Quarantine Control #133: And Now to Hulk Out

DC Staff | October 20, 2022 | Features, Television | No Comments

It was detailed in the lede to last week’s Quarantine Control post that there was little new to talk about, which largely applies this week. Everything is terrible. The only part worth acknowledging here is how this is the season to fittingly feel a foreboding horror on the horizon. Too many subjects could qualify for that definition, so let’s stop here. This lede was, once again, about how little there was to talk about for the lede. Not the most pleasant pattern.

Geoffrey Barnes

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022)
Source: Disney Plus
Episodes: 9

Marvel Entertainment knew how to set the right expectations for She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, the newest Marvel series to grace Disney Plus. The show, as the name implies, marks the debut of She-Hulk, attorney Jennifer Walters in human form, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it was important for the trailers to highlight how the show’s tone would be lighter compared to other Marvel fare, a welcome change from prior shows and films when done well. Comedy-driven Marvel works can largely be a hit (WandaVision) or miss (Thor: Love and Thunder — admittedly a movie and not a show). (Honestly, “hit or miss” could describe the entirety of the MCU’s fourth phase.) But I always had faith in this one, thanks to how well its concept would fit the TV series format. The show, fortunately, delivers harder than several other Marvel works.

The show wastes no time giving Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) her Hulk powers near the start, which occurs after she and cousin Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) get into an accident. Both are injured at the time, but some of Bruce’s Hulk blood just happens to travel into Jennifer’s open wound, bestowing upon her the ability to turn into a Hulk herself — though the “She-Hulk” name doesn’t come in until later. It’s quickly discovered that Jennifer can largely maintain her composure immediately after transforming, which took Bruce years to master. But she’ll still need training, and will have to adjust to her new life as a human who can turn into a Hulk at will, which seriously upsets her life as an attorney when the public is well aware of who she is.

The show is fortunately more about how Jennifer deals with her new life rather than to stop villainous threats like other superhero shows, with plenty of jokes along the way. They’re good jokes, at that, which somehow largely fulfill the task of making the lives of Jennifer and those around her relatable despite the number of extraordinary twists. But there are enough fights with enemies and other scenarios to show off Jen’s newfound strength.

A key reason why I enjoyed She-Hulk more than other recent Marvel shows is how it actually feels like a goddamned TV show. A big problem with Marvel’s Disney Plus content involved how some of them felt like they were concepted as films, but split over a six-episode span. This was an issue with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki, though both were nonetheless enjoyable, but Moon Knight suffered the most from this, as if the producers seriously wanted it to be a movie but were denied because “Moon Knight” wasn’t as well known a character compared to other Marvel heroes. The episodic format of She-Hulk makes it a good fit for a TV show with new chapters added on a weekly basis, a criticism I hope they’ll keep in mind for future shows.

She-Hulk is quality stuff because it’s, simply enough, plain fun to watch. The first two episodes aren’t the strongest, thanks to a clear adjustment period for the writers and actors. But the jokes start landing more consistently with the third episode, and actors like Maslany as Jennifer, Ginger Gonzaga as Nikki Ramos, and eventually Jameela Jamil as Titania get used to their roles. Appearances from returning characters help, like the aforementioned Bruce/Hulk, Emil Blonsky/Abomination (Tim Roth), Wong (Benedict Wong), and a certain other character later in the series. I know the appearance is not much of a spoiler anymore, but I’m trying to be nice.

The most worrying aspect after the first She-Hulk trailer was the CG for the titular character, which leaned too far into the Uncanny Valley, the clear result of the overworked and underpaid VFX artists Marvel employed for the job. This is fortunately improved for the final show, though it’s unsurprisingly nothing compared to the CG present in prior Marvel movies with larger budgets. I wish the She-Hulk character model herself was more muscular, though her appearance is closer to the recent comic cover artwork from Jen Bartel. Titania makes a good impact on the story, but ends up being underutilized by the end. Marvel hopefully has solid future plans for her, but she’s unlikely to fit into other shows outside a potential second season of this show or maybe Ms. Marvel.

She-Hulk is a very good show, and anyone who enjoys Marvel stuff should watch it. By managing to avoid the main pitfall WandaVision fell into, which turned into a Generic Marvel Fest by its end, this show makes for one of the best Marvel series to grace Disney Plus thus far. Don’t spend a second reading the comments from, let alone interacting with, the dudes extremely mad online about the jokes that tackle toxic masculinity, or about the mere presence of Megan Thee Stallion. I hope Marvel keeps in mind the lesson here: Make the TV shows feel like TV shows, rather than stretched-out movies.

Joseph Daniels

Transgender rights are a hot issue right now, with many on the right making a big deal about them in the upcoming midterm United States elections and parading around talking points like litterboxes in schools as reasons why the trans community is harmful.

This is hilarious to me, that litter boxes in schools are being used to smear trans people because if anything, that’s anti-furry nonsense. That sounds like something that came out of the CSI episode. It didn’t, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had Sexy Kitty using a litterbox in an early draft of the script.

In fact, the often used “attack helicopter” joke kind of also feels more like it should be anti-furry to me, even though it’s very much an anti-trans dog whistle. In recent years, I’ve seen furries coming up with their own “planesona”, and this is sincere. This isn’t furries jumping on the attack helicopter joke, these are furries who like the idea of humanoid planes, and of being able to just turn into a plane at an airport and fly to their destination. It also reminds me of an old on-line comic that I swear was real, called Components on Campus. The cast of characters were based on the musical Starlight Express, and were all, I promise I’m not making this up, anthropomorphic trains. They were people in body and train components in truth, and at least one character was a crossover with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s other strangely anthropomorphized musical Cats. The comic lasted for a very brief period of time and like most comics from the early days of the Internet, hasn’t been updated in about twenty years.

If anything, I’d love to start responding to anti-trans activists using the attack helicopter joke by asking to see their planesona and bugging them so much about it that it poisons the joke for them. For once, I’d like to take a piece of bigotry away from them. Bullies have gotten so good at taking seemingly innocent words like “queer” and turning them awful. I can’t imagine it was fun for Elizabeth Levy, author of the Something Queer… book series, to find out that what used to be a perfectly good term was co-opted by bigots. After 1997, the series dropped the original naming convention and has been redubbed The Fletcher Mysteries instead but I remember back in elementary school, before the name change, kids would grab those books all the time and laugh about the word queer in the title, and anyone who might’ve wanted to actually read the perfectly good mystery story contained within its pages were labeled queer for wanting to read those books in particular. Man, if reading a book with “queer” in the title worked to make one gay, then all the books I’ve read with the word “tiger” in their title should’ve worked to transform me into an actual tiger by now.

This week, John Oliver made transgender rights the main story of an episode of Last Week Tonight, and I’d like to respond by making it my recommended viewing this week.

Last Week Tonight (2014)
Source: Crave (Canada; seasons 5-9 only), YouTube (usually only the main story), other sources around the world including foreign Disney+ services
Episodes: Ongoing (currently 265)
Tigers?: Surprisingly, yes

For thirty out of fifty two weeks in a year, John Oliver discusses an important issue and doesn’t limit himself to the United States. He’ll discuss Brexit in the United Kingdom, various world elections including Brazil’s and Canada’s, and he talks about people like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, the former president of Turkmenistan (he stepped down this year and held a sham election to install his son as the current president) who had a strange obsession with collecting Guinness World Records. This week’s episode is a very important one in the fight to allow transgender people the same freedoms as everyone else, and is recommended viewing for everyone.

In case anyone’s curious about where John Oliver stands when it comes to tigers, he hasn’t featured them as a main story yet (and somehow I get the feeling it won’t be good news for tigers if he does), but they’ve shown up often, sometimes where you’d least expect, like when discussing potential new Jeopardy hosts, or when a tiger got upset with him during a segment on Donald Trump:

In Canada, seasons five through nine are available on Crave in their entirety, and if we don’t mind watching just the main story, the YouTube archive has most of them. I say most, because due to a licensing agreement, the YouTube upload doesn’t become available to Canadians for a few weeks. This was annoying when you used to have to spend extra money to get access to HBO’s library on Crave, but it’s less annoying now that Crave seems willing to let us watch the HBO stuff on the basic subscription plan. There are a few episodes from the end of the 2018 season on YouTube that still haven’t been made open to Canadians and they seemingly forgot about doing that when the 2019 season started up.

In the United States… oof, yeah, this is an HBO Max series, and watching it there will give you all of the segments, not just the main story. However, everyone hates HBO Max right now for what they did to basically every show except their current hits. So for now, I’d recommend watching the YouTube channel instead. At least in the United States, it should be up to date, and you’re likely not missing anything significant by only watching the main story. If you’re quick, you can even watch the whole episode because there are always one or two pirates who upload the entire thing on Sunday night and/or Monday morning and it stays up for a couple days before HBO gets it pulled from the site.

That’s really all I have to say this week, so I wish everyone a good weekend.

And now, this:

If this conclusion goes on any longer, it will get grim. But it’s worth mentioning that the midterm elections in the United States are in less than three weeks, so anyone reading this hopefully has a plan to vote for people who don’t plan to make things worse for those who don’t bend the knee to Christofascism. Ahhh damn it, this got grim. See you next week.

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