SPOILERS AHEAD FOR “SHE-HULK” FINALE
Marvel and Disney’s “She-Hulk: Attorney At Law” came to a close this week, the season finale taking the show’s fourth-wall-breaking elements and shattering it with an episode that went completely meta in its back half as Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Manslany) takes back control of her story.
That includes everything from jumping out of one Disney+ tile within the app and into another, berating the show’s writing staff, and meeting Marvel chief Kevin – or more specifically K.E.V.I.N., a robot very much akin to GLaDOS from “Portal” which creates Marvel works from algorithms.
In an interview with the company’s official blog, head writer Jessica Gao revealed that the ending wasn’t always planned this way – rather the original end was going to be more akin to the kind of regular Marvel ending the actual episode satirises:
“I think I probably wrote like, twenty versions of a finale that went all over the place and I started feeling like, ‘Well, this is a Marvel show, I better give them the classic Marvel ending’. Big villain fight, big finale. But it never felt right because I was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”
Turns out the one who put her on the right course was the real Kevin, Marvel Studios president and executive producer Kevin Feige, who helped pushed them down the road they took – even if it turned him into a sinister robot mastermind:
“[Kevin Feige] really opened my mind to the idea that it’s okay to not do that, because I was trying to do what I thought was the Marvel expectation of what the show had to be. He was like, ‘Why? No one’s telling you to do that, you don’t have to do that, you can do something completely different, we should be doing something completely different because this show is so different from anything that Marvel has done.’ It was getting that permission from him that really made me think, ‘Oh.’ It just changed everything.”
In the process, the episode allowed Gao to address not just the criticisms she knew the series would be subjected to, but that which Marvel overall receives in terms of adhering to rigid formula and not really “doing something different” each time they say they will:
“It felt natural that not only that she was in a show, but that she would have opinions about the show, especially since she just was completely betrayed by the makers… It just felt right that she would go and complain to the ultimate lord of Marvel, which is K.E.V.I.N..”
Gao says feels happy with the way things have turned out with the series, which is not only comics accurate but follows the mandate the show has set out from its first day:
“This feels right for this show. This is not the right ending for every show, but this is the right ending for this show. We could not have been more clear about what this show is. From day one, we’ve been very upfront and honest about what kind of show this is, what the expectations for the show will be. And for some reason, people love to not believe that…even though we’ve been telling them for months now that this is what the show is going to be.”
The series has proven a little divisive amongst fans. From its smaller stakes to its character-centric focus, shifting tone, refusal to connect to the larger MCU narrative at times, and more – what some have found frustrating about its avoidance of the regular Marvel tropes are what has endeared it to others. The finale, in particular, sums up that divide, showing a genuinely different finale than just another CG battle and/or sky portal.
The full season of “She-Hulk: Attorney-at-Law” is now available on the Disney+ service.
