She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022) Episode 1, "A Normal Amount of Smash" TV Show Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty good. The first episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law dropped on Disney+ this morning so that's what I'm going to be talking about today. It's going to be hard to not include spoilers because not a whole lot happens in this first episode. So if you haven't watched it yet, please do so before reading this review. Let's get into it.

This episode was good. Having never read any comics that Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk is in, this is my first introduction to the character. Initially I was pretty neutral about this show, mainly because there really isn't anything for me to get overly excited for, since Mark Ruffalo has played Hulk for the last ten years, I'm not a big Daredevil fan (he's not in this episode), and, like I said, I've never read a She-Hulk comic before. It looked good, but nothing spectacular. And the first episode continues that feeling.

I liked this episode. It was pretty good. The humour didn't always land with me, but I'm autistic so it's a rare day when a show's humour DOES land with me. Every Marvel series up to this has had galactic, universal, or temporal consequences to them. This is just gonna be a nice little superhero courtroom drama/comedy and that is perfectly okay with me.

Tatiana Maslany is great as Jen. I've never watched Orphan Black (2013-2017) and haven't seen her in anything recently so this was basically my first time seeing her in anything. Apparently she did appear in a few episodes of a show that I used to watch on YTV called Incredible Story Studios (1997-2002), though I don't remember seeing the episodes she was in. Of course that was 20 years ago, but still. I liked the chemistry between Bruce and Jen though I don't think Bruce is gonna be in the rest of the series since all of his scenes that we saw in the teaser were in this episode, but it was still cool to see him in something after Avengers: Endgame (2019). 

I'm glad that we got the origin story out of the way in the first episode. Ms. Marvel was the entire backstory, and Moon Knight seemed that way too from what I saw in that show's teaser, so it was nice to have a nice, quick, origin for a change. Origin stories can be pretty tedious, especially for characters everyone knows whether they've read the comics or not. She-Hulk's is pretty straightforward though so it was nice to see it quickly.

The downside of getting the origin story out of the way is that we don't really spend any time with Jen before she and Bruce's car gets hit by an alien spaceship and she becomes She-Hulk. By the end of the first episode of Ms. Marvel I knew who Kamala was as a person before she got her powers. Here, I don't know much about Jennifer Walters, except that she's a lawyer, and wants to be an attorney. I don't think that that's going to be a problem going forward in terms of the story that Jessica Gao is wanting to tell in this show, but for me personally, I find it much easier to connect to a superhero/comic book character if I know what their life is like before they put on the costume or get their powers. But we'll see.

I think my favourite scene in this episode was the end in the courtroom where She-Hulk fights Titania (Jameela Jamil). Not the fight itself, but at the end after she takes out Titania and transforms back into her normal human form and then she tells the judge that she's ready to give her closing statements in the trial she's working on as if nothing happened. I laughed.

Something else I laughed at was Jen's obsession with whether Captain America died a virgin or not. I mean we all know that Cap didn't die at the end of Endgame, but the general population within the MCU don't know that, so I guess it makes sense that Jen would think about such a thing, but still, it's like watching that one nerd who asks the actors playing these characters those kinds of questions at conventions. It was funny.

That's pretty much all I have to say about this episode. Like I said, not alot happens in it so I don't have much to talk about. But, honestly, I think that that's a good thing because as much as I loved The Falcon & The Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, and Ms. Marvel, all three of those shows had so much happening in the first episode that it was a bit overwhelming. Especially in Hawkeye and Ms. Marvel because both shows were introducing alot of new characters AND trying to pack in as much story as possible since they were both only six episodes long. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is nine episodes, so hopefully that gives it room to breathe. 

Overall this was a good first episode and a good introduction to Jennifer Walters for those of us who aren't already familiar with her as a character. i.e. those of us who haven't read the comics before. If you're interested, I recommend this episode to you to see if you wanna keep going with the show.

Alright my friends that's going to be it for me for today. I haven't decided if I'm going to do weekly reviews of She-Hulk or not yet, but I'm definitely thinking about it. In the meantime I will be back tomorrow with the second part in my Disney Sing-Along Songs series overview and I have a book review coming soon as well. So until then have a great rest of your day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.