The She-Hulk season finale Thursday (October 13) sent fans into a frenzy. If you haven’t seen it, beware: there are spoilers ahead. Big ones. Bookmark this page and come back! For now, we’ll separate the intro with the rest of this article with a few (spoiler-free) photos from Marvel’s recent one-off special, Werewolf By Night. It dropped on Friday, and if you missed it, check it out! It’s perfect for Halloween!
Still there? Great! So let’s talk about the finale! Between another Matt Murdock appearance (and other guest appearances), and Tatiana Maslany’s She-Hulk/Jennifer Walters breaking the fourth wall in the best way, the episode 9 closer was a successful close to the series. Walters knows that there’s someone behind-the-curtain tinkering with her and her show and she’s blindly trusted that they had her best interest at heart — that is, until Damage Control agents surround her with their weapons.
“She’s so self-aware and she knows she’s in a show, and she knows that there is somebody writing this and pulling the strings for now,” head writer Jessica Gao tells Marvel.com. “Up until now, she always played along because she felt like, ‘OK, well, this is the story that I was meant to live out.’ There was this unspoken assumption that whoever was doing it had more or less her best interest in mind or at least didn’t have any malicious intent. In this moment [at the end of Episode 9], it was the betrayal of knowing that they didn’t have her best interests in mind.”
Once the episode starts getting insane, Walters goes into Marvel Studios to talk to someone directly about the direction the show was taking. There, she meets the AI machine that is pulling the strings to the storylines, named Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus — better known as K.E.V.I.N. — aka Marvel Studios President Kevin Fiege. The AI machine wears a classic Feige-style black baseball hat. Gao recalls all of the visual development team’s sketches of K.E.V.I.N. all wore little hats, “no matter what type of robot or machine it was, it was wearing a little black baseball hat on top. [Human] Kevin said, ‘Well, that doesn’t make a lick of sense, why would a robot wear a hat?’ I said, ‘That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to you, Kevin, that is the line of logic that you won’t cross, we have you represented as an AI brain that is controlling all of the Marvel Cinematic Universes, but the thing that you can’t get past is that it might have a hat on top of the machine?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’”
Gao said that the ending to She-Hulk‘s season felt right, adding, “This is not the right ending for every show, but this is the right ending for this show. We could not have been more clear about what this show is. From day one, we’ve been very upfront and honest about what kind of show this is, what the expectations for the show will be. And for some reason, people love to not believe that…even though we’ve been telling them for months now that this is what the show is going to be.”
She-Hulk: Attorney At Law Season 1 is now streaming on Disney+.
See what fans said about the final episode below: