Jen Walters gets a job offer… just when she needs it…

She-Hulk picks up from right where it ended episode 1. Jen is being celebrated for intervening against a powered criminal and everyone is clapping and cheering.

The show is structured around reminding us that Jen didn’t want to be powered, that her passion isn’t power or influence but doing her job – a job she loves. Everything else is a distraction. This approach can fall a little bit flat because the writing goes to such lengths around centring Jen’s desire to be a normal, in debt, lawyer that she doesn’t wrestle with the changes in her personal life. We saw some of this with Bruce last week and her avoidance continues. A good deal of this is by design – it’s clear that Jen does not want to face what’s happened. However, there are moments when it feels like that avoidance shades into the implausible.

However, there are consequences for Jen’s actions and they’re not good. She is effectively punished for doing the right thing and the rest of the episode is her reorienting her life around the fallout from her decision to reveal who she is to the whole world.

The analogue here is the powerful woman being shunned, especially the famous powerful woman, because of who she is. It’s hard to imagine Steve Rogers being fired from his job for being Captain America. People accommodate difference when it suits them, but Jen is a woman and I think we can read here how powerful women find being assertive, capable and effective a handicap in a way that men don’t.

The choices and opportunities that do come with who she is are of an entirely different order from what came before and there’s a fabulous moment where we see her ambition, what she considers a massive win, contrasted with someone for whom what she wants is as easy to give as a penny sweet to a child.

Add to the above a family dynamic that makes it clear how Jen’s life does not mirror that of Bruce’s in any way and we have a good idea of just how her own person Jennifer Walters is.

The show continues to highlight the world in which Jen exists – by which I mean we see corporate America and its culture as well as her family circumstances and how they are a source of ongoing struggle.

I didn’t gel entirely with her family – they are clearly working class but it was played a little bit for laughs in a way which played into classist ideas of poverty and capability. I hope, per Ms Marvel, that we see more of her family and that they get fleshed out to undermine the stereotypes of being working class in America.

What presenting her working class family does demonstrate is that Jen’s had to fight hard for what she’s achieved and her passion for keeping it, even in the face of becoming a Hulk, has good reasoning behind it.

This episode remains very funny. It also ties itself into the MCU in a way that Ms Marvel and Moon Knight deliberately didn’t. Both those prior shows stood on their own feet, insistent on carving out their niche regardless of what might be happening elsewhere.

She-Hulk is not only the cousin of the Hulk but also an attorney to super-criminals and explicitly linked to at least two of the movies in the MCU. This doesn’t feel forced and the different take on how Jennifer Walters fits into the fabric of the MCU is refreshing not because it’s nostalgic but because it’s tightly written and self-aware.

I don’t think we’re going to get much of her being a lawyer though. I think we’re going to see the show explore Jen’s life and her challenges are going to be ones that never quite make it into a court room. There’s no A Few Good Men, going to appear here. This is a shame but that’s just a personal desire not a criticism.

With the extra episodes in this season it will be interesting to see where we go. I’d say that this episode wouldn’t have had room in a shorter run like that of Ms Marvel.

Hopefully this room to breathe will give us something more to chew on – it would be ironic if the show with the longest runtime would be the one that tackled the least.

So far at least its commentary on sexism, discrimination and the identities we build for ourselves has been brilliantly written and fun to watch without feeling these issues are the point of the show (not that there’s anything wrong with such an approach).

It feels inevitable that we will see a number of MCU cameos beyond Jen’s first client and those revealed in the trailers. After all, the world’s first powered lawyer isn’t going to be short of work.

Verdict: I’m looking forward to seeing how ridiculous the show can be – I think it’s enjoying itself, luxuriating in the chance to be daft while holding something interesting at its core and I am here for that.

Rating? 7 awkward job offers out of 10.

Stewart Hotston