The following article contains major spoilers for the finale of She-Hulk.
I've got to admit, I initially gave up on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law after the first couple of episodes. As much as I appreciated a new genre take on the familiar MCU formula, I didn't love the fourth wall schtick, I didn't chime with the jokes, and the effects seemed rushed, presumably a result of the poor conditions allegedly forced on VFX artists. (Maybe I got out of bed on the wrong side the day I double-billed the eps, but it was giving me Diet Waller-Bridge, with giant green people.)
My boyfriend, nevertheless, kept with it — and it was a few weeks ago, with my interest stirred by my Twitter timeline going wild over Charlie Cox's big Daredevil return, that I caught an episode in the background while I was cooking dinner.
The titular Ms Hulk was running legal for an immortal super-person with a proclivity for jumping out of windows… and bigamy. Elsewhere, a friend's wedding was falling apart, with the beleaguered bride seemingly worried that the presence of She-Hulk would steal her limelight (a legitimate concern to grapple with in a world of metahumans). It was really rather funny, and refreshingly self-aware; it felt different to the other Disney+ MCU spin-offs I'd sat through, variously out of genuine enjoyment (WandaVision, Hawkeye, Loki) and job duties (the other ones).
So when a friend tweeted in shock at the finale's meta twists and turns — “Oh my god SHE-HULK,” he wrote, “THEY REALLY DID THAT!” — I had to jump in.
Let's recap. About halfway into the episode, fleeing the big climactic brawl mandatory of all superhero shows, She-Hulk leaps through the fourth wall into the series' writers' room. Huh! She chastises them for their cliched storytelling ("the bad guy steals my blood in order to give himself superpowers… where did you come up with that original idea? Was that from every other superhero story, ever?") and her own diminished agency (who wants to be saved by their similarly large, green cousin? Why aren't women heroes afforded the same strength as their male counterparts?)
Turns out her ire is in the wrong place: this is the climax “Kevin” wants. Now clued into the meta of it all, we obviously expect the human form of Kevin Feige, the MCU's famous head honcho. Instead, we get a HAL 9000-style mechanical AI, K.E.V.I.N., housed in the bowels of the Disney offices, his (it's?) narrative ideas dictated by a clinical algorithm — an interpretation that Feige would've presumably signed off on.
In the following back-and-forth, they dialogue about the financial costs of CGI production, amid heightened awareness around the plight of special effects artists and larger scrutiny on the quality of CG in She-Hulk itself. She-Hulk, now in human form, scolds K.E.V.I.N. for the MCU's favourite emotional crutch: daddy issues. The MCU's lack of sex, another oft-wielded critique of the franchise at large, gets a line ("historically we've been light in that department," K.E.V.I.N. robotically intimates). Most of all: the MCU is deeply formulaic. Why should She-Hulk be, too?
Fans across social media tweeted and posted their gleeful surprise. Did they really just dedicate half of a popular series' finale to… self-effacing in-jokes? Not aimed at She-Hulk, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself, that ever-expanding monolith broadly criticised for its structural repetitiveness? Credit where it's due: the writing's fun, it's a risky way to bow out and, taken on face value, could win a curmudgeonly Marvel agonostic (read: me) over. If Marvel ever does succeed, it's when franchise creators are given as much creative freedom as possible, and you don't get a much more literal example of artistic license than a finale that, well, takes on the MCU's lacking creativity.
Breath of fresh air so it is, it's still akin to the crown-approved jester playing to the court. You relish in the meta of it all, the (fundamentally safe) jokes at the expense of the Feige throne, but will Marvel actually learn from any of the soft criticisms the finale engages in? Probably not. K.E.V.I.N., after all, is another familiar cameo. Marvel movies will continue to structurally replicate one another. And it feels a little tone-deaf to tacitly acknowledge the criticisms of the show's effects, knowing the working conditions that allegedly undergird them. In truth, a finale so apparently self-immolating doesn't speak to any emerging vulnerability in the Marvel machine, but its unending dominance. It's certainly a hoot to see the creators take on Marvel's foibles from the inside, but it's hard to shake the sense of a mirage.
She-Hulk is now streaming in full on Disney+.
