Recap and Review of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, S1E7: “The Retreat”

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law continues on the Disney+ scene with She-Hulk episode 7! Finally we get to see what Emil Blonsky aka Abomination has been up to! Let’s check in and see how are things going for our new favorite Hulk!

Recap of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law S1E7: “The Retreat“

She-Hulk Episode 7 begins with a montage of Jen and Josh progressing through their dating, starting with handshakes and ending with the presumption of something a little more intimate. However, after they spend the night together, Jen is worried because Josh doesn’t answer her texts at all. She’s completely ghosted.

Jen is frantic through the weekend, but on Sunday she gets a call from Chuck, Emil Blonsky’s parole officer. Apparently his inhibitor device has malfunctioned and Chuck needs to go check in on Emil at his meditation retreat. You remember – the one that he said he was going to form when he got out of prison?

Anyways, Chuck can’t get any uniformed backup, so he requests that Jen accompany him as She-Hulk. It’s also sort of a double-dipping kind of situation because Jen is Emil’s lawyer and so it’s helpful for her to hang around anyways.

As it turns out, Emil’s inhibitor malfunctioned due to him being in contact with an electric fence while trying to get his favorite chicken back. Chuck fixes it up and everything is ship-shape, meaning that Jen can leave and lament Josh’s silence.

Unfortunately, as Jen is about to leave, Man-Bull throws El Águila into Jen’s Toyota. The two minor super-powered folks continue battling it out, using the car as a focal point for their engagement. Jen needs to call a tow-truck which won’t be able to arrive until much later in the day. Therefore, Jen is stuck at this meditation retreat with Emil Blonsky and a bunch of other super-powered individuals.

Jen chooses to walk all around the property hoping to find a cell signal, since there isn’t any Wi-Fi on the premises. Eventually she arrives at a building in the middle of the woods, which turns out to be the location for a sharing circle with Emil’s meditation members. Besides Man-Bull, Emil, and El Águila, there’s also Porcupine and Saracen. And that’s when Wrecker joins the party, who you might remember from the team that tried to take Jen’s blood!

Immediately Jen wants to solve the situation with violence, but Emil says that’s not how they do it around her. Instead, everybody goads Jen into becoming She-Hulk and ask her to share what’s on her mind instead of obsessing over her phone. Jen takes to the idea really well and before long she’s divulging all of her inner thoughts to this group of D-List supers.

We get to hear from Jen that she just wants to be appreciated as Jen. All anybody seems to care about these days is She-Hulk and it’s like she’s living with a super popular friend inside her own body. She has a major breakthrough in this therapy, including deleting Josh’s number!

But she’s not the only one who has a breakthrough because Porcupine takes off his mask! All around this was a great day for everyone, and it seems like Jen appreciates herself a bit more than she was allowing herself originally. They even made Jen a card for her to remember them by. She’s glad she stuck around, and leaves with the tow truck.

At the end of the episode, we flash back to Josh’s antics on the night he spent with Jen. He ended up copying the contents of her phone and sending a message to the HulkKing implying that he got the blood that he needed.

Thoughts on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law S1E7: “The Retreat”

Dang it! We all knew that Josh wasn’t such a great guy after all, which stinks for Jen! As if ghosting someone after spending the night wasn’t bad enough, stealing their personal information and potentially even their blood is even worse. I wish we had been wrong about him!

There were a lot of great moments in this episode. For one, I loved the presentation of Emil’s meditative retreat. He had a ton of inspirational posters including some of the following platitude quotes:

• “Today Is Today”
• “Make Your Goal A Reality”
• “Achieve Anything”
• “Seize Your True Power”
• “Abomaste”

Abomaste is my personal favorite.

It was also really fun to see these way-lesser-known Marvel characters in Porcupine, Saracen, Man-Bull, and El Águila. The comic relief between him and Man-Bull was really genuine, and I snorted when El Águila said he did some light matadoring in college. Absolutely ridiculous.

What’s really interesting is that El Águila was mildly associated with the Heroes for Hire team in the comics. This team had a rotating cast of members but there are a couple current MCU heroes that were a part of it: She-Hulk, Moon Knight, Spider-Man, Falcon, Shang-Chi, Doctor Strange, Hulk, and Black Panther. Most of the time, Heroes for Hire is in reference to street-level heroes like Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Daredevil, and others, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of team-up in the near future.

The introduction of Saracen is also topical considering that there’s a Blade project in the works. Saracen was an actual vampire, so having him a part of the episode starts to lay the groundwork for Blade in the MCU. What’s also very telling is Wrecker’s quick diversion when the topic of Jen’s blood comes up. Is he still in cahoots with the HulkKing?

I was pleasantly surprised at how pleasant everything seemed to be at Emil’s retreat. The fact that these super-powered individuals were in therapy is such a good thing, because therapy shouldn’t be any sort of taboo topic. Mental health is incredibly important, and anything that helps normalize therapy is a big win in my book.

Also I should mention that I loved the ‘Previously on…’ break of the 4th wall by Jen midway through the episode. If there’s one thing that She-Hulk does well, it’s tying in comedy with ensuring that the audience doesn’t feel alienated if they can’t remember the plot points.

I’ve been enjoying She-Hulk immensely, just because it feels very real and down-to-earth. There’s a ton of relatable content while still mixing it up with the superhero world. We’ve also seen a lot more information about how super-humans seem to be populating the world with more regularity in the MCU ever since the blip. And not all of them are Iron-Man and Captain America level in power. There’s a wide range of supers out there with a myriad of abilities.

One final easter egg in the episode was that the tow truck company was Slott, and the driver had ‘Dan’ on the nametag of his shirt. Dan Slott is a comic book writer, having written She-Hulk, Fantastic Four, and more. A nice nod to the real world there!

The show is nearing a conclusion and I suspect we’re getting the HulkKing reveal in the next episode or two. We’ve just been fed tiny breadcrumbs of this sinister plot and I just want some answers!