We only have two episodes left of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, but the first season definitely isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to telling the story of Jennifer Walters / She-Hulk (Tatiana Maslany). Jen’s unconventional origin as a superhero has manifested in some fascinating ways across the season thus far, especially as she has balanced her life as a single woman and a high-profile lawyer. That all came to a head in a surprising way in this week’s seventh episode, with an ending that might start to spell trouble for Jen. Spoilers for Episode 7 of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, “The Retreat”, below! Only look if you want to know!
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The episode sees Jen dealing with her budding romance with Josh (Trevor Salter), who she met during her friend’s wedding the week before. After they went on several dates and eventually hooked up, Josh began to not respond to Jen’s text messages — something that made her incredibly frustrated and distracted, especially once she had to go upstate to visit the wellness retreat run by Emil Blonsky / Abomination (Tim Roth). Once Jen began to bond with some of the eclectic costumed characters at the retreat, they convinced her to prioritize herself and delete Josh’s number from her phone.
The final scene of the episode then showed why that was a good idea, as it flashed back to when Jen and Josh first hooked up — and revealed that he was actually a member of the Intelligencia, the dark online forum that has been making death threats against She-Hulk. After Josh wirelessly copies all of the data on Jen’s phone, he then texts the elusive “HulkKing”, who was teased at the end of last week’s episode, and sends a bunch of emojis indicating that he got a sample of her blood.
This reveal definitely casts Jen and Josh’s prior moments together in a new light — and now escalates the inevitable conflict between Jen and the Intelligencia even further.
Who are the Intelligencia in Marvel Comics?
Created by Jeff Parker and Paul Pelletier in 2009’s Fall of the Hulks: Alpha #1, the Intelligencia are an assembling of some of the smartest supervillains in Marvel lore, who work together to cause evil that can benefit all of them. After they initially formed and disbanded, they got back together after the events of World War Hulk, and were led by MODOK and The Leader. Their goal in the fight against Hulk was to create their own powerful being through gamma and cosmic radiation, and their work led to the creation of Red She-Hulk, A-Bomb, and Amadeus Cho.
This directly connected with She-Hulk in the 2010 miniseries She-Hulks, which saw Jen and Lyra / She-Hulk, the future daughter of Bruce and Thundra from another war-torn Earth in the multiverse, hunt down the members of the Intelligencia and bring them to justice.
Based on Episode 6, it definitely seems like She-Hulk is recontextualizing the Intelligencia as a sort of a “men’s rights activists” group, which gives the show another outlet to deal with the sexism and misogyny that Jen faces. Now, there’s the question of whether or not some of the previously-unsettling scenes on the show, like the Wrecking Crew’s attempt to steal Jen’s blood and Todd’s (John Bass) creepy fascination with She-Hulk, could be tied to Intelligencia as well. After all, both the Wrecking Crew and Todd scenes highlighted the awkward and uncomfortable moments of Jen existing as a female superhero, between the comments Todd made and the Wrecking Crew accusing her of “flaunting her powers” by just existing in the public eye. With Samuel Sterns / The Leader (Tim Blake Nelson) conveniently just confirmed to be the big bad of the upcoming Captain America: New World Order movie, we’ll have to wait and see if he could factor into things as well.
What do you think of She-Hulk’s Episode 7 twist? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
New episodes of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law will debut Thursdays exclusively on Disney+. If you haven’t checked out Disney+ yet and you want to give it a go, you can do that here.
