She-Hulk’s Marvel Cinematic Universe origin was explained in the first episode of the currently-airing Disney+ show, but it wasn’t always that way. Initially, that episode (or most of it before some editing) was the final episode of the series. It’s an odd way to structure a story, but at the same time, it could have provided a pretty nice dramatic effect. The issue is that the whole show isn’t airing just yet, so we’ll just have to see whether the change makes sense after the first season wraps up.
She-Hulk: Attorney At Law stars Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters, a cousin of Bruce Banner. As she’s riding in a car with him, they end up driven off the road by a spaceship. In the middle of the scrape, her blood is cross-contaminated with Bruce’s, resulting in her receiving his super-strength and incredible healing factor. She also ends up with his trademark green skin.
The plot for the rest of the series is unknown, but the show is likely to shape up to be a courtroom comedy with some fish-out-of-water and action elements. That being said, it’s not like the show exists in a vacuum. It’s one of the last entries in Marvel‘s Phase Four, which means we’re likely to see some serious shake-ups to the MCU to prepare for the next phase.
Maybe it isn’t so much that She-Hulk head writer Jessica Gao thought the episode provided better context to the story. Whatever the case is, the trajectory of the season was originally a bit different. Gao was recently interviewed in Variety, where she revealed…
The episode order was slightly different — we changed things up a little bit in post. Most of the pilot that you see was actually Episode 8. We waited until the very end of the season to really reveal her origin story. There were several factors leading up to the decision, but really at the end of the day, we just realized people really wanted to know that information sooner. It was hard for them to not know the origin story and then get to know this character.
Pretty much all of the action in the first episode begins when Jennifer begins to recount how exactly she came to be in her current situation. Theoretically, it could be a good way to wrap up the season, as a kind of retrospective, but we’ll likely know how good of a move it was as the season unfolds.
New episodes of She-Hulk: Attorney At Law premiere on Thursdays on Disney+.
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