It’s finally time for Marvel to take us out of the multiversal battles, the cosmic conquests and alien adventures and into a calm, quiet courtroom. Not really, but that’s what Jennifer Walters wishes would happen in the new Disney+ original series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. The first episode sees Walters transform into the titular character and have to learn how to deal with becoming a hulk.
The episode opens with Jen giving what appears to be a closing statement for a case before it’s revealed that she is simply practicing for her colleagues. It doesn’t take long to learn that Nikki is a good friend while Dennis is a condescending coworker looking to take Jen’s case out from under her. Jen and Nikki shrug off some comments from Dennis and move on before Nikki reveals to us that she knows Jen is a hulk. Jen opposes the idea of using her hulk abilities and they start to head out of the room. Before she leaves though, Jen comes back in to speak directly to the audience, something that will be a staple of this series, and lets us know that this is going to be a lawyer show. First though, she’ll explain how she became a hulk.
We flash back to a road trip for Jen and her cousin, Bruce Banner. Bruce gives us an explanation as to how he is human again, as we saw in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Jen shares a theory about Captain America’s virginity before they are run off the road by a vaguely familiar alien spaceship, but we’ll come back to that later.
Jen pulls herself from the car wreck and immediately goes ot help Bruce. She gets him out of the car but not before cutting her arm. Bruce notes that his inhibitor, the device that was keeping him human, is broken and warns her that he is bleeding but she continues to try and save him. He bleeds into her open wound and in a matter of seconds we see both of them start to transform into hulks.
Jen, not being accustomed to the transformation, runs off into the woods, sounding like the Hulk of old. She wakes up that night, still in the woods but human again. She finds her way into a bar and heads discreetly into the bathroom to clean herself up. Several women enter and immediately offer to help her. Now cleaned up, she waits outside the bar for Bruce to pick her up before a group of guys start to hit on her. She loses her cool and begins to hulk out before Bruce stops her from hurting them.
Jen wakes up in a bed, human again. She looks around and clearly doesn’t know where she is. She heads out of the room and sees a busted Iron Man helmet out on display before hearing music coming from another room. She heads downstairs into a lab where she finds Bruce, now in Smarth Hulk form. He explains to her that he has accepted that name despite the fact that he didn’t make it up. It’s a nice nod to the fact that Marvel runs with what the fans give them.
Bruce reveals that Tony Stark built this beach house/lab combo for him years ago. He also reveals that the ship they saw was Sakaaran and that they were probably trying to get him a message. This is very interesting because while we know the Hulk has a history with Sakaar in the MCU, the story is a bit different in the comics. In a popular story called “Planet Hulk,” the Hulks rescued the people of Sakaar from a brutal tyrant. That then led to an even more popular story called “World War Hulk,” which sees a once-banished Hulk return to Earth to wage war against the heroes that exiled him. This story has been rumored to be adapted for the MCU for some time and it looks as though the seeds may have been planted here.
Bruce explains to Jen what’s happening to her and she is clearly not happy with the idea of becoming a hulk. After he explains everything, he destroys her blood samples and explains the dangers of her blood getting out there and potentially creating another one of them. The two argue over Jen returning to her life vs. staying in isolation for the safety of others.
Bruce tries to test out Jen’s transformation and she suggests putting on Pixar’s Inside Out, specifically the Bing Bong scene. You know the one. Bruce has other, more dramatic ideas and uses something out of the James Bond villain manual to get Jen to transform, which she does. After her initial angry reaction though, they both realize she’s still Jen, just in a hulk body. She doesn’t have to deal with a hulkish alter ego like Bruce did for all those years.
Jen takes this to mean that she’s done here and can go back to her life. Bruce disagrees and convinces her to go through some training. Bruce runs her through a gauntlet of hulk training, at which she quickly succeeds. Jen is still frustrated with the situation and Bruce decides to show her one of the benefits: how much they can drink. While they drink, he explains that he and Tony built the bar, though Tony mostly drank and complained about Steve Rogers.
The next day, the two have another argument about Jen leaving and eventually she decides she’s just going to go. That results in a hulk fight between the two of them, which eventually levels Bruce’s bar. They rebuild the bar together and Bruce accepts that she’s going to leave, which leads to Jen’s first fourth-wall break and some confusion from the two of them.
Jen leaves the beach house and we come back to her office where she continues to talk to the audience. We then see her working her case but just before she can give her closing statement, Titania bursts through the wall and causes a panic. Nikki convince Jen to transform into her hulk persona and stop Titania. She reluctantly agrees and dispatches of Titania, transforms back into a human and tries to give her closing statement as the episode comes to a close.
We do get the rare first episode tag, which sees Jen and Bruce drinking at the bar again. Jen continues on her theory regarding Steve Rogers and tricks Bruce into thinking she’s drunk and giving her information. It results in a hilarious line that I won’t repeat here.
The first episode of this new series makes it clear right away that this is going to be one of the funniest projects Marvel has created yet. Marvel fans are quickly going to become She-Hulk fans with this show and it’s going to be very exciting to see what else Jen Walters gets into.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is now streaming on Disney+.