S01.E07: The Retreat

[Silver-hyren]

On 9/29/2022 at 7:32 AM, arc said:

Also, I kinda figured he hadn't stolen Jen's blood because wouldn't she have felt the shot and woken up and hulked out? Or at least felt the wound in the morning and realized something was up?

Correct me if I'm misremembering, but doesn't she rub her neck and grimace when she wakes up the next morning? That to me was the clue he had taken her blood.  If her neck was sore, she could have chalked it up to the uncomfortable (looking) sleeping position.  

I for one appreciated the "Previously on That Guy" segment because I thought at first he was the stage magician with the sling ring.

[Chyromaniac]

I was suspicious of Josh when he left before Jen woke up.  If he was on the up and up, she’d have found him in the kitchen cracking eggs into a skillet.

As for Jen & Wrecker- personally, I feel like if he had any useful info on whatever the background conspiracy is, they would have shown it.  As is, they’ve got 22 minutes to tell this story- I don’t need them to spend time on questions if he doesn’t have answers.

Besides, it didn’t seem like that scene was about all that.  The important point was to get Jen to the place where she can talk to the group about feeling like a second banana to her alter-ego.  As such, I thought it went really well- I was really wondering how they would handle the line from the promo about She-Hulk being everyone’s popular friend from HS.  But I think in this context, it helped to explain a lot of what she’s been going through.  I will say, it was amusing when Seracen made an off-hand remark about Josh wanting her blood, considering the end results.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

And it just seems a little fishy to me that Blonsky's inhibitor monitor went haywire for no discernable reason other than, perhaps: "Come to think of it, I did get a jolt from an electric fence earlier, but it was worth it because my favorite chicken, Princess Silk Feather, was stuck."

I thought we got the real reason when El Aguila pulled out the bio-electricity sword. 

4 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

And in this episode, Wrecker (who was involved in the earlier attack and attempt to get Jen's blood) is the one who seems to suggest Jen delete Josh's number, which effectively makes it harder to find Josh if/when Jen discovers Josh likely stole her blood, and Jen wants to track down who has her blood:

It really wouldn’t make it more difficult. Her call log would still exists. 

[paigow]

5 minutes ago, Dani said:

I thought we got the real reason when El Aguila pulled out the bio-electricity sword. 

It really wouldn’t make it more difficult. Her call log would still exists. 

Stark Industries probably has archived it as well

[Chicago Redshirt]

4 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

I'm still hung up on motives of the peripheral characters involved with Jen in the last 2 episodes, and I am completely unspoiled.

Maybe I watch too many non-scifi crime shows, but I'm expecting to learn that Josh, Blonsky, Wrecker, and even Blonsky's parole officer have all been intimidated or enticed into working for whomever wants Jen's blood.

Josh took 3 dates to get her blood. This could mean he didn't want to do it, but perhaps he needed money or a family member was being threatened.

And it just seems a little fishy to me that Blonsky's inhibitor monitor went haywire for no discernable reason other than, perhaps: "Come to think of it, I did get a jolt from an electric fence earlier, but it was worth it because my favorite chicken, Princess Silk Feather, was stuck."

And in this episode, Wrecker (who was involved in the earlier attack and attempt to get Jen's blood) is the one who seems to suggest Jen delete Josh's number, which effectively makes it harder to find Josh if/when Jen discovers Josh likely stole her blood, and Jen wants to track down who has her blood:

Maybe Blonsky and the guys at the retreat were paid to get Jen there and delete Josh's number since she was obviously not forgetting about it. 
Maybe they even just thought they were being paid to help Josh not get in trouble with his main squeeze (wife, gf, bf, etc.).
Wrecker's original introduction in the earlier episode as a She-Hulk, wannabe-blood-stealer is suspect to me, so maybe Wrecker is the one who offered the Retreat Gang ("not a real gang") a reward to get Jen to delete the number.

I mean, you can't necessarily rule anything out. But it would be a very unnecessarily convoluted conspiracy to have the people at the retreat in league with Josh. with the objective of trying to get a blood draw without Jen's knowledge. Then again, hiring the Wrecking Crew to get a blood sample by force wasn't exactly the smartest move either.

Telling Jen to delete Josh's number wouldn't make it significantly harder to find Josh. It's a symbolic purging. With the resources in the real world, let alone the Marvel Universe, Josh could probably be found relatively easily even if Josh had purged all reference of himself from phones and the Internet.

It remains to be seen why Josh hit it and quit it when he could have continued to play the innocent boyfriend even after scoring She-Hulk blood.

3 hours ago, paigow said:

Who built the inhibitor technology? Would it work on Banner?

My sense is it is plot dependent. Presumably, Blonsky was on the inhibitor at the prison during his parole hearing. if not, what's the point of having it? If so, it certainly didn't stop him from Abom-ing out. 

2 hours ago, Silver-hyren said:

Correct me if I'm misremembering, but doesn't she rub her neck and grimace when she wakes up the next morning? That to me was the clue he had taken her blood.  If her neck was sore, she could have chalked it up to the uncomfortable (looking) sleeping position.  

I for one appreciated the "Previously on That Guy" segment because I thought at first he was the stage magician with the sling ring.

I went back to the scene and no, she doesn't rub her neck and grimace the day after. She seems to be very much in the post-coital glow and smiles. The closed captioning says "sighs in relief."

49 minutes ago, Chyromaniac said:

I was suspicious of Josh when he left before Jen woke up.  If he was on the up and up, she’d have found him in the kitchen cracking eggs into a skillet.

As for Jen & Wrecker- personally, I feel like if he had any useful info on whatever the background conspiracy is, they would have shown it.  As is, they’ve got 22 minutes to tell this story- I don’t need them to spend time on questions if he doesn’t have answers.

Besides, it didn’t seem like that scene was about all that.  The important point was to get Jen to the place where she can talk to the group about feeling like a second banana to her alter-ego.  As such, I thought it went really well- I was really wondering how they would handle the line from the promo about She-Hulk being everyone’s popular friend from HS.  But I think in this context, it helped to explain a lot of what she’s been going through.  I will say, it was amusing when Seracen made an off-hand remark about Josh wanting her blood, considering the end results.

I was holding out for the possibility that Josh was kidnapped by the real blood-drawer for some reason.

Wrecker knows (or should know) who hired him and the others to get her blood.  And even if he doesn't know exactly who hired them because the mastermind preferred anonymity, the fact that someone specifically hired him to get her blood would be useful information to Jen. Right now, Jen is most likely operating under the assumption that Wrecker and his friends were just a random group of male chauvinists.

[Raja]

35 minutes ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

It remains to be seen why Josh hit it and quit it when he could have continued to play the innocent boyfriend even after scoring She-Hulk blood.

snip:

I was holding out for the possibility that Josh was kidnapped by the real blood-drawer for some reason.

Wrecker knows (or should know) who hired him and the others to get her blood.  And even if he doesn't know exactly who hired them because the mastermind preferred anonymity, the fact that someone specifically hired him to get her blood would be useful information to Jen. Right now, Jen is most likely operating under the assumption that Wrecker and his friends were just a random group of male chauvinists.

I was just thinking of that scenario. Josh's other action in copying the phone data suggest he has more to gain and why ghost his source, except the meta reason to get Jen talking to the therapy group

[Stardancer Supreme]

21 hours ago, arc said:

@diebartdie is saying Josh coulda stolen a tampon/pad rather than extract blood from a vein.

Well, discarded uterine lining isn't the cleanest blood sample to acquire, as a woman and especially from a woman. 

What most of us are stuck on is that a blood sample cannot be acquired by conventional means with conventional equipment when Jen is She-Hulk.  We saw the regular needle bend up like crumpled tissue.  So, we then see the needle point be replaced by a heavier looking metal meant to pierce She-Hulk's skin.  I was expecting that needle to be used in some capacity.   Of course, someone smarter realized that maybe it was better to get the blood sample from Jen AS Jen.  Then you can just drug her and have at it.  I just rewatched the 3 dates until she wakes up on Friday. Jen did not rub her neck when she woke up.  There appeared to be a scratch on her right shoulder as she turned her head and noticed that Josh was gone.  I just wonder how he got her blood?

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

My sense is it is plot dependent. Presumably, Blonsky was on the inhibitor at the prison during his parole hearing. if not, what's the point of having it? If so, it certainly didn't stop him from Abom-ing out. 

He wasn’t on the inhibitor until after the parole hearing as a condition of his parole. It was Bruce’s design that he came up with post-Endgame and is mentioned a few times in the pilot. Jen only became a Hulk because the inhibitor allowed Bruce to be injured in the crash. Bruce said that it was made specifically for him but the show completely hand waved that when they needed it for Blonsky. 

[Ailianna]

Although he (or Tony), might have decided to make one for the Abomination too.

[Chicago Redshirt]

2 hours ago, Dani said:

He wasn’t on the inhibitor until after the parole hearing as a condition of his parole. It was Bruce’s design that he came up with post-Endgame and is mentioned a few times in the pilot. Jen only became a Hulk because the inhibitor allowed Bruce to be injured in the crash. Bruce said that it was made specifically for him but the show completely hand waved that when they needed it for Blonsky. 

It seems foolish to me that there would have been an inhibitor available to use with Blonsky while he was incarcerated but that the prison officials would not have availed themselves of it. Like I could conceptualized that normally he was on the inhibitor but was not specifically at the parole board for some reason.

[arc]

A couple of other superhero universes (like Powers and Jupiter's Legacy) have universal power inhibitor devices that make prisons workable, but AFAIK Marvel has never done it, maybe because it'd become a narrative crutch the way Kryptonite was for Superman writers in the Silver Age. So far what we've seen in the MCU, from the Raft to the DODC superhuman prison, is a reliance on fairly low tech. They're not exactly armed with Hulkbuster suits[1].

[1] this gets back to one of my pet issues, which is that superhero stories inherently can't be good SF because they can't allow themselves to realistically project how technological advances would diffuse throughout society. If the MCU was SF instead of superhero, the Raft guard would all have Iron Man type armored suits. But you do that with all the super tech that exists in the stories and the world no longer resembles our world and then it's not a superhero story.

Anyways, with this show, Bruce invented a gamma-specific inhibitor and at the start of the show it was a prototype tuned just for him, like @Dani said. I think the prison mostly got by on Blonsky's own genuine rehabilitation, or possibly the implicit threat that an Avengers-class hero or team could round him up again if he broke out.

[Guest]

19 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

It seems foolish to me that there would have been an inhibitor available to use with Blonsky while he was incarcerated but that the prison officials would not have availed themselves of it.

There wasn’t. The prison officials didn’t know anything about the inhibitor. Jen presented the idea (she only knew about because of her relationship with Bruce) once she realized the parole board would be willing to release Blonsky but not Abomination. 

[tennisgurl]

Josh is truly the MCU's greatest monster! Get him, therapy group! 

This episode was a lot of fun, I love Emil's therapy group of lovable weirdos, and whether he's a super villain or just a garden variety creep, Josh must be destroyed. Poor Jenn, its not surprising that he's a bad guy, but it still sucks. 

I'm glad that Jenn requested a Previously On for the guy from the Wrecking Crew, I totally forgot who he was. 

[Tachi Rocinante]

I love TM, but this ep dragged.  I actually fast-forwarded for the first time.

[AncientNewbie]

I'm still liking it. I like the quirky nature of the show and the guests each week, compared to the heavy-duty stories of the mainline MCU. The support group was exactly the same sort of weirdness I liked, especially when I compare it to the support group Steve Rogers attended post-blip. The MCU is a weird, weird place and have diverged from "our" times so something like Man-Bull just showing up really intrigues me. 

[ItCouldBeWorse]

On 9/30/2022 at 9:03 AM, AimingforYoko said:

She has no reason to think they were for hire. She thinks they jumped her because they resent She-Hulk.

On 9/30/2022 at 9:37 AM, PurpleTentacle said:

She should still have asked: "Why did you jump me? What specifically do you have against me?" And then he probably would have answered that he was hired.

Or he should have just volunteered it, when she was angry at him "It was nothing personal, I just needed the money! Please don't hurt me!"

Nobody bringing it up is very contrived writing.

On 9/30/2022 at 4:14 PM, Chicago Redshirt said:

She doesn't really have any particular reason to believe that someone hired them to jump her. 

She knows that they jumped her, talking shit about how if she was going to flaunt herself as She-Hulk she needed to back up that action. (And she did.)

She knows, thanks to Nikki, that there's a bunch of incels who talk trash about her and muse about her death.

What did she experience that would make her think that there was someone else behind the attack on her?

The fact that they tried to take her blood.  That's more than an attack by resentful people.  Because of that detail, I agree about the contrived writing.  At the very least, you would expect her to ask the Wrecker what, exactly, he intended to do with her blood.  (Self-inject?  Sell it to the highest bidder? She would want to know.)

On 10/1/2022 at 6:08 PM, Chicago Redshirt said:

Wrecker knows (or should know) who hired him and the others to get her blood.  And even if he doesn't know exactly who hired them because the mastermind preferred anonymity, the fact that someone specifically hired him to get her blood would be useful information to Jen. Right now, Jen is most likely operating under the assumption that Wrecker and his friends were just a random group of male chauvinists.

I just don't think that a random group of male chauvinists would show up with a syringe.

[shapeshifter]

32 minutes ago, ItCouldBeWorse said:

The fact that they tried to take her blood.  That's more than an attack by resentful people.  Because of that detail, I agree about the contrived writing.  At the very least, you would expect her to ask the Wrecker what, exactly, he intended to do with her blood.  (Self-inject?  Sell it to the highest bidder? She would want to know.)

I just don't think that a random group of male chauvinists would show up with a syringe.

Now I can’t recall:   
Did Jen see that Wrecker and crew tried to get her blood with a syringe? Or was that only seen by the audience?

[Chicago Redshirt]

15 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

Now I can’t recall:   
Did Jen see that Wrecker and crew tried to get her blood with a syringe? Or was that only seen by the audience?

We the audience know that the crew tried to get her blood with a syringe because we followed what happened after they retreated and they talked about whether the one guy was able to get her blood.

From Jen's perspective,, she sees them coming at her with a whole bunch of construction tools. She fends off their attacks when the guy with what turns out to be a syringe stabs her with it from behind and to her left. It crumples. She sees that she has been attacked with something, then slams him into another guy and the group flees. He still has the syringe.

So Jen had only seconds to see the syringe in a dark alley where there was a fair amount of chaos going on. The syringe doesn't (IMO) obviously look like a syringe. 

I suppose it's possible that Jen was able to discern that the object that the one guy tried to stab her with was a syringe. But it seems way more likely that she just saw him trying to stab her with something construction-oriented like the rest of the group's weapons and it failing. 

Edited October 4, 2022 by Chicago Redshirt

[Danny Franks]

Okay, I ghosted a girl once. Eight years ago, after two dates. I still feel guilty about it now but it's one of those cowardly things that you don't even need to justify at the time because you can just reason, 'oh, well I'll just reply later... tomorrow... maybe the day after.' It's lousy behaviour and I appreciate seeing how much it bothered Jen in this episode.

I really like what this show is doing with the Jen vs She-Hulk theme - that Jen has this alter-ego that allows her to be so much cooler and braver and more impressive than she feels she is. The downside with that is... Jen realises how ordinary she seems to other people.

Tim Roth is fun as a slightly spaced out, new age hippie. I like that there doesn't appear to be an ulterior, sinister motive with him. He actually is in control and reformed (I hope). I don't want him or the other guys at the retreat to be involved in the villain plot. It would just feel predictable and lazy.

I like that superpowered people are becoming unremarkable, and I don't feel like I need any explanation for it. We've seen how Captains America and Marvel got their powers, we've seen how the Hulks got their powers, I can happily accept there are loads of far less impressive origin stories and "unnecessary backstory" for people like Man-Bull and Porcupine and Saracen and El Aguila.

But now Jen also has the power to call in a Previously On... segment? Cool.

Edited October 4, 2022 by Danny Franks

[tkc]

On 10/4/2022 at 3:08 PM, Danny Franks said:

But now Jen also has the power to call in a Previously On... segment? Cool.

She’s like America Chavez, but she’s only able to break into our (the viewer’s) universe — but without needing to punch a star-shaped hole in our screens first!