Warning: The following contains mega-She-Hulk finale spoilers…
It was brilliantly executed: In the very middle of the climactic showdown in the She-Hulk finale, an apparent glitch in the streaming service sends the viewer back to the Disney+ homepage.
Who didn’t reach for the remote, irked by the interruption? It lasts only long enough so that we don’t actually have time to press any buttons of our own. She-Hulk (Tatiana Maslany) then breaks through the tab for her own show, with the air of someone escaping through a window, and crawls into the display art for a behind-the-scenes Marvel documentary, which then deposits her at the Disney lot.
She continues her journey, making her way to the She-Hulk production offices. (The most unrealistic thing about this sequence, other than the Gamma-fied hero, is that a door at the famously secretive Marvel Studios would be clearly marked “SHE-HULK PRODUCTION.” The QR code on the sign in the image on screen, by the way, actually works and takes you to a free comic book. Surprise!) Once inside, she hassles the writers over the cookie-cutter conclusion, and they send her to Kevin—not Kevin Feige, the iconic producer of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its many-armed episodic spin-offs, but an artificial intelligence robot, K.E.V.I.N., which stands for Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus.
Once at the core of the Marvel storytelling apparatus, She-Hulk reverts to human Jennifer Walters form (because, K.E.V.I.N. explains, the green version is expensive) and talks the device into a new ending that doesn’t involve her blood being stolen, her cousin Bruce Banner saving the day, or a big knock-down, drag-out fight sequence. Once she’s had her say, she returns to our regularly scheduled plot, and we see what she’s mandated play out to end the show’s first season.
Anticipating the blowback over this meta-narrative, Walters explains her rationale: “That’s what Hulks do. We smash things. Bruce smashes buildings. I smash fourth walls and bad endings. … And sometimes Matt Murdock,” she adds, with Maslany adding a priceless expression that is destined for immortality as a meme. Zing.
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