Jen Walters has a lot on her plate. If you don’t believe me, please try to pause when she scrolls down her to-do list. You can’t read half of it. It blurs. She scrolls forever. And then, way down the list: “Finish dating profile.”
Oh, no.
Almost halfway through its first season, She-Hulk is charming, it’s snappy, it sometimes tries very hard to fit in the Marvel references required—and when it’s at its best, it is what was promised in that first episode: a fun lawyer show. If it can’t always juggle everything with perfect grace, well, neither can Jen! Not with a to-do list like this. (My favorite entry: “Edit to-do list (2 hrs).”)
But this show really shines when it lets Maslany lean into the tension between Jen and She-Hulk: when she’s just absolutely 100% determined to live a “normal” life and do “normal” things, like go on terrible dates and then get interrupted by bothersome work things that, in this case, really truly can’t wait. She puts her corporate headshot on her dating profile! That’s how normal she wants to be. And if you peek under the hood, under the horrible lawyer suits (with a valid point about how not much fits a She-Hulk body) and big CGI hair, there’s something sweet and smart and almost subtle about what’s really going on. Jen’s coming to terms with her own power. Not just She-Hulk’s power. But Jen’s power, in whatever form. She has to accept her own strength.
And she’s going to do it with quips and well-taken opportunities, of course.
“Is This Not Real Magic?” neatly builds two plots—Jen’s work life and her dating life—and brings them inevitably together. On the work side, there’s Donny Blaze (Rhys Coiro), an unbearable magician in the vein of Gob from Arrested Development, except with a smidgen of actual mystical power. When he sends Madisynn (sorry, girl, but that Y is exactly where I expected) to another realm, she goes on an adventure involving a goat (maybe named Jake) and a heart and eventually makes her way to Wong’s, where the real crime is committed: She ruins an episode of The Sopranos for him.
Buy the Book
Nona the Ninth
Donny Blaze must pay.
Meanwhile, Jen goes on terrible dates. Just absolutely terrible. Sometimes, the dating jokes land (the duel of the check!). Sometimes these bits feel recycled, the successful date with the hot pediatrician most of all. His lines that are supposed to be appealing just feel like lines he got out of a magazine article about how to impress on a date! As Nikki says, “Hetero life is grim.”
How you feel about some parts of this episode may depend on how much you can stand Donny Blaze, who is obviously meant to be annoying but is perhaps more so than required (I’m still not sold on the judge siding with him just because he conjured a bunny). There is, maybe, an interesting mystery here about students who drop out of their sorcerer schooling; there is also a great bit about how just swearing yourself to a line of study doesn’t leave one a lot of room to maneuver in the American legal system. But one hopes Donny Blaze is just a one-off bit of trouble and not, as some have theorized, a whole other Marvel Thing.
But the balance to annoying Donny Blaze is, of course, Wong, who everyone does love, and personally I love him most when he’s at his crankiest (“Cheap human tricks!”). He calls the judge “your highness.” He takes everything very seriously but he also is essentially badgered into friendship with Madisynn (Patty Guggenheim), and yes, I would watch an entire series of shorts that’s just them watching TV while she quizzes him on whether he’s had different drinks or desserts or kinds of sushi or whatever.
Everything comes together when Wong appears in Jen’s apartment to insist she help with an invasion of small-but-rapidly-growing demons, and Benedict Wong’s delivery of “I feel like your dad” is so absolutely perfect, so embarrassed yet still stoic and sorcerer-like, that I hope this show puts him in ever more awkward dad-sorcerer situations. And while this episode is largely fun and cute (and successful on those fronts), let us not ignore that Jen, in full Hulk mode, takes the opportunity to extract what she needs from Donny Blaze while she has him at the mercy of… whatever those flying things were.
And then, everything collides again, in a much less enjoyable way. Hot Doctor shows his true colors. And Titania, maybe, finally, does something: She’s suing Jen for using She-Hulk, which Titania… has trademarked? Sorry, I guessI should say She-Hulk™.
It’s such a little scene, but Jen’s exchange with the guy serving her the papers is what I always want from this show: Prickly, quippy Jen, who goes from hopefully and giddy to grumpy to takes-no-shit in a matter of seconds. Maslany is so good at this, at dissolving fully into her character when she’s in the most mundane moments, like in the bar when she’s regretting “woot-woot”ing over parole papers. I know this show’s called She-Hulk. But it’s best when it’s about Jennifer Walters.
BOTTOMLESS GIN AND TONICS
- “Everybody loves Wong. It’s like… giving the show Twitter armor for a week.”
- I remain envious of Jen’s beautiful apartment.
- Wong, buddy, I do love you, but “We answer to a higher power that abides by the metaphysical laws of the time-space continuum” really isn’t going to hold up in court.
- The “New Yorker, through and through” who lived there for 14 months is such a sweet and accurate burn.
- Whoever named this bar “Legal Ease Bar and Grill” is a beautiful dork and I love it.
- More to-do list highlights:
- Meet Nikki in the bathroom @ 11:47
- Buy and read How to Make Friends and Influence People
- Desk Feng Shui
- Find “direct” contact info for Wong
- Eat 1 homecooked meal this week
