Warning: this story contains spoilers for Thursday's She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. "I'm a much better lawyer than I am a Hulk," Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) tells her superhero cousin, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), in the series premiere of Marvel's She-Hulk. The episode, titled "A Normal Amount of Rage," recounts the fateful road-trip accident that exposed Jennifer to a dangerous dose of gamma radiation: Bruce's blood. As Smug Smart Hulk explains inside the lab where he spent The Blip fixing himself and integrating the Hulk-Banner identities, Jen's transformations into a green, 6-foot-7-inch superpowered hulk are triggered by distressing emotional states — anger and fear.
"Those are, like, the baseline of any woman just existing," says Jen, who makes the case for why she doesn't want to follow her cousin's Big Guy-sized foosteps as an Avenger. While undergoing Hulk training in Mexico, Jen tells Bruce she wants to return to her career as a super-lawyer — not a superhero.
"It's not one or the other, Jen," Bruce responds. "I am trying to show you that we can live between what we want and what is."
After a Hulk family feud ends in a beach brawl — and an "all buzz, no barf" bonding session over drinks that reveals the decades-old truth about Steve Rogers' (Chris Evans) love life — Jen returns to Los Angeles to resume her life as Deputy District Attorney. But when a super-strong woman known only as Titania (Jameela Jamil) bursts through the wall of a court room, Jen's best friend Nikki (Ginger Gonzaga) encourages her to do her "civic duty": She-Hulk smash.
Turning green with her best "savage Jen Walters look," the superhero lawyer introduces herself: "Jennifer Walters, attorney at law."
"I think people receive Jen very differently when she's She-Hulk than they do Jen Walters," Maslany told ComicBook about the star attorney's transformation into a green-skinned superhero. "And that's something that Jen, I think feeds off of in a way that she does get, you know, a little hit of confidence. It's fun to be looked at like that. But then at the same time, I feel like she also has a fraudulent sort of feeling around it. Or she doesn't totally feel like she can own that and that people might not be looking at her, but looking at just She-Hulk."
Ahead of She-Hulk Episode 2, premiering August 25, Marvel has released the first images from She-Hulk Episode 1, "A Normal Amount of Rage." See them in the gallery below.
Starring Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk, Jameela Jamil as Titania, Ginger Gonzaga as Nikki Ramos, Josh Segarra as Augustus "Pug" Pugliese, Jon Bass as Todd, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Mallory Book, Tim Roth as the Abomination, and Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Smart Hulk, new episodes of Marvel Studios' She-Hulk: Attorney at Law are streaming Thursdays on Disney+.
