So, if you're a sci-fi/genre fan of a certain bent, specifically one who has seen Orphan Black, seen in the US via BBC America, you already know how insanely talented Tatiana Maslany is. On that show, Maslany played a woman who discovers that she is actually a clone, and has several doppelgängers who have her exact DNA - all part of the same secret human cloning project. The clones and their friends team up to get to the bottom of the mystery and the cover-up that threatens their lives.
And Maslany, naturally, plays every one of the clones. The nuances and layers to her performance are astounding - one character will impersonate another, and rather than simply dialing in the performance she created for clone she's impersonating, Maslany convincingly plays both the character and the impersonation that that character is doing. It's astonishing to watch.
So, when Maslany was tapped to play Jennifer Walters, the cousin of Bruce Banner who gets his powers but has a very different attitude about it, I knew she was going to be great (Marvel's casting director, Sarah Finn, is really freaking good at what she does). And, two episodes in, that expectation has been validated.
The question here, though, is whether the MCU can resist doing a superhero story.
We're introduced to Jennifer as an assistant D.A. in Los Angeles, getting ready for a trial. Normal human, yes, but then she turned to the camera to explain a comment by her paralegal friend, and we get a signature She-Hulk 4th-wall break (she's been doing this in the comics longer than Deadpool). She then explains how she got her powers.
The story is fairly boilerplate here - she's driving with her cousin Bruce and an alien space ship (ok, maybe not so boilerplate) causes them to get in a car accident. Bruce's radioactive blood drips into Jennifer's own wound, and it apparently reacts with similar genes that allowed Bruce to Hulk out, turning Jennifer into her own Hulk.
After a few black-outs, eventually she awakens at Bruce's Mexican hideaway - a lab he built with Tony Stark to study his condition. Bruce is eager to teach Jennifer everything he's learned over the last decade and a half about being the Hulk. In particular, he emphasizes that being something like this means a total change of lifestyle. And that's the main thing that Jennifer cannot accept.
What Bruce doesn't realize, until Jennifer has repeatedly demonstrated it to him, is that she's actually far better equipped to handle her anger and rage than he is, simply by having to live as a woman in a patriarchal culture. Bruce comes from a place of love, trying to guide his cousin on the difficult journey that he had to make over many years, but doesn't really know how to handle the fact that Jennifer clicks almost immediately.
The truth is that Bruce's life as the Hulk has been deeply isolating and lonely, what might have started as a chance to impart his wisdom to his little cousin becomes a bit of a plea for her to keep him company in that same isolation.
But Jennifer's not interested in the life he's pitching: she doesn't want to be a superhero. She just wants to be a lawyer.
And, that, as I understand it, is kind of how the comics work. She-Hulk becomes a lawyer who specializes in superhuman law.
So, again, I wonder if Marvel and Disney can let this story just be the genre it wants to be.
Captain Falcon and the Winter Soldier was meant to be the first Marvel Disney Plus show, but delays pushed the far stranger and more experimental Wandavision ahead of it. Wandavision was probably the boldest the MCU has ever gotten in its style and format - for several episodes, there were only brief hints that this wasn't purely an anthology of progressive sitcom styles with Wanda and a strangely living Vision starring in them.
Now, sure, the show needed to eventually explain why all this was happening and not just be elaborate sitcom parodies with brief, Lynchian interludes, but even if it turned out that, despite the catching song, it was, in fact, Wanda's grief all along that was the big bad, the show still found its way to having a big CGI superhero fight throwing balls of energy at each other.
I'm fairly confident that the climax of She-Hulk will likely be a big action show-down. But I'd have a ton of respect for the show if they really do fully buy into the idea that this is, in fact, a court procedural show that just happens to take place in a world of superpowers. Let the climax be a big court scene.
We shall see.
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