responsibility of those with power?”
Jennifer Walters asks this question in her closing arguments she’s preparing as She Hulk: Attorney at Law begins, and it’s certainly a through line in the episode. Her cousin Bruce is adamant that the accident leading to her becoming a hulk means that she is bound to become a superhero, but she disagrees. She just wants to go back to being a lawyer, returning to the carefully constructed career that she sacrificed so much to achieve. It’s a tension that will no doubt be a central theme in a show that—whether Jen likes it or not—is about her becoming part of the world of the Avengers, and taking on the responsibility she demands of the powerful people she tries as an ADA.
“A Normal Amount of Rage” might raise this theme, but it doesn’t get to explore it much, as it gives up its entire running time to a fourth-wall introduced flashback of how Jennifer Walters turned into…well, not She-Hulk, but rather a Hulkified version of Jennifer Walters. This information is pertinent to the story being told, and I enjoyed the banter between the two cousins, but this is not an origin story that seeds a significant narrative. It’s just a series of facts, with a productive thematic parallel, and this premiere resists giving us a clearer image of what the actual TV show in question intends to do in and around that theme. The result is an engaging half-hour of television, but one that offers less clarity about what to expect over the next eight weeks than I’d imagined.
I understand the impulse, though. Although Mark Ruffalo is only credited as a Special Guest Star, the promise of more material around Bruce Banner is certainly going to be a draw for MCU followers. While the Fox deal resolved most of the entanglements around the licensing of key Marvel characters, the Hulk has remained stuck in an inscrutable situation with Universal, with the Ed Norton-featuring origin story—which I’ve honestly never seen—the only solo effort for the character. And whereas Steve, Tony, and Natasha got major sendoffs, Thor is still ongoing with his own film series, and Clint got a series of his own to transition out of Endgame, Bruce has always been a background player. Because he’s never been a lead player within the interconnected era of the MCU, even when his story has appeared in the teamup films or in his key supporting role in Thor: Ragnarok it’s felt tangential.
And so while Bruce remains in a supporting role here, giving us more of the character and making him a mentor figure to Jen scratches an itch of sorts for an audience that has generally liked the character. We only get a minute or two of Bruce post-Endgame, controlling the rage using a prototype device, but Jen’s gammafied blood ends up curing his busted arm, giving him a new lease on his superhero life. Smart Hulk thus becomes his permanent form again, a sacrifice he’s made because he believes—to the theme mentioned above—that his job is to save the world. Whereas Jen crashes her car when the Saakarian courier ship shows up on the road in front of her, Bruce sees this as just a part of being super, which I’m hoping the show interrogates a bit more. Jen makes a lot of comments about how he’s resigned himself to being isolated and alone, and while this is not going to be as balanced a story as Hawkeye was, I do hope we get to see Bruce often enough to explore those themes through his perspective.
But in the end, “A Normal Amount of Rage” doesn’t get to explore them at all, because once we finish the flashback to Jen’s origin story we get two seconds of Jameela Jamil’s Titania attacking the courtroom and that’s it. It’s an important moment for Jen, as she willfully reveals her superpowered self to the world despite being able to control it, but it isn’t a significant launching pad for the story. We get no backstory on Titania—whose name I only know because of the show’s marketing—before she attacks the courtroom, we learn nothing about the case itself, and if Jennifer is in fact a lawyer who specializes in “powered” cases the show hasn’t explored that dimension here. In this way, it resists doing what a television pilot would historically do, as the show has not yet reached the point where its logline on Disney+—an attorney specializing in superhuman cases navigates like as a single, green, 6-foot, 7inch hulk—actually makes sense, with the “single” part also more or less unexplored here.
It’s why I’m surprised they chose to only debut a single episode—Disney has done two-episode premieres many times now, and while it inherently reduces the value of the show in terms of churn by limiting its run by a week, it can have a stronger effect of pulling people in. They did it with Hawkeye, for example, and I think it might have helped me here. I’m obviously inclined to keep watching given that I’m covering the show, but I find myself with a lot of unanswered questions as to the capacity for the show to…well, be a show. As with Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law has a clear generic tie to television as a medium, but whereas the former spent a fair bit of time in its high school setting before giving Kamala super powers, “A Normal Amount of Rage” leaves its setting to tell its origin story. And while Jen’s direct address narration offers a clear picture of what this new life looks like before her courtroom transformation—her family and her paralegal Nikki (Ginger Gonzaga) know about it, but no one else—it doesn’t give us much of a clue of what the show itself will look like in the weeks ahead.
Marvel doesn’t really care about that, though—the MCU shows don’t have the same pressures of an average TV show, because they know that the built-in audience is pretty likely to see it through to the end. I don’t know what the completion rate is on the Marvel projects, but I’m guessing it’s better than your average TV show, or else Disney would likely be trying to adjust the launches to account for it.
In this case, though, they may have simply had enough confidence that Tatiana Maslany would be enough to convince people, and they may well be right. I never did finish Orphan Black—it got too convoluted, I got too busy—but I always marveled at Maslany’s performance there, and she’s winning as Jen. She’s just so intensely charming, and immediately sells you on the kind of person Jen is. The show has to do some explaining as to her ability to control her rage differently, but Maslany sells the lawyer-y speech about what it is to be a woman in the world, and while I don’t really see a TV show around her yet I’ll happily watch such a TV show. Knowing that the show leans heavier into comedy, I was reminded how great Maslany is at handling the banter-y style the scenes in Mexico settle into, despite being Emmy-awarded for her dramatic work. As soon as this casting was reported—and then unconfirmed for a hilarious amount of time—it felt like a great fit, and this premiere confirms that.
We can and will be having conversations about the show’s use of CGI, and on its balance of genres, and on the continued balancing act of creating TV shows within a cinematic universe, but “A Normal Amount of Rage” doesn’t really offer enough of the show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law intends to be for me to make any definitive judgments on any of it. But I found this to be a breezy and enjoyable half-hour even though it was bogged down in this origin tale, which means I’m at the very least hopeful this energy can be transferred to the legal show it wants to be in the weeks ahead.
Stray observations
So, the CGI. I think there are two problems here (outside of the exploitative working conditions facing digital effects artists working on Marvel and other big-budget projects, of course). The first is that spending so much of the episode next to Smart Hulk is a bad comparison: not only was that model developed over a much longer period, but we’re also more familiar with it, and so our brains naturally accept it as existing in space differently than Jen’s. The second is that while I thought the model looked fine throughout this episode, it was mostly in scenes with another CGI character, and in lighting conditions in Mexico that likely aren’t going to be similar to those the show normally lives in. It’s possible sitting with this for a week as opposed to jumping right into more screeners—critics writing advance reviews got four episodes—will help, but I’m sure it will be a topic of conversation throughout its run.
“He used to say it was a loaner and one day he’d swing by and take it back”—Ruffalo as Smart Hulk gets a split-second to sell the emotion of this line, but then things move on fairly quickly. I might’ve lingered on it a bit more, but I get that the show doesn’t want to get too bogged down in the past.
“Bing Bong jumping out of the wagon in Inside Out” as an emotional baseline is correct, yes.
Tatiana Maslany is a tiny human, and thus any scene with her and Smart Hulk just made me smile, as any scene featuring one tiny person and one giant person does. It’s just science.
I enjoyed the style of the closing credits, but I’m curious if some of the images will be changing each week—the Spandex and “Steve Rogers is a Virgin” vignettes felt very specific to this hour, and so I’ll be keeping an eye on that while waiting to see if we get more mid-credits scenes (which was just implied in a tweet I read noting that some website spoiled them, so if you read those spoilers please refrain from sharing them).
Speaking of the Steve Rogers is a Virgin runner, it’s a fun bit, and a worthy use of the post-credits scene to get a nice near-swear in there. I don’t know if it was expressly necessary, but I get that they want to use the existing MCU lore to anchor their comic approach, and this was a productive merger of those two goals.
By choosing to show us the origin in seemingly full detail, it opens up the question of why Jen was never…angrier? Like, she’s defiant that she’ll just go back to her normal life and that’s fine, but she doesn’t ever process this as a traumatic event, and that strikes me as a bit strange. Curious if we circle back to that at all, or if the tone of the show just doesn’t allow for it.
I’m curious if this was the same for everyone—did Disney+ suggest Infinity War when the episode finished? That was a surprising choice to me out of all of the possible MCU films to recommend, and frankly it’s a missed opportunity for it to have not been Inside Out.
Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law! I’m excited to dive into another MCU show after having great discussions about Ms. Marvel with subscribers earlier this summer. As a reminder, everyone gets this first review for free, but starting next week only paid subscribers have access to weekly reviews. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this premiere in the days ahead.
I really wanted another episode available at launch, too. Pilots are always sort of wonky creatures that can introduce a story and characters but not really the typical episode structure, and that seems to be truer than ever with these established-franchise streaming ventures -- Remember how Falcon and the Winter Soldier didn't even share any scenes together in their own first episode?
Anyway, whether in a second installment or as a bigger role in this one, I would have loved to get more of the 'Attorney at Law' today along with our dose of 'She-Hulk.' But maybe that's just because I'm still mourning the recent departure of Better Call Saul from our lives.
(Say it with me now: "Lawyer show!")
Also got the Infinity War lead-in. So far the show was just ok, which a lot of premiere's sort of have to suffer through to set everything up. But I'll watch Tatiana in anything as she is a pure joy to see perform. A few notes:
- Who is making Hulk custom vintage tee shirts? The Nirvana one raised so many questions, especially since I think Hulk admitted to once attempting to end his own life before. Odd choice there.
- I don't see how in any way being able to drink forever and not get drunk but still get hangovers is a perk. This seems like all the worst parts about drinking, and expensive to boot.
- Gonna need to see Bruce's binder about why Jessica's hair changes when she Hulk's out. Distracting more than the shoddy CGI.
- I kind of hope Cheetos acts as an unofficial co-lead for the entire run as its appearances here were so egregious.
- Kind of a dick move taking the Jeep and leaving Bruce on the island...seems like he was only there to help her and probably had shit to do (Hello World War Hulk tease with the Sakaarian ship!)