Jen’s first cases at her new firm get complicated…

I need to confess at the beginning that I don’t know what I think of this episode. It’s unevenly paced, at times chaotically written and, ultimately, nothing happens. And let’s not mention the shonky CGI.

However, it also made me laugh loads and I continue to find Jennifer Walters an engaging and likeable character.

My goodwill remains but the show has problems.

She-Hulk is so tightly bound into the MCU continuity that there are almost as many cameos as there are speaking characters. So many in fact that the writers takes time to explicitly reassure us that this is, still, the She-Hulk show.

Beyond that we have an ongoing origin story that isn’t tying together Jen’s origin as She-Hulk with the actual story. We’re three episodes in and still working on the basics here. I don’t understand why.

This episode deals with two legal cases although I hesitate to call them legal in anything except circumstances and surroundings – there is no legal practice on display here, just the rule of the schoolyard and its teachers. Now, lots of lightweight legal dramas and comedies have done very little actual lawyering but, for me, this kind of undermines why Jen wants to be a lawyer so much. Nothing she’s doing has any weight to it and for a character who appears to want so desperately be taken seriously this doesn’t really work.

Add to that an appearance as a witness where she is not only ridiculous but delights in revenge and cruelty and I’m struggling.

There’s an argument that we’ve all wanted to get back at the fool who’s made our lives difficult for no other reason than they’re mean, self-absorbed and prejudiced. Except the example in this show is so extreme, so foolish, they make Homer Simpson look like a bastion of wisdom. The result, once you strip away the laughs, is a sideshow antagonist whose role is to be humiliated but also someone without any real substance to repudiate. Trivialising the issue was easy to avoid but I was left with a feeling of being told ‘isn’t sexism bad!’ in neon letters above characters whose lives had absolutely not been harmed by the only example of it in the room.

My own biggest thorns have not been fools but those who are smart, calculated and who have made my life difficult because they chose to – never by accident.

I get the revenge of humiliation is something we all fantasise about doing from time to time but this doesn’t work for me – I found it alienating and, honestly, it tarnished the spirit of the show.

You might argue the show isn’t for me and you might be right. Except I am largely enjoying it, can see what it wants to achieve and hope it gets there. I’d also argue that I’d object to cruelty for its own sake everywhere – this is no special case.

As for the second ‘court case’, a tighter show would have perhaps cut Abomination’s appearance entirely, threading in a larger arc to She-Hulk’s origin story from the beginning.

What we actually get is a drawn-out set piece in which Jen flails. This competent assistant district attorney who was aiming for the top position in her field runs around like a headless chicken and then lucks out into winning. There was precious little wit and certainly no sense of the highly competent lawyer I wanted to see. The flailing was funny but it was bubblegum funny – the flavour gone and forgotten – when it could have been drily funny, a little weightier and while showing us just how bad ass Jen is as an actual lawyer.

With more episodes to play with than any Disney+ MCU TV show to date, the extra episodes are not, so far, earning their presence.

So what does work for me?

I am loving Jen Walters. I am loving the largely light-hearted nature of the show, the fun it is having and the way it’s delighting in concerns and issues that are central to Jen’s daily existence.

In other words, I am enjoying the frivolity of it all.

The comedy is well delivered, well written and overwhelmingly warm hearted.

I don’t think this show can survive on frivolity alone.

Rating? 5 terrible witness statements out of 10.

Stewart Hotston