Returned to her life, and with her new super-secret out in the open, Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) deals with the fallout of being a powerful woman (who is occasionally 8-feet tall and green) in a man’s world. Keeping the same lighter tone, even when dealing with a crisis for our heroine, the second and third episodes focus on a new direction for Jennifer’s role in a courtroom, attempting to work her alter-ego into her social life, and her struggles with how the world begins to fashion its own narrative about who She-Hulk is as our heroine remains reluctant to turn into the media storm. The focus of a super-woman in a man’s world can very much be felt here (especially with every male character a shmuck, a mansplaining Hulk, asshole, or creep with only a single exception who is about as asexual as you can get in the MCU).
Now with the setup out of the way, the opening arc of the series also offers Jen a new client in the return of Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky (helping to explain the character’s random cameo in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, although not why the MCU seems so insistent on making callbacks to one of its weakest entries). Despite her reservations concerning Blonsky’s past with her cousin, our hero takes the case which turns out to have its share of surprises and challenges. Time for She-Hulk, Attorney at Law to get to work, although it appears we’re gonna have to wait for She-Hulk as a super-hero.
Three episodes in, one of the choices of the show is to keep Jen and She-Hulk separate but still the same person, allowing for her change to be cosmetic more than transformative. In the comics, the choice to let Jen just be She-Hulk all the time really seemed to make the character click. Perhaps because the MCU already decided to go that way with the Hulk, or not having the CGI budget to do her in Hulk form for every episode, the writers decided to go with the Jen/Hulk back-and-forth without any noticeable change in demeanor. She-Hulk, even rendered in the questionable CGI, but still possessing all of Jen’s personality, is more interesting on-screen than Jen (something which is more noticeable with every episode as you can almost feel Maslany shrinking on-screen).
