New fits, but more misses than hits in She-Hulk Ep. 5.
The satire lived up to the series’ gold standard, but a highly-anticipated character left me wanting.
The Short Take:
I appreciated the send-up of retail marketing, but overall this was a bit of a let-down after last week’s episode. Missed opportunities with a character we’ve been waiting to see.
Image Credit: Collider
[SPOILER WARNING: I may not be legally obligated to tell you this, but I also don’t want to get sued. Make sure you have seen through Episode 5 of She-Hulk before you continue.]
The Long Take:
Even when I know I’m going to give a student paper a lower grade, I still like to start with what is working well. Despite what many may assume, I don’t do this to “soften the blow.” (Though that does happen, probably.) I do it to acknowledge that how well a piece is working overall does not preclude it from having individual strengths or aspects that might be excellent. So while I would say that this week’s episode of She-Hulk was weaker — as a discrete narrative chunk of the series or as an episode of television in general — I don’t want to go straight to my criticisms. I want to celebrate the elements that shine on their own first.
If I pluck the spot-on parody of social media influencer celebrity culture and product marketing from the episode, for example, I can say that it is brilliant. We quickly learn that Titania has not only trademarked the name “She-Hulk”, but she has created an entire line of beauty products called “She-Hulk by Titania.” The advertising for these seems so scarily accurate and yet completely ridiculous that I burst out laughing and asked myself, “Why is this so funny?” I think because it struck a nerve with the kind of advertising I’m bombarded with on a daily basis.
Image Credit: Decider
People seem to be going wild over these products not because of any attachment to She-Hulk — if you removed the legally contentious name I would not have known the difference — but because they are followers of Titania on social media and will pretty much buy anything with her branding on it. Even worse, the show implies that these products are of questionable quality. There are two kinds of celebrities: the artists and the entrepreneurs. Titania is certainly the latter. Jen reading all the different labels as she and Nikki wander around the “pop up” shop at The Grove (a fancy schmancy mall in LA) reminded me of times I have been completely stymied by the vast selection at Sephora. I too do not know what the difference between a beauty oil, beauty serum, or beauty tonic is. Tonic is especially bizarre — am I supposed to be drinking this stuff?
I do feel as though I am obligated to disclose that as I type this, real-life advertisements for a She-Hulk make-up collection by Urban Decay are popping up on my Instagram feed. The main product seems to be a an eyeshadow palette featuring greens and purples. Each shade has an obnoxiously cute name like “hulk out,” “crushing it,” “no further questions,” and, appropriately for this episode, “trademark this.” One of the models in some of the promotional images sports a look eerily similar to Titania’s. I’m curious how conscious a decision this was, and whose it was.
Image Credit: Urban Decay
I want to pause here to note how perverse this really is. We have a television series owned by a huge corporation parodying cosmetics that use superheroes in their branding. Meanwhile, that huge corporation is collaborating with another slightly less huge corporation to create actual cosmetics that use superheroes in their branding. Is the show’s parody being weaponized to sell the very thing it’s making fun of? Or is this just peak capitalism and we should all bask in its glow? The ads for the Urban Decay collection do include the tagline, “an original series only on Disney+.” So at the very least the beauty product very similar to the one being made fun of in the show is actually being used to promote the show. Is this a snake eating its own tail situation? The end of times? What if someone buys this make-up and then checks out the show having no idea what She-Hulk is about? They’re in for a surprising amount of introspection about their own consumerism. All that said, was I still tempted to purchase She/Hulk x Urban Decay? I plead the fifth.
While the satire Titania prompted was bitingly funny, Titania herself, as a character, continues to disappoint. I do not think that this is a failing in character design or of Jameela Jamil’s acting. I don’t think the writers have given us enough time to get to know her and have not used the time they’ve had with her wisely. To me, she still seems more like a stereotype than a fully formed villain. Madisynn is a great counterpoint; she has only been in one episode, and yet I feel as though I could describe her persona vividly to someone else. We’ve technically seen Titania in three episodes and she has been referenced several times, but I can’t tell you anything beyond she’s a bratty social media influencer who wears a lot of eye makeup. Her appearances have been so fleeting. In this episode, she has a lot more screen time, but spends most of it sitting quietly in a courtroom while lawyers argue around her. The catty Shrek joke she makes under her breath and the exasperated “fine, you can buy me things” comment as she exits the courtroom gave me glimmers of fun villain diva, but not enough.
Image Credit: Collider
To get more Titania, the episode could have intercut the courtroom scenes with Titania’s social media posts/videos so we can see why followers might find her so compelling. We see her posing for selfies during legal proceedings; why not go one step further and give the audience access to those? I would have even been happy with a viral marketing campaign for the show in the form of a fake account for Titania so that we can get to know her more off-screen. At least give us some trash talking of She-Hulk on her Tik Tok account.
Or maybe an explanation of why she really trademarked She-Hulk. Was it just to make a buck and capitalize on Jen’s 15 minutes of fame? Or is there a more deep-seated vendetta, with the lawsuit serving as retaliation for She-Hulk humiliating Titania in their Episode 1 courtroom brawl? I mentioned earlier that I thought there was very little She-Hulk in the She-Hulk by Titania line, so that implies that the trademarking was more about taking Jen’s name away from her rather than it actually being useful to Titania. And what about her powers? Where did she come from? Titania had so much potential, and I now fear that the trademark verdict combined with the Daredevil tease (simmer down; I’ll get to that in a minute) means she won’t be back.
Maybe I need to remember whose show this really is, as the episode actually does a decent job of furthering Jen Walters’ development by bringing the dating plot line back to haunt her in the courtroom. I did not expect to see any of those bad dates again, and thought that Jen’s epiphany to use her dating profile as evidence was quite a clever way of closing the trademark case while also continuing to interrogate this question of who She-Hulk is and whether she is separate from Jennifer Walters. Why isn’t Jen also the pediatric oncologist’s “type”? Shouldn’t they be the same person, or at the very least a package deal?
[Very mild spoilers for WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, and Ms. Marvel in this next paragraph.]
Here’s hoping some fresh fits will help Jen make peace with her dual selves. If she feels comfortable in one outfit and can fluidly shift from human to Hulk form without feeling sartorially out of sorts, then maybe she will begin to reconcile her inner conflict on a psychological level. Getting a suit has frequently been a moment of triumphant unveiling for other Marvel Disney+ characters. Wanda fashions her Scarlet Witch suit at the end of WandaVision. The Wakandans build Sam Wilson a Captain America suit at the end of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. In Hawkeye, the LARPers craft some suits for Clint and Kate. Kamala Khan’s mother makes her a suit at the end of Ms. Marvel (that one is probably my favorite). So it stands to reason that we’ll see a more comics accurate superhero look for She-Hulk soon. In this episode, I liked the general conceit of a fashion designer for superheroes and Griffin Matthews had great comedic timing, but it’s hard not to have a “been there done that” attitude when the formidable Edna Mode from The Incredibles did the same bit first (and better).
Image Credit: Polygon
Similarly, I worry it’s going to be difficult to avoid a comparison between the Charlie Cox/Matt Murdock/Daredevil we are going to see next week and his beloved past self from the Netflix series. It’s not yet clear how much overlap there will be between the two versions of the character, and while this will not be Charlie Cox’s first appearance as Matt Murdock in the MCU, it will his first appearance as Daredevil. The gold mask we see waiting for pick-up in an upscale hat box at the end of this episode is different than the less splashy red and black suit he wore in the Netflix series. So at the very least that could visually signal to the audience that we should prepare for a new story, a new Daredevil.
The fashion designer, Luke Jacobson, scolds one of his employers for leaving Daredevil’s mask out in the open, saying “Does client confidentiality mean nothing to you?!” To me, this means that unlike Jen Walters, who is very much in the open and in the public eye as She-Hulk, Daredevil has probably maintained his secret identity. This could be challenging for the series because I assume that part of the fun of getting these two characters together in the first place would be to see them talk shop as lawyers. They can’t really do that if She-Hulk only sees Daredevil and doesn’t know that by day he is Matt Murdock Attorney At Law. Perhaps She-Hulk hangs with Daredevil and then Jen Walters meets Matt Murdock in the courtroom, and, unlike basically everyone else who meets them both, can actually put together that they are the same person?
Netflix Daredevil is also a very self-serious character (in a good way; I loved that show, especially in Season 1), and I’m curious to see how he will blend into the satirical humor of She-Hulk’s world and to the brighter, more comedy-forward, swashbuckling MCU. I’m wasn’t overly pleased with how Kingpin appeared at the end of Hawkeye, but I have no reason to be pessimistic at this point. And, to be honest, Charlie Cox is so charming that I’ll likely accept whatever version of him we’re about to get.