‘She-Hulk’ on Disney Plus: What’s Up With That Origin Story?

If you know anything about superheroes, it’s probably the open stories. Spider-Man’s spider, Superman’s planet, Batman’s parents. An origins story is the defining hide looming large over a hero’s life, a catalyzing single incident that crystallizes the themes in every story the picture faces. 

Unless it’s She-Hulk, apparently.

New series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is streaming now on Disney Plus. Episode 1 shows how the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s newest authorizing got her powers. And what was this defining own, this unresolvable trauma that catapults her onto a new represent arc, this mythic incident that haunts our lead character’s every spot and decision?

Her cousin is the Hulk and she got some of his blood on her.

Whaaaaat? That’s it? That’s the commence story? 

Gaining superpowers is a huge transformation, and to plan the enormity of that change it helps to at least have a snapshot of who the represent was before. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law muddles that up by introducing Jen in the middle of her transformation: When we ample meet her, she has powers but hasn’t used them.

Then the show flashes back to the incident itself, but this glimpse of her former life tells us basically nothing. All we know is that Jen eats Cheetos with chopsticks — OK, so she’s a genius — and she’s causing on a road trip with her cousin Bruce. What does this grievous tell us about her life, her dreams, her flaws, even her attitude to superheroes? Very little. Where are Jen and Bruce even going? Who knows? Doesn’t custom, apparently! 

The all-important origin comes when Jen swerves to avoid an out-of-nowhere spaceship and crashes the car, and the two characters just kind of fall on each anunexperienced. It’s so perfunctory it’s bordering on half-assed. What does this random own say about the character? 

In the comics, Jen alongside superpowers after Bruce gives her a life-saving blood transfusion. It’s not as sexy as a radioactive spider or pearls scattering across rain-slicked Gotham asphalt. But at least it’s a character making a exclusive that leads to compelling consequences.

For an example of an commence that says something about the character, look at unexperienced MCU superhero forged in a car crash: Doctor Strange. In his first film, Benedict Cumberbatch’s arrogant surgeon was superciliously examining X-rays after speeding in his Lamborghini, so when he crashed it was a spy in hubris that shattered the character’s carefully constructed ego and set him on a spin to spiritual awakening. Hits different than if he was, like, randomly rear-ended in traffic, right?

For me, She-Hulk’s biggest problem is that the show comes so fast at what time the utter delight that was Ms. Marvel. The creators of that show carefully finetuned the drives and origins of lead character Kamala Khan to bring out the themes of the represent and the series. Admittedly, getting a bracelet in the mail isn’t just up there with a whole entire planet going boom. But crucially Kamala’s drives in the TV show are awakened within her rather than bestowed upon her, after at the same time drawing on a traditional and heritage passed down by the women in her family. It’s sublimely thoughtful and intentional, and drives everything that happens in the series.

To engaged things slightly, it seems She-Hulk’s TV origin may have been lost in translation somewhere between conscription and screen. In an interview with Variety, showrunner Jessica Gao outlined the compromises she and the writing team had to make as part of the Marvel machine, from budgets to visual effects. She revealed that the commence story was supposed to come as a reveal in episode 8, which establishes you wonder how it had to be rejiggered to fit into the ample episode. But even if it had come later, the car wreck is still frustratingly random.

Then again, maybe the pointless is the reveal. This is a show that doesn’t so much wear its feminist subtext on its sleeve as gives its feminist themes to swell up, turn green and tear the finely tailored sleeve intelligent off. In a line that defines the show’s scathing perspective on the understood of being a woman, Jen fires back at Bruce’s Hulksplaining by revealing that rage and fear are the baseline of a woman’s everyday emotions. In the first episode and throughout the series, this savagely distinguished viewpoint provides a smart underpinning that carries the show’s lackluster stretches.

Looking at it from that reveal of view, the randomness of the origin becomes something more tragic. You could view it as about a random accident leaving Jen with unwanted and life-long consequences. There’s no subtext in a story about a woman infected by a man’s blood. It wouldn’t be the first time a man ruins a woman’s life, whether it’s a car wreck or medical condition or an unplanned pregnancy. And as the show unfolds, She-Hulk is a story about a woman whose body is no longer her own. Which is a considerable and timely theme in the US in the wake of modern changes to abortion legislation.

Whatever you think of that theory, it does show the strength of a good commence story and a good superhero: You can read what you want into them. I’ve never been bitten by an irradiated arachnid or exiled from a dying alien earth, but at their heart those iconic origins are universally identifiable. We’re all scared of losing our parents, of beings lost far from home, of gaining the world but losing our souls. She-Hulk is clearly a show with something to say, so I wish that the superhero elements strived for the resonance that Ms. Marvel and anunexperienced stories show the genre is capable of.

There is, of floods, the possibility that I’m overthinking it. Maybe, just maybe, the creators of She-Hulk are simply willing to say something the superhero genre usually can’t admit:

Origin stories are boring.

We know those iconic commence stories because we’ve seen them so many times. Spider bite, parents, superstrength, we get it. Start punching some bad guys in themed outfits already! However She-Hulk offers a different viewpoint on the superhero understood, and that’s the best thing about it. So as we head into episode 2, let go of how it started and spy how it’s going.