A week or so back on the new Quantum Leap, Dr. Ben Song experienced his first leap into a woman. The woman was in a bar and had to fend off an unwelcome advance from a drunken letch.
Then Addison, Ben's hologram companion, arrives and assesses the situation: "You've only been a woman for 30 minutes and you've already been insulted, harrassed and assaulted. (sigh!) Yeah, that sounds about right."
OK, we're not talking about Quantum Leap this week (we'll check back in on that series in a few weeks) but I wanted to quote Addison from that episode to set the tone for this week's Tuesday TV Touchbase as we look at the finales of She-Hulk: Attorney At Law and Kevin Can F**k Himself which arrive at the inescapable conclusion: Being a woman is hard!
On She-Hulk: Attorney At Law, the lurking threat over the course of the seaon was Intelligencia, an online forum of trolls who have it in for Jennifer Walters and She-Hulk. Jen doesn't take them seriously. They're just a bunch of petty dudes with grievances over a woman having any sort of power or agency and she doesn't see them as a threat.
Until they find a way to hurt her.
As Jen noted way back in episode one, she's had a lifetime of dealing with anger from just being a woman, to feeling anger at men who feel the need to mansplain her own job to her to controlling that anger because a woman would dare not expose that anger without being judged as hysterical or out of control. Which is why she learns way faster than Bruce Banner did how to control her transformations between Jen and her Hulk form.
But there is only so many times one can feel anger and only so many times it can be controlled before anger must express itself.
Which is what Intelligencia is counting on.
The advice to simply ignore bullies is of dubious value because bullies will not be ignored.
At an event to celebrate "female lawyers of the year" (which is sounds more like an insult than an honor), Intelligencia hacks a big display screen to invade Jennifer Walters' privacy, of her just living her life.
And having sex.
Yep, Jen is attacked with revenge porn.
And She-Hulk goes into full rage monster mode and smashes stuff.
The season finale opens with Jennifer Walters in prison.
Yep, the bullies kept poking at her, poking at her, poking at her and when Jen says enough is enough, it's Jen who is in trouble.
Which is the way it is with bullies. I know this from experience. You can ignore them all you want but they just wear you down and then when you can't take it anymore, guess who fucking winds up in the god damn principal's office?
(Take a deep breath. This is a post about TV.)
<deep breath>
OK, where were we? Oh yeah.
The season finale builds up to the big epic showdown. The head of Intelligencia injects himself with gamma irradiated Hulk blood to become a Hulk, Emil Bronsky is on hand as the Abomination and Bruce Banner's Hulk shows up.
Jen looks at the audience and voices her displeasure with where this episode is going.
Jen's been breaking the fourth wall all season. What happens next is stuff that Deadpool has sex dreams about.
Jump cut to the Disney+ Marvel menu screen. The square for She-Hulk: Attorney At Law opens up and She-Hulk climbs out and down to the square for Marvel Assembled (the section for behinds the scenes documentaries) to have a conversation with Kevin.
No, not Kevin Feige.
No K.E.V.I.N., as in Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus, an artificial intelligence in charge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's storyline decisions, "creating near perfect entertainment".
Jen persuades K.E.V.I.N. that not all MCU projects needs to end with a big epic battle and maybe to try something different this time.
K.E.V.I.N. reluctantly agrees and the big epic battle doesn't happen and bad guys are arrested and sent to jail. Jen does allow for a totally extraneous appearance by Matt Murdock/Daredevil because "a woman has needs".
The season finale for She-Hulk: Attorney At Law is as unconventional as the season has been all along, a sit-com that played with the toys in the MCU toy box and dared to have fun while doing it.
What other show would have Wong get a ditzy party girl for a girlfriend who calls him "Wongers"?
Not everyone was in on the joke.
In real life (or IRL as the kids say and I am nothing but down with how the young people talk in the texting), the trolls have been out in force against this show. Frequently, the IRL trolls were saying the same shit the Intelligencia trolls were saying. Which means the writers already knew years in advance these trolls would be saying.
For all those trolls who thought writer Jessica Gao having She-Hulk climb through the Disney+ Marvel menu to talk to her creators was a bit too much, you bastards thought Grant Morrison was a fucking genius when he did the same thing in Animal Man nearly 30 years ago.
By the way, here's a chart of the review ratings for the season finale of She-Hulk: Attorney At Law.
Not everything is for everyone.
She-Hulk: Attorney At Law was never going to be about super powered slug-fests. It was a story of a young single woman trying to make her mark in her chosen profession while navigating other life stuff like dating.
Oh, and also changing into a Hulk.
Since I've yakking so much about She-Hulk: Attorney At Law , I'll keep the remarks on Kevin Can F**k Himself brief.
There's some spoilerishness if you haven't seen this.
Allison gives up on the season one plan to kill Kevin and resolves to kill herself... metaphorically. She plots to fake her own death. The scheme actually works. Mostly.
We get to see Kevin in not the sit com world and he's a scary bastard. Without the bright lights and the laugh track, the shit Kevin says goes from irritating to threatening.
Everyone abandons Kevin: his dad moves to Florida without a forwarding address, Neil leaves, his girlfriend.
Yep, 2 months after Allison "died", Kevin got a girlfriend who doesn't continue to put up with his shit.
And Kevin does indeed fuck himself.
Allison and Patty each figures they will die alone. They resolve to do it together.
OK, that is that for this week's Tuesday TV Touchbase.
Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.
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