When I first saw the third episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, I honestly thought I was in the midst of a fever dream. I checked my temperature and examined my lymph nodes for any swelling. But with all of my vitals in stable condition, I had to wonder exactly what it was that was making me discombobulated.
It didn’t take me much longer to realize that it was because I had been trying to follow another one of She-Hulk’s nearly incomprehensible plotlines. Perhaps the show’s biggest achievement so far is that, when it comes to jumbled narrative arcs, it’s three for three.
In the episode, She-Hulk follows the employees of Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg, and Holliway as they go about whatever misadventures and silliness that lawyers who defend supervillains for a living come across. One such occupational hazard is Runa, an Asgardian shapeshifter who has tricked She-Hulk/Jennifer Walters’ colleague Dennis into believing he was dating Megan Thee Stallion by changing her appearance to look like the Houston Hottie.
Throughout the episode, Runa masquerades as different characters, only to reveal herself as an imposter with impish delight. It’s a gag that deserves only a chuckle at most. Like everything else in She-Hulk, it’s pounded into the viewer's consciousness over and over with increasingly diminishing returns.
Sure, the B-plot was childish and obnoxious, but the part that really aggravated me was the continual repetition of Megan Thee Stallion’s name throughout the episode every time Dennis’ lawsuit against Runa was discussed. It felt like a slap in the face. How dare a television show of this caliber mention one of the greatest talents working today—not just in hip-hop, but across all genres—and not even bother to fork over the money for her appearance fee?
Come to find out, I was the fool.
In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo appearance, Megan turns up among the courtroom spectators watching as Runa is sentenced to 60 days in whatever kind of prison is strong enough to hold supervillains. (I’d guess a TGI Fridays on whatever day kids eat free.) “That’s right,” Megan shouts. “There’s only one Megan Thee Stallion!”
It was nice to see her actually appear, but watching Megan Thee Stallion do her signature tongue-out pose on a show like She-Hulk: Attorney at Law felt, in a word, disheartening. She’s so far above all of this! Why appear in such a random and underutilized fashion that doesn’t even speak to her outlandish humor? To go from a Beyoncé collab to being on a studio backlot somewhere in the outskirts of Burbank acting across from a tennis ball on a stick? That hurt me!
That is, until a brief interstitial in the episode’s end credits. Until now, it was never worth sticking through the whopping five minutes of end credits tacked onto every episode of She-Hulk for one unfunny extra kicker, inconsequential to the show’s overall plot. And then I saw the familiar baby pink of Ms. Thee Stallion’s Chanel suit.
Megan has briefly returned to the office of one She-Hulk Walters Esq. to sign a few documents. Moments later, Jennifer and Megan are putting it down and twerking to Megan’s hit “Body.” It’s…random, to say the least. And it feels like extremely low-hanging fruit written by someone who only has a surface-level idea of who Megan Thee Stallion is and what she does. “Oh, I saw a clip of the ‘Body’ video, what if She-Hulk and Megan twerked together?” And Disney threw a billion dollars at it. Cut, print, straight to streaming.
That said, I had quite a bit of fun watching this, knowing how mad it would make a certain sect of Marvel misogynists. You, I, and God all know that if Deadpool was doing the Dougie with Brad Pitt, the sound of hooting and hollering from fanboys would shatter the sound barrier.
And though it was cloying, I can admit the scene was cute. There’s a brief moment near the end where She-Hulk says, completely out of nowhere, “I will kill for you, Megan Thee Stallion!” I appreciated it because that’s how I fire off an Instagram comment whenever Britney Spears posts a new dancing video or Martha Stewart ’grams about one of her cats being eaten by a fox.
Is a fun little aside enough to make a flailing, haphazardly written and produced show genuinely good? Of course not. That much is obvious from the scene’s abysmal CGI. Watching Megan twerk next to a clump of pixels is beyond uncanny valley—it’s not of this earth. It also doesn’t make sense when you factor in that She-Hulk’s supposed superhuman strength should’ve sent the both of them flying through the floor down to the lobby by the sheer force of her bodacious green donk—but I am willing to give a smidgen of credit where it’s due.
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