Viewer Log: She-Hulk ep 7

 A retreat with Supervillains, what could possibly go wrong?

Last time on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Jen had to go to a wedding. Parts sucked, like the bride telling her “no She-Hulk” at the wedding; parts were good, like Jen meeting a cute guy named Josh and them hitting it off; and parts… started sucky but turned out okay, like Titania weaseling in as a plus one but Jen got to deck her and see Titania have a huge public gaff. High fives all around. Meanwhile, Nikki worked with Mallory Book on a… complicated divorce settlement. Craig Hollis aka Mr. Immortal, had over the last several years been married multiple times only to sort of fake his death because he’s too much of a wuss to have a conversation. I say “sort of” because while he survived, the things he did would have killed someone without immortality. The exes had found him after a video of him surviving death popped up on Intelligencia, Reddit for incels. Nikki is able to work out a settlement that satisfies all the exes and she and Mallory have a celebratory drink. While having that drink, they learn that Intelligencia has a Cancel She-Hulk page full of death threats. Mallory wants to not tell Jen, as there’s very little point telling her about Trolls, but Nikki tells her immediately. Enough recap. Let’s get to it.

Things start off well.

 

We open on Jen having a few dates with Josh. Things seem to go well with him, those first few days of a new relationship are universally exhilarating, aren’t they? But, by Friday, coincidentally the day after they slept together, he starts ghosting her. Now that feels awful. At the office, Nikki tells Jen that she’s been nominated for Female Lawyer of the Year, but Jen doesn’t react like one should upon hearing they’re up for an award. Why? Still waiting for Josh to text back. Nikki tells her to stop looking at her phone or she’ll drive herself crazy.

 

By Saturday, Jen still hasn’t heard anything and spends her day with her phone nearly constantly in her sight. I mean, she can’t even enjoy the Great Muppet Caper, she’s checking her phone so much.  What? It’s a good movie. Saturday rolls into Sunday and first thing that day she gets a call. No, sadly, not from Josh letting her know he’d been in a coma for 48 hours or something. The call is from Chuck Donelan, Blonsky’s parole officer. He lets her know that Blonsky’s inhibitor is malfunctioning, Chuck has to go check it out, and he’s hoping she’d be willing to meet him at Blonsky’s ranch incase Blonsky isn’t feeling cooperative. She agrees to help and heads out to meet him. Refreshing her phone constantly as she does.

 

Man-Bull and El Aguila are delightful.

She meets Chuck at Summer Twilight Ranch. It has a gate and everything. Jen honks her horn to try to get Blonsky’s attention, but Chuck is feeling jumpy. He asks her to hulk up, just in case and they go inside. They find out that Blonsky’s inhibitor is malfunctioning, but Blonsky is still being extremely chill. Blonsky thinks it might have been due to a shock he got from an electric fence while trying to get his favorite chicken back. Chuck recalibrates the inhibitor, and books it out of there. I kind of get it, as Blonsky’s retreat is for superhuman criminals trying to reform themselves. Jen prepares to leave, but her car gets hit hard by two of Blonsky’s… patients? I guess? They are Man-Bull, a bull-human hybrid, and El Aguila, a man dressed like a matador. I can kind of get why there’s friction here. They smash up the car a lot, but Jen stops Man-Bull from hitting her car and impaling El Aguila. After the fighting stops, both men are chiller than they seemed initially. They’re working through some aggression, I guess, because while El Aguila insists he's not a matador, he looks like one and that is a bit triggering for Man-Bull. Blonsky asks Man-Bull to push the car into the garage, he says “My name is Man-Bull, not Mechanical Bull,” and everyone judges him for how planed that sounded.

 

Blonsky tells Jen that the mechanic can’t arrive until later, but that’s good news so Jen can relax at his retreat. She’s not super jazzed for this, as she’s still waiting for a Josh text. He leads her to a sweat yurt and offers to let her relax but she’s not interested. The retreat doesn’t have wifi or cell reception, so Jen is incredibly screwed on the text and work front. Blonsky tells her he’ll be around if she needs him and walks off. Jen spends a while searching for service but can’t find a single bars worth of it. Eventually, she stumbles on a bar of cell service, but also Blonsky’s group therapy session. It consists of him, Man-Bull, El Aguila, Porcupine, and Saracen. Porcupine is dressed in a head-to-toe spiny costume, and Saracen thinks he’s a vampire. Jen tries to get service while the guys talk about El Aguila’s identity issues and his dislike of being called a Matador. The others all think Man-Bull and El Aguila are in an unhealthy codependency thing, and that Porcupine really should take off his suit and be vulnerable with them. They’re then joined by none other than Wrecker. Remember him? He led the group with Asgardian construction tools. He was in the Yurt and lost track of time. Jen recognizes him and calls up a previously on this guy to remind everyone. She hulks up and throws him. Blonsky tells her go to sit in the calming chair. Wrecker, or maybe Dirk since he doesn’t have his crowbar, offers to talk with her so they can work through their issues.

 

"What did I say about Bioelectricity?" funny line.

He’s apparently given up his magic crowbar and trying to not be a “supervillain.” The circle senses that Jen is dealing with some things that she’s not wanting to talk about. They get her to talk about Josh and how he hasn’t texted her in days and how she made it worse with some cringe worthy “looking for you,” texts she sent in the meantime. The guys talk about how she was probably ghosted. Jen explains that she met Josh as Jen and he seemed to like Jen more than She-Hulk, so that’s probably why she’s fixating on him like this. She feels like She-Hulk is that more popular friend from high school that got all the attention, and that being able to change back and forth feels like Cheating. The group agree that they should go kill Josh, except Dirk, who suggest maybe they should try to find a healthier way to handle this. The group give her some life advice, Dirk and the others agreeing that maybe Jen feels this way because she’s not spending enough time as Jen. Which is a shame because they’d all like to get to know Jen. Jen de-hulks and this encourages Porcupine to take off his mask too. He stinks to high heaven, but the gesture means a lot. The group tell her to delete Josh’s number, so she does and feels a lot better, and agrees to use the yurt. She comes out of the yurt sometime later and gives them the thumbs up.

 

As she leaves, the group give her a goodbye card and wish her well. Blonsky gives her a little more empty advice, Jen thanks him and then leaves with the tow truck guy.

 

The support group was right, they should have
hunted him down and killed him.

We flashback to Thursday night, where it’s revealed that after having sex, Josh cloned all of Jen’s phone contacts, took a picture of her and texted the HulkKing that he got her blood. Oh no.

 

I’ll start by giving a shout out to the Villains support group. I loved these guys from minute one and how they helped Jen get through the Josh situation. Nathan Hurd as Man-Bull, Joseph Castillo-Midyett as El Aguila, Terrence Clowe as Saracen, Jordan Aaron Ford as Porcupine, and Nick Gomez as Wrecker/Dirk were all great in this supportive support group. The joke about Man-Bull and El Aguila being codependent and how that’s a bit weird gets me every time. I wasn’t expecting to see Wrecker as a member of the group, and I got to say I like this version of him as a dude trying to get his life together with some new age healing. Wrecker in basically every other adaptation is pretty one note, he commits crimes and yells at his boys when they commit crimes. Not a lot there, but I think Nick Gomez adds a lot to the character. And Jen’s whole journey through the episode was great. While not the five stages of grief, I think everyone who hasn’t married the first person they dated has gone through the high of the new relationship followed by the crash when it falls apart. It especially sucks when one is ghosted, since like Jen showed, you spend way more time than you should trying to figure out what went wrong. The whole bit about her being conflicted about She-Hulk and admitting she likes how being noticed like she does in hulk form feels good and that she feels bad about it feeling good is true to the comics too. It’s been years since I read a She-Hulk story, but if memory serves a recurring plot point for her is that Jen is kind of addicted to being She-Hulk. She doesn’t have to battle the inner demons like Bruce, but the transforming from a meek introvert to a superpowered extrovert is a battle all on its own. I think they handled the explanation of that well here, with digging into the ick factor. Comic She-Hulk has some impulse control issues and might be a sex addict, depending on the writer. It’s good that they found a way to explain how Jen feels about the difference between her as base Jen and as She-Hulk without dipping into that particular can of worms. And the reveal that Josh was just getting close to her to get her blood for HulkKing just hurt. Like, damn, they found a way to make it worse than him just ghosting her after getting laid. Awful. Next time… a devil comes down to LA. See you then. 

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