Review: She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, "Ribbit and Rip It" | Season 1, Episode 8
Yes, Daredevil finally made his appearance, but it isn't the MCU-ified escalation you might expect
I was at a Carly Rae Jepsen show over the weekend, and made some small talk with a man and woman near me because they, too, were wearing masks. In the midst of this conversation, the gentleman asked if I considered myself a “crazy fan” of the artist, and I paused at this question. He then elaborated that he really only knew “Call Me Maybe” and thus was a more casual fan, and I realized that by that definition, yes: I knew all the songs, even the B-sides, and while I don’t feel like I embody the emotions of fandom in most circumstances, I probably qualify in this instance.
I was thinking about this as “Ribbit and Rip It” began playing out, and Matt Murdock aka Daredevil was officially welcomed into the MCU after his brief cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home. It wasn’t a surprise like that cameo had been: he showed up in the show’s trailer, they talked about being able to include the character, and they actively teased him even to viewers who missed all that press with the appearance of his helmet in Luke’s work room a few episodes ago. They even released a clip from this week’s episode in advance. But it’s different when we actually get the full experience, not just with Matt Murdock the lawyer, but also with Daredevil fighting through goons in hallways just like the good ol’ days. For fans, part of the joy of the MCU as a concept is seeing these moments of convergence, and Daredevil’s cancellation by Netflix and subsequent return following the rights reverting back to Disney offers one such narrative (beyond considering the comic book fandom elements that predate the MCU, as Eric models here).
Here’s the thing, though: the Netflix street level shows were a moment where my “fandom” of the MCU such as it is reached its limit. I’ve seen every movie, and I’ll watch every explicitly canonical TV show (probably), but after watching the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones (and the first arc of Luke Cage), I bailed. Some of this is timing, as I ended up dropping a lot of shows around the time I started my tenure-track job (see: Better Call Saul), but more of it is the fact that I realized this was building an entirely new satellite vaguely within the MCU, and that didn’t have the same appeal. Once Iron Fist and The Defenders fizzled out the possibility of interconnection within that universe, the incentive to catch up disappeared, and the lengthy 13-episode seasons seemed too daunting to bother. And so while I saw a season of Charlie Cox’s Daredevil, I have no idea where that show ended, nor whether anything we see here contradicts it.
Which is to say that I’m maybe not as concerned about the confused issue of canonicity as fans of Netflix’s Daredevil might be, although I have to say that Feige’s choice to leave the question vague is a fascinating one. “Ribbit and Rip It,” like the No Way Home cameo, gets mileage out of fans’ familiarity with the character—we’re meant to know who Matt Murdock is, and while Jen might not outright break the fourth wall to acknowledge it, the episode is set up to pay off the teases over the course of the series. But the episode also isolates him from any of the stories around him, anchoring him to a She-Hulk-specific character—superhero tailor Luke—and having him explain his powers to Jen once she discovers his identity. From maybe most fans’ perspective, this is a cameo, but it leaves room for the idea someone is being introduced to Daredevil for the the first time, as surprised as Jen when she pulls off his helmet.
As such, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to speculate on whether the Matt Murdock we meet in “Ribbit and Rip It” is the same as the one on Netflix. Whether explained with the multiverse or simply hand-waved away, the Netflix shows are clearly not going to be treated as outright canon in the way the rest of the MCU is. What matters more is whether or not the impression Matt makes here is a productive engine for whatever will happen in his own forthcoming series (and Echo before that), and more importantly what that appearance does as the anchor of the penultimate episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. And on these fronts, “Ribbit and Rip It” is a strong outing that makes tremendous use of Tatiana Maslany’s chemistry with Charlie Cox, as well as Jen Walters’ ambivalence about being a superhero, before rushing into a climactic moment that brings us all the way back to the premiere.
And look, Tatiana Maslany is probably capable of having chemistry with any living actor, but her connection with Cox is great right off the bat. The show may not have a lot of patience for actual law (and there’s a good number of logistical issues that would keep a NYC-based attorney from just leapfrogging coasts like this), but it understands the flirtatious reality of sparring in court, and taking it to the lawyer bar afterward is a great example of the show embracing its legal sitcom genre to let them connect without being bogged down by the dourness of those Netflix shows (and much of the MCU).
Admittedly, the plot with Luke stretches credulity—I refuse to believe Jen wouldn’t have delved deeper into Leapfrog’s claims about the suit and at least discovered the possibility of user error, for instance. But the plot requires her to be on the opposite side of the case so Matt can enter, and so it can both have its cake (have She-Hulk and Daredevil face off) and eat it too (have them realize they’re actually on the same side and team up). The fight has the nice moment where she accidentally takes out his hearing with a sonic boom, and of course her wondering if he’s faking being blind, while the teamup gives us a look at their different philosophies, with both stealth and brute force proving productive in their own way as they take out Leapfrog’s goons.
The episode never pretends this is anything other than foreplay—you didn’t even really need Jen’s break of the fourth wall to comment on the chemistry, and once they’re on the roof together the fact they’d end up hooking up just feels right. It seems doubtful the MCU has long-term plans for this relationship—Daredevil has appearances in Echo and his own series ahead, but doesn’t have as clear of a link to the broader MCU as Jen does. But that’s completely fine, because the sight of Daredevil’s walk of shame was a true laugh-out-loud visual that speaks to the fun this show has been allowed to have within the confines of the franchise. It’s unclear if any of this will be allowed to carry over to Daredevil’s other appearances, but it’s a winning proper reintroduction of the character for someone who didn’t follow all of his past exploits.
Notably, though, “Ribbit or Rip It” doesn’t end there, rushing to show us the gala we were promised as opposed to leaving it for the finale. Jen herself comments on how strange this is, as the image of Daredevil’s walk of shame really is the natural end point for the basic plot of this episode if you divorce it from the context of the season. But this is a penultimate episode of a season of television, and thus the episode gives way to the pressure in a rushed trip to Jen’s (shared) victory as Female Lawyer of the Year, which is swiftly disrupted by HulkKing and the Intelligentcia.
At first blush, this seems disconnected from the episode that came before it. There’s no time to unpack the idea that the award had multiple winners, and Mallory’s appearance as one of them doesn’t do much to add to her suspiciously thin character, making it seem like a hastened grasp at a final act given Daredevil was just an interlude. Jen jokes about this, sure, but it’s still rushed, and what we see of the Intelligentcia’s plan isn’t the Big Bad the whole runner about her blood seems to have been building to. Instead, they hijack the event to “expose” her, presumably because they believe she stole the Hulk’s powers and represents a threat to the masculinity of the superpowered order. The blatant misogyny of the “Female Lawyer of the Year” presentation gives way to the blatant misogyny of slut shaming and revenge porn, with the reveal that Josh recorded them having sex.
The choice to make the “Big Bad” of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law into online incels is on-the-nose, but works to reflect the specific consequences of something Matt and Jen talk about here: the perils of being a superhero without a secret identity. Her desire to try to remain a private citizen after gaining superpowers was an honorable one, perhaps, but it was fundamentally naive. Matt lays out a potential model to make this work for Jen—do what she can within her job to make the law work for people, and then working off-the-clock to help where the law cannot. But this implies that she will be capable of doing so without coming under siege, and that clearly wasn’t true. She was always going to be subject to scrutiny as a public-facing hero, let alone as a female hero with such a clear connection to an existing male one.
There was much internet discourse around Jen’s explanation in the premiere regarding her ability to retain her identity when transformed into a Hulk, and it’s telling to me that the Bruce scenes were originally intended to come here in the eighth episode. Because what we see in the final moments is Jen’s ability to control her rage—practiced after a life of experiencing sexism in both her work and personal lives—disintegrating, and her Hulk form taking over. She’s no longer Jen in those moments—Mallory tries to talk her out of it, but at that point Jen’s capacity to sustain these attacks has given way to pure hatred. In a season about her efforts to understand her identity after becoming a Hulk, but with the ability to swap between the two forms at will, she loses control of her own narrative here, which is fitting given how the Intelligentcia’s actions are built around using the internet to violently wrest control of her image away from her.
I doubt that this connection will do much to help those who rejected Jen’s argument as an example of “woke” politics invading a superhero show unnecessarily, but it no doubt embeds those politics more directly into the character study on display. A lot of this will still depend on whether there’s a reveal of someone orchestrating this HulkKing campaign, and whether the show has any desire to connect it to the MCU at large, but for me “Ribbit or Rip It” makes those points somewhat moot. Much as Daredevil’s entrance was just a sexy teamup with the show’s star, the ongoing threat being revealed as a bunch of violent men online threatened by the fact of her existence is thematically effective and resonates dramatically within the plot of this series if not the MCU as a whole.
We’ll know more about what the MCU wants to do with this origin in next week’s finale, but for the time being this was a good culmination of the story being told so far, and that’s more what I needed from it at the end of the day.
Stray observations
The Sokovia Accords! Everyone’s favorite subject. I don’t know if Matt’s speech about the distinction between superheroes and celebrities necessarily added up to much of anything, but it was nice to see some of the specifics of the “world” of heroes debated like this in this context.
Eugene was a real dipshit, but I appreciated how much his rich parents gave him the full opulence of supervillain behavior, but in the lamest possible way—the Frogger machines and lily ponds were a great touch. That said, we didn’t actually see who his father was, which feels like it’s a meaningful hint at something else to be revealed about the company Jen keeps at her firm.
Okay, but seriously, Renee Elise Goldsberry is not in this show just for that, right? Her one story was mostly with Nikki, and while she briefly appears to mentor Jen in this moment of rage, we get no followup. I still can’t shake the idea she has to be somehow connected to a bigger picture, but it seems deeply unlikely she’s involved with the misogyny of the Intelligentcia, so I’m flummoxed.
It does seem like we’re moving past Todd, who just wanted to flex his wealth under the guise of legal advice as he continues to pursue Jen. It does make you wonder why he didn’t do this to begin with, rather than running into her on a dating app, and those early questions about her skin were certainly conspicuous (or are we just so trained to search for a Big Bad that we’re grasping at straws?).
“Crap, I’ll go leave a note”—I appreciate that she’s so untrained in the superhero-ing that she doesn’t even think about property destruction, but completely shifts into guilt mode when she does. Do superheroes have insurance? Questions this show could answer if it doesn’t move too quick to throw Jen and her new supersuit into the MCU at large.
“Am I getting fridged?”—I found this particular break of the fourth-wall to be a bit disingenuous, only because the very fact a writer wrote this line in means that she obviously won’t be. It’s sort of my inherent issue with the writerly fourth wall breaks, which reinforce the existence of the writers, and thus disconnect the events of the season from Jen herself. I just don’t know the limits of her self-awareness, and that serves to disconnect me from the character instead of welcome me more into her head.
“We’re all feeling this, right?”—yes, Jen, my notes are just various observations about how cute and charming the whole thing was.
The Ketchup and Mustard color scheme does really feel like it can’t come back from this, right?
I saw Charlie Cox do a solo Dragon Con panel right around the time that season 1 of Daredevil came out, and he was charming, self-effacing, and genial. Basically, stuff that Daredevil only occasionally allowed him to be and that She-Hulk decided to build his character around. He can be an incredibly winning actor when he isn't forced to brood all the time, and even as someone who enjoyed the Netflix show, I'm now far more excited for Born Again than I thought possible (even if it isn't as lighthearted as She-Hulk, which is all but a certainty).
I also liked how they leaned into the fact that She-Hulk and Daredevil are very different shows. The walk of shame was magnificent, but they way they teed up another hallway fight before having She-Hulk pull the rug out from under the viewers by smashing the henchgoons might have been my favorite gag. Not quite as funny as the elevator fight fakeout in Endgame, but still an excellent bit.
I've been enjoying this show, but man are the courtroom scenes bad. Asking questions and presenting evidence while seated and addressing the judge? “He’s lying. Don’t ask me how I know, I just know.” Really? REALLY?
When the writers talked about not being skilled at writing courtroom scenes, I never expected that they've apparently never even watched a legal show.
Daredevil, though!