Main cast: Tatiana Maslany (Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk), Josh Segarra (Augustus Pugliese), Ginger Gonzaga (Nikki Ramos), Megan Thee Stallion (Herself), Benedict Wong (Wong), Renée Elise Goldsberry (Mallory Book), and Tim Roth (Emil Blonsky/Abomination)
Director: Kat Coiro
In The People vs. Emil Blonsky, Jessica Gao’s original creation Green-Hag has to do some lawyer-ing for Emil Blonsky, and it is not going well as Emil seems determined to throw a wrench into all her plans just because. Oh, but who cares about that, as we are all about the cameos here.
The people behind this show think they are being clever by having Green-Hag talk directly to the camera that the show is not about cameos, but come on. 80% of the pre-show hype is all about which character will be showing up, and oh, remember people, Daredevil is going to show up too and we all know how thirsty people can’t get enough of the Cox, so yes. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: being stupid and then saying oh you are being so stupid won’t change the fact that, yes, you are stupid.
Anyway, Wong is here. Okay, he’s a fat clown whose characterization gets increasingly bastardized into Clown Joke Supreme each time he shows up, and oh boy, if he had been a moron in the previous Dr Strange movie, here he is reduced to being a buffoon in ethnic costume being looked down upon by people in corporate suits. Yes, that’s really progressive.
That’s the tragedy of this show. If this had been a self-contained series, I won’t mind the pointlessness of this series so much, but shows like this are turning other MCU characters into jokes. Thor is already ruined, with the final nail on the coffin being him and his hangers-on reduced to being unfunny one-liner generators that can’t stop quipping even when Asgard blows up in front of them. Sadly, Hulk was dragged down to their level by Taika Waititi, and this show completes the act by burying the last shreds of respectability Hulk still had up to that point… and now it is also burying Wong and what little of that remains of character’s tattered dignity.
Oh, and then there is the much hyped twerking scene with Megan Thee Stallion, who is now part of the MCU as well for some reason. You know, I’m actually disappointed with that one, because I’ve heard so much about how horrific that scene is, but now that I’ve watched it, I’m heartbroken that it’s nowhere as awful as I imagined. It’s just a silly kind of filler scene, one of the many filler scenes in this episode.
You notice that I’ve not mentioned much about the story, and that’s because we are still stuck in the Green-Hag and Blonksy story line. It seems like something new will come up in the next episode, but the “main plot” of this series seems to be shaping up to be Green-Hag’s day to day “funny” capers at her new law firm.
It’s clear by this point that Jessica Gao and her writer friends are very likely spending most of their days drinking and snorting lines, while devoting the last 30 minutes of their writing deadlines to borrow chunks of social media post by their fellow progressive bubble people and clumsily throw them together as “witty conversations”. This will explain the cringe kind of comedy here: the overly sarcastic, one-note barbs that conflate one’s inadequacies and failures with societal oppression.
The men are sexist clowns or incompetent clowns, for example. Jessica Gao keeps mentioning in interviews, conveniently after the show tanks at the ratings, that oh, all this is deliberate, and she’s just being clever by trolling the sexist white males out there, hee hee. Well, I’m sure Disney really appreciates her wasting their time and money to turn this IP into her personal toilet! Whatever this genius savant’s motives are, she and her buddies have turned the show into a cartoon based off the most stupid segments of social media. So… congratulations?
The biggest loser here is Tatiana Maslany. From what I have seen so far, she manages to hold herself with some semblance of dignity despite being saddled with some of the worst lines and scenes ever in the history of MCU.
Sadly, her brand of comic timing doesn’t seem to go well with the slapstick and over the top cringe that Ms Gao and friends consider comedy. Ms Maslany always seems a bit low-key when she has to up the camp to crazy levels in order to elevate the crap she has to wade in into so good, it’s great territory. She should have been more like Tim Roth, who embraces the awfulness of the stuff he has to deal with, and gleefully chews scenery in a way that is infectious.
Indeed, that’s the main reason this show so far isn’t working for me: it’s bad, so it needs to dial up the awfulness so that it becomes a twisted kind of awesome. Sadly, it just sort of meanders around so far, missing the mark with the “comedy” while offering zilch compelling story to compensate for the cringe overload.
