Cheetos and chopsticks not included.
Editor's note: The below article contains spoilers for Episode 1 of She-Hulk: Attorney At Law. Marvel Studios’ latest series, She-Hulk: Attorney At Law, has finally premiered on Disney+ and is the penultimate installment in phase four of the MCU. She-Hulk introduces Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany), cousin of Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and attorney at law who has the unique ability to break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience. Despite being one of the last projects of phase four it is the most connected to the original three or any other installment yet.
With a heavy focus on Bruce, returning to train and coach Jen, after their freak car crash, there is plenty of mention of old times. Bruce talks of Tony, Steve, and even Natasha, as the nostalgia permeates throughout the entirety of the episode. The pilot is an excellent introduction to She-Hulk, but it also serves as a treasure trove of Easter eggs and ties back to some unanswered questions from past MCU projects.
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Since Avengers: Endgame hit theaters in 2019, we’ve come to know Hulk as Professor Hulk, or Smart Hulk, as he refers to himself in the show. Essentially, Smart Hulk is an amalgamation of both Bruce Banner and the Hulk’s separate personas. Bruce describes it as a sort of happy balance, finally being in control of the wild green monster he has been attempting to tame for years. The last time Bruce semi-Hulked out was in Infinity War in New York. Despite calling on the monster to show up for the fight against the Black Order, he only "got green" long enough for Hulk to tell him off.
On his drive with Jen, before their accident, Bruce shows off a device on his wrist that he created. He states that it is what keeps him in human form and allows him to go back and forth between human and Hulk while still maintaining full control. After the crash, Jen rushes over to help Bruce only for him to warn her to get back. The impact of the crash broke Bruce’s inhibitor and for a very brief moment, the fear is there again. It’s only for a split second, but Ruffalo’s eyes tell all. The momentary loss of control. The slip of calm. Warning Jen to get back. He may have the Hulk tamed for now, but it’s now more likely than ever that we haven’t seen the last of Savage Hulk.
At the beginning of the episode, Bruce and Jen are bantering back and forth during their road trip. Jen insists that Steve Rogers was a virgin (more on that later) as an exhausted Bruce deflects her theories, just trying to enjoy his Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and chopsticks in peace. But Jen never gets an answer out of Bruce before a familiar, alien spaceship descends directly in front of their vehicle. With no other choice, Jen swerves off the road, crashing the car and inciting the accident that leads to Jen’s transformation into She-Hulk. But back to that spaceship. It seems to disappear after their crash, but in the short glimpse we get of it, it appears to be Sakaarian.
Sakaar is the planet that Hulk landed on after the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron, and it is where the majority of Thor: Ragnarok is set. Sakaar is a planet full of many things, specifically a giant Colosseum known as the Grand Arena, where the Grandmaster hosted fights between worthy gladiators. Stuck as Hulk, Bruce was the Grand Master’s champion for two years and was treated as a hero and celebrity among the Sakaar population before Thor arrived.
As Bruce confirms later in the episode, the ship is Sakaarian, telling Jen it was a Sakaarian Class-Eight courier craft. He also mentions that they were likely trying to send him a message. It’s a cryptic tease, that even Bruce seems confused about. The whole scenario is left very open-ended and only begs the question of when and how it will be explained, if at all. It seems odd to include such a heavy-handed reference back to Ragnarok and Sakaar if there are no plans to follow up, but with the MCU who knows? We’ll have to wait and see what Kevin Feige and company have in store for the future, but who wouldn’t be curious to return to Sakaar for a bit?
When Jen wakes up after her dazed Hulk-out at a bar, she finds herself on a breezy island home, with the sun flooding in through every angle. Confused, she wanders downstairs to find Bruce, as Smart Hulk, working in a lab. Flooding over with questions, Jen asks Bruce all the essentials, including where they are. Bruce tells her that they are in Mexico at a beach house and lab that Tony built for him a couple of years ago. He adds that it is where he spent his time during the Blip working to integrate his personas into Smart Hulk.
It has been a while since there has been mention back to the early MCU days, specifically the core six Avengers, so it's refreshing to hear more stories about Tony. It’s heartwarming to think that the Science Bros worked together to create a happy place for Bruce where he could escape his anger on a sunny Mexico beach. It’s also a callback to Avengers: Age of Ultron when Tony posed the question to Bruce, “What if you were sipping margaritas on a sun-drenched beach, turning brown instead of green, and not looking over your shoulder?” Considering the majority of all Phase Four projects have taken place post-blip, there are five years of time that have been unexplored for the surviving Avengers and She-Hulk’s first episode does a great job at giving us a glimpse of how Bruce spent that time.
As Jen attempts to find her bearings, wandering through Bruce’s beach house, she comes across one of Tony’s Iron Man helmets. Though it's difficult to tell which mark it is, the black and gold mask is heavily battered and scratched up. Jen reaches out to touch it as an Iron Man-esque theme swells up for a fleeting moment. Knowing Tony, he probably gave Bruce the helmet as a gift and reminder that he might come back and take the beach house ‘loaner’ back for himself if he so decided. It’s another great nod to Tony and his legacy in the MCU. Seeing newcomers like She-Hulk connect with Iron Man even after his death shows how impactful his presence was and continues to be in everyone’s lives.
Bruce, still grappling with his own traumatic experiences with his transformation, wants nothing but to be there for his cousin, and ease her through the process of controlling her new identity. He hopes to help Jen get the jump on her emotions and stop a Hulk-out before it causes unintended destruction and chaos. While we learn later that Jen’s experience is much different from Bruce’s and that she has already refined her anger to use at will, at this moment, Bruce hopes to determine a threshold to give Jen an upper hand. He tells Jen that the transformations are caused by “distressed emotional states” and that they need to find her breaking point to determine how to progress her training.
Jen suggests putting on a Pixar movie, citing the tear-jerking moment from Inside Out when Bing-Bong jumps out of the wagon to save Joy from being lost forever. It’s a quick but humorous reference that Bruce dismisses, annoyed by Jen’s suggestion, stating that the baselines are anger and fear. While the meta question of how Pixar fits into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Maybe Captain America really is the voice of Buzz Lightyear??) is unclear, one thing’s for sure. Though he tried to play it cool, Bruce definitely welled up at the mention of Bing-Bong, and who can blame him? Rest in peace, Bing-Bong. Gone but not forgotten.
One of the hallmarks of Savage Hulk was the many attempts at getting him to revert back to Bruce Banner. The most successful at the task was Black Widow, who bonded with Bruce through the Avengers films. By raising a hand as if to tame an animal and mentioning that the “sun is getting real low” at least once or twice, she has been able to get Hulk to relinquish control to Bruce on multiple occasions. When testing for Jen’s threshold proves successful, and she transforms, breaking through her containment unit, Bruce’s immediate reaction is to back away and talk Jen down the same way Nat had done for him many times before. Raising and lowering his hands, Bruce speaks in a low voice to get Jen to emerge.
However, as it turns out, when Jen hulks out she maintains full consciousness and essentially becomes a giant green version of herself. Jen is understandably confused as to why Bruce is talking to her as if she were a “stray horse” but she isn’t the only one that’s puzzled. Shocked and admittedly a tad jealous of Jen’s control over her hulk form, Bruce is stunned that Jen is free of an alter ego.
Feeling confident about her ability to maintain consciousness as She-Hulk, Bruce reminds Jen that she still can’t control how and when she transforms. Considering it’s a pretty important step in adapting to life as a hulk, Jen asks Bruce how he managed his transformations. Being the honest man he is, Bruce somewhat jokingly admits his transformations were mostly out of his control.
The situations he gives to Jen range from The Avengers, Age of Ultron, and Thor: Ragnarok, which all feature iconic moments of Hulk to Bruce transformations. Falling out of the sky in Avengers leads to a naked Banner waking up in a warehouse to the shock of a security guard. Age of Ultron features two moments, first being beaten into submission by the Hulkbuster armor and secondly when Natasha eases him back to Banner, and finally in Ragnarok when he falls out of the Sakaarian ship onto the rainbow bridge. While we have all enjoyed these moments as audience members, it’s fun to be reminded of the events through Bruce as he shares them from his perspective.
Though we’ve come to know Hulk and Bruce as one and the same, back in the earlier phases of the MCU, Bruce’s connection with Hulk was much rockier. She-Hulk revisits this frightening time in Bruce’s life when he was essentially sharing his own body with the Hulk. For the first time since the Avengers films, Bruce refers to Hulk as "the Other Guy" to explain how crucial it is that Jen gets control over her hulk side. It is refreshing to revisit this side of Bruce, as his reference to the Other Guy is very reminiscent of his scenes in Avengers where he is still struggling against the monster inside of him.
After a long day of training, Bruce and Jen go to Bruce’s Bar and bond over a couple, several, drinks in Hulk form. Bruce tells Jen that he and Tony built the bar by hand and admitted he did the grunt work while Tony griped about Steve. Bruce then runs his hands over the bar counter, where Tony’s initials, TS, are carved out, right next to his own, BB, and now JW. It’s a melancholy scene that again places the viewer into an unseen moment. Though we never saw it, Tony spent time at that bar with Bruce, bonding over frustrations with their Avengers colleagues and swapping stories with one another. Since we only ever saw the Avengers dealing with world-threatening gods, robots, and aliens, it's nice to imagine them in their downtime enjoying some much-earned leisure.
She-Hulk, unlike many of the other MCU shows, will feature a post-credit scene after some episodes, and its first sets a gold standard. Flashing back to Bruce’s Bar, Jen is still distraught over her theory from earlier. Seemingly drunk, she sobs to Bruce about how “that ass did not deserve to die a virgin.” It’s a fun callback to one of the most quotable moments in Endgame when Ant-Man tells Steve Rogers that he has "America’s Ass" and is later reiterated by Steve after he fights a 2012 variant of himself.
Assuming she’s drunk, Bruce admits to Jen that Steve lost his virginity in 1943 while on the USO tour. Jen immediately composes herself, proud to have squeezed a confession out of Bruce. It’s a hilarious final moment in the episode that answers arguably one of the longest-running MCU questions and sets the tone for the MCU’s newest series.
After its debut episode, it is easy to say that She-Hulk: Attorney at Law has lived up to what it promised as a half-hour comedy. Reconnecting with Bruce allowed us to catch up with the overall MCU timeline while introducing us to its newest developments and setting up what is to come for Jennifer Walters as she adjusts to her new life as She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.
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