The Short Take:
My favorite since Episode 4. I wish we’d gotten to it sooner, but this was an endearing, important step in Jen’s personal journey. I’m nervous they’ll undermine it all shortly, though.
Image Credit: Polygon
[SPOILER WARNING: You’ve been subpoenaed, but only can appear in court unless you’ve seen this episode. (My apologies to all the lawyers. Really.)]
The Long Take:
I want Emil Blonksky to be good.
Sitcoms take many forms, but I think I can place many of them in one of two buckets: cynical and hopeful. Or, more specifically, terrible people hilariously doing terrible things vs. mostly good people doing their best (though that does not preclude them from sometimes doing terrible things in the process). I was a 90s kid, and Seinfeld had a huge impact on me and TV sitcoms; I can see its legacy in more recent series like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, 30 Rock, Arrested Development, and Veep. I would place that entire lineage in the cynical bucket. In the other, more hopeful bucket, I would put Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99, and Ted Lasso. Some shows like The Good Place, Community (congrats, on the movie, by the way!), and Schitt’s Creek do feature selfish characters who do bad things, but at their core those series want to convert those characters into kinder, more emotionally intelligent people. They have breakthroughs. They grow and develop. There’s an optimism and an earnestness.
All this classification is to say that while I enjoy both types of shows and will laugh at both, I want to live in the worlds of those more hopeful and optimistic shows. I’m a sap. I’m a sucker. I want everyone to be or become a good guy. And after this week’s episode of She-Hulk, I want the MCU’s first sitcom to be, at its core, hopeful and optimistic more than cynical.
I think the jury’s still out on which it is. Yes, creator Jessica Gao has given us a lot of satire, a lot of spoofing that would imply a certain degree of cynicism. The humor surrounding Jen’s experience as a woman is especially dark because they speak aloud the sexism that many women watching at home experience daily. But this week’s episode, in which Jen visits Emil Blonsky at his yoga retreat, “Summer Twilights,” was, in response to Jen’s continual (and somewhat tiresome) dating problems, profoundly sweet.
A tussle between two of Blonsky’s clients, Man-Bull and El Aguila (who wants everyone to know that he is NOT a matador), damages her car and leaves her stranded at Blonsky’s retreat while she waits for repairs. While wandering around the property searching for cell phone service so she can check for texts from Josh — who has been ghosting her — she stumbles upon a group therapy session led by Blonsky. The circle of trust includes Man-Bull, El Aguila, a vampire named Saracen, Porcupine (my personal favorite), and Wrecker — yes, that’s the guy who led the gang that jumped Jen in the alley in Episode 3. These are apparently all deep cut super villains from various corners of Marvel Comics history.
Image Credit: Looper
I loved these guys. I thought they were amusingly, endearingly goofy. The way in which they rally around Jen was adorable. The reveal that Porcupine hasn’t even removed his suit to wash it was an amusing surprise. And hearing them spout lines like, “It hurts when others reject us because it reminds us of the times we reject ourselves” worked so well because the words are both absurd self-help gobble-y goop and kind of true. I got the sense that these villains, like Blonsky, want to reform and have actually made some progress on that front. Even if the characters hadn’t been sweet or cute, the concept of a villain going through group therapy to try to work through their issues is in of itself funny. The humor reminded me a lot of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog [insert lamentation over how Joss Whedon ruined his own work for all of us…sigh] in the way it counterintuitively shows how megalomaniac villains have feelings too.
I want those feelings to be real. I want Emil Blonsky to actually be reformed rather than a part of a grand plot to ensnare She-Hulk. I want the group therapy session in this show to have meant something. If Blonsky turns out to have been playing the long con, all of that warmth and fuzziness fades away. And yet there are too many hints at a nefarious plot during the Blonsky retreat scenes. Wrecker apologizes to Jen for attacking her, but he conveniently avoids explaining why he did so in the first. We, the audience, know that he is working for someone who wants a She-Hulk blood sample because, in Episode 3, the camera zooms in on the broken syringe and someone, possibly even Wrecker, says that their boss is going to be upset. Wrecker’s very presence in Blonsky’s circle makes the whole thing suspect. The world is just not that small.
Image Credit: AV Club
Then, Saracen, a “human who identifies as a vampire,” according to the MCU fan wiki, suggests that maybe Josh wanted Jen’s blood. I cringe to cite a wiki, but after my Marvel expert friend and frequent MCU consultant, Colby, noted that Saracen is out and about during the day unharmed, making it unlikely he is a real vampire, I had to investigate and could only find comments about not being a vampire on this wiki. Blonsky says that Saracen thinks he’s a vampire. Colby recognized all of the retreat villains except Saracen, which tells me the “human who identifies as a vampire” may be the deepest, most shrouded cut of them all. Other than announcing that a Blade movie is on the way, the MCU hasn’t established any legitimate vampire lore yet (sorry, Morbius). So I’m not quite sure what to make of this.
At any rate, his comment about how maybe Josh just wants Jen’s blood is, I think, more meta-commentary for the audience. It’s absurd and not taken seriously in the therapy circle because Saracen is obsessed with blood and vampires, but to the audience it serves as a hammer over the head that, as we learn soon after, Josh was only feigning interest in Jen to steal some of her blood while she was sleeping.
Image Credit: Looper
I can’t help but say I told you so about Josh. This is probably the closest I’ve come to predicting the plot of an MCU series, so let me revel in the small victory. I’m still mad that the show decided to let Jen think she’d found a good guy, almost weaponizing her own dating insecurities against her. I do, on the other hand, like her speech in this episode because she finally articulates her inner conflict and conflicted feelings about She-Hulk; it was beautifully written, tied together a lot of what may have seemed like more erratic storytelling in previous episodes, and allowed Tatiana Maslany to showcase her dramatic acting more.
A lot of questions arise here as we move into the final two episodes of the season. Who is HulkKing? When will Daredevil show up? And will he merely aid She-Hulk in a fight by happenstance or will HulkKing actually have an in-universe connection with Daredevil? Is the King in HulkKing a reference to Kingpin, for example? He seems like a villain savvy enough to raise an army of Intelligencia incels on the Internet. Or is that too much currency for Marvel to spend here when Daredevil Born Again is in the Disney+ pipeline, set to release in 2024?
The other candidate floating around digital alleyways is Todd, one of Jen’s bad dates from Ep. 4. He’s the one who asks her about her skin being impenetrable and calls her a specimen. He stuck out as creepier than all the other dates because he had such a keen interest in She-Hulk’s powers. MCU series do have a habit of hiding their villains in plain sight (see WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), so while I don’t love this pick, I wouldn’t be surprised by it. There are also some theories that HulkKing is actually Hulkling, a half-Cree, half-Skrull character from the comics. So we could potentially get a Hulkling origin story with Todd? But beyond the potential connection to the upcoming Secret Invasion next year, I don’t see enough to go on here.
In many ways, She-Hulk has been a battle of the trolls, on screen and off. Actress Jameela Jamil renamed her Twitter acount Titania and has been responding to less civil backlash against She-Hulk. Some of that backlash includes big complaints that Daredevil hasn’t arrived yet. They’re the ones that have forgotten whose show this really is.
That said, why would they tease his appearance so early on, unless they were purposefully trying to mess with MCU fans and help us cultivate some self-awareness? So much of the series seems to mock what MCU fans want and expect from a series. I think that’s healthy for normal fans — much might like Blonsky’s support group, we could all use a little introspection. The writing on the show definitely seems designed to enrage the more toxic, sexist fans out there, though.
Image Credit: Collider
Do we have to troll Jen in the story? That’s my only qualm with this plot line. Are we going to keep making her think that she’s found happiness only to yank the proverbial football away from her again and again? I want better for her, and here’s hoping I get my wish by the end of the season.