I have a lot of questions about Emil Blonsky.
First: Who’s funding “Summer Twilights,” this land of yurts and well-named chickens? Was Blonsky rich? Who found and paid for this prime plot of California real estate? (It doesn’t seem to have been his seven soulmates—which Jen really should’ve asked about.) Where does he get his self-themed inspirational posters printed? (ABOMASTE is my favorite.) Where did he find these men for his little group when there’s no wifi or cell reception? Is there really no wifi or cell reception or was that for Jen’s benefit, specifically?
And what’s his long game?
“The Retreat” answered one question that was barely a question: Yes, Josh sucks. Josh sucks really, really hard. Josh did exactly what the show told us to expect him to do, but then went a step further and copied Jen’s whole phone.
And one key Blonsky question remains: Was he in on it? Was the whole thing with Blonksy’s inhibitor malfunction and the resulting trip to his little bucolic playground all part of the plan—to get Jen to erase Josh’s number, to get her to relax, to drop her guard a little bit? For a minute I thought the whole point was that she would Just Jen herself and then our friend from the Wrecking Crew would act, but every fellow in Blonsky’s man-huddle played nice right up to the end.
Like last week, this episode walked a wobbly line as it tried to use clichés to say something interesting—with mixed results. “Guy doesn’t text after sex, girl goes bananas stressing about it” is a tough plot point for me to enjoy; these gendered clichés aren’t quite balanced out, here, by the fact that it’s a bunch of semi-villainous yet vulnerable men who show Jen how to let go (possibly for their own nefarious purposes). It should’ve been funnier than it was, watching these guys use their Blonsky-taught self-help language to get She-Hulk in touch with her inner Jen (and/or vice-versa) but instead it felt somewhat forced. The most effective aspect was that I kept expecting a trick or a trap—turn into Jen so we can steal your blood!—but that dastardly deed had already been done.
But if the plot left me wanting, there’s nothing to complain about in the performances. As Jen, Maslany gets more and more brittle as she stresses about Josh, and even if I don’t love this narrative, I do love the way you start to see her stress in her human body. She looks about ready to snap at any moment. (There is not enough Nikki in this episode, but Nikki, as ever, gives good advice.) Jen’s speech about how She-Hulk is like the cool friend who gets all the attention gets to the heart of Jen’s whole issue: She has to integrate and accept both parts of herself. Jen is She-Hulk, She-Hulk is Jen. And despite whatever false pretenses may be in play here, she does make some progress at Summer Twilights.
Roth is still playing Blonsky almost too straight—a certain amount of how could you expect the worst of me, a reformed man? that I really, really enjoy and am very, very skeptical of. His gaggle of … students? colleagues? supplicants? is made up of a handful of minor Marvel characters that are not super likely to become super important, though Saracen (Terrence Clowe) might be an actual vampire (remember that Blade is, in theory, not that far off) and El Aguila (Joseph Castillo-Midyett) is a mutant (which the MCU powers-that-be are slowly bringing into their cinematic universe now that assorted rights issues are no more).
(Nathan Hurd’s Man-Bull seems like he ought to end up hanging out with the Agardians. Jordan Aaron Ford’s Porcupine is my favorite.)
If the plot was a bit lacking this week, the structure did some good work to make up for it. The montage of dates was charming (though I really thought more than three dates had happened); the fourth-wall break to reintroduce Wrecker (Nick Gomez) from the Wrecking Crew was clever and fun and yes, I did need the reintroduction; the big booming DAY TITLES had a sense of urgency and frustration that underscored all of Jen’s anxiousness and stress.
And then there’s Blonsky’s farewell, an ominous statement couched in the language of understanding and acceptance: “Everyone we meet, no matter how much they hurt you, is a lesson learned.” Oh, are they? What lesson is Jen going to have to learn from having hung out with the Blonksy squad for an afternoon? Hopefully it’s not as painful as the one she’s going to learn from having met Josh.
YURT SWEAT
- Still struggling to believe these unremarkable suits are what Luke the super-tailor made for her. Also, how can her apartment be so perfectly, pristinely styled and her clothes continue to be bad regardless of which body she’s in?
- Yes, she said “hulk smashed” and “hulk out,” which kind of feel like things that are in the scripts so that people will go “Ooh, she said the thing!” (I liked “jolly green yourself” more anyway.)
- The most genuinely stressful moment in this episode is Jen being a very bad driver while obsessing over her phone.
- I’m not one of those who’s desperate for our buddy Matty Murdock to show up, but I do think it’s weird that the teasers started to make more and more a Thing of it and yet it has not happened. There are only two episodes to go!
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
