'She-Hulk: Attorney at Law' Director Kat Coiro Dissects the Finale Ending, Including the AI, Skaar, and the End Credits Scene

Warning: This story contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, titled "Whose Show Is This?" Read at your own risk!

If you thought the first season of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law was going to end in a Marvel-typical superhero battle, you aren't alone. That's what the comic book studio has conditioned you to expect, but is it what you really want? That is the question the She-Hulk finale actually poses — and then quickly answers with, "No, it's not."

Titled "Whose Show Is This?" and directed by Kat Coiro, the episode begins in the aftermath of Jen Walters (Tatiana Maslany) giving into her Hulk abilities at the gala where she was being honored. With the public now fearful of her, she first does a (very short) time behind bars while a solution is reached, and then she moves home with her parents because the solution is that she will be permanently barred from transforming. Because of that, she also loses her job, since her job was dependent on being able to appear in her Hulk form in court (which honestly sounds like a lawsuit in and of itself).

She decides to take a few days to reset at Emil's (Tim Roth) retreat, only when she gets there, she stumbles upon a secret meeting of Intelligencia — which her friends Nikki (Ginger Gonzaga) and Pug (Josh Segarra) are infiltrating. They learn Todd (Jon Bass) is HulkKing and his grand scheme was to steal Jen's blood to turn himself into a Hulk — because he feels she did nothing to earn the abilities, but his action, criminal as it may be, did. 

Todd actually does transform into a Hulk, and, like Bruce and Jen before him, his new form tweaks his facial features, in addition to his size.

"There were so many versions of Todd: There was a version that was purely comedic, like a guy who missed leg day, and so, he had these little skinny legs. I was actually very partial to that one," Coiro reveals to Metacritic. "But it ultimately proved to feel too goofy in trying to build this tension of this fake finale. Ultimately, the way he looks placed the story because in the cliché version, Todd gets to win and he gets to be this idealized version of masculinity that he so desperately wants to be. And so, if it leaned too far into the funny or made him look too ridiculous, then you lose what she's fighting against. And she is fighting against all the tropes and all the clichés."

With Todd as a Hulk, the stage is set for one of Marvel's epic showdowns — The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Titania (Jameela Jamil) even make appearances, and Emil is in full Abomination form — but Jen stops things.

In the biggest fourth wall break in the show's history, she climbs out of her own show and looks around at the Marvel on Disney+ menu in order to find a way to get to the people who make her show. Here, the timing of the sequence was key for Coiro, who also serves as executive producer on the series, because she wanted "to make people think that their television had malfunctioned, but not go on so long that they had time to reach for the remote and change the channel."

Once Jen is through the menu and in the quote-unquote real world that makes her show, she confidently strides across the Disney lot and into the writers' room, where she confronts the team for, well, being basic and just giving everyone the same ol' ending. The aspect ratio changes, and so does the shooting style, relying on more handheld so that, "in the writers' room, it's got almost a reality show vibe," Coiro points out.

"One of the things I was adamant about was shooting on the Disney lot because you just get that level of reality, and if you're going to have a self-aware character breakout of a TV show, you want to really feel like you're stepping into reality," she explains.

Once there, Jen is told, "This is the story that Kevin wants," though, which then sets her down a path to meet Kevin, who is not producer Kevin Feige in a cameo role, but rather K.E.V.I.N, an artificial intelligence that relies on an algorithm to create stories.

"The thing that I think shocked me the most is how hands on Kevin — the real Kevin, Kevin Feige — is," Coiro says. "He has he has such a grasp on all the phases and what's coming, and so, a lot of the plots and which characters we incorporate come from him. And I think the only thing that shocked me more than his hands on involvement was his willingness to poke fun at himself and the company and to throw things under the bus. I was much more nervous about that than anything else. I was like, 'Guys, are we going too far? And they were like, 'No, no, it's fine.' And I think it speaks to what makes Marvel so special is not being precious."

Jen gives a closing argument to the AI, talking about how people complain that all these movies end the same way before telling it what she really wants: for Emil to own up to his mistakes and to be able to fight Todd in court. Because She-Hulk is like no other Marvel property, K.E.V.I.N reluctantly agrees.

"We spent a long time figuring out what K.E.V.I.N. would look like and what the room would look like, and that was a collaboration between our production designer Elena Albanese and the entire Marvel visual effects team," Coiro says. "There's a version where you could do that all virtually and record her voice, but we actually wanted to do it practically so we retained the shooting style. The camera moves are all real; she's really interacting in that space; we had a little cardboard K.E.V.I.N that moves just like he does in the show."

However, there was freedom to adjust dialogue in post, and Coiro reveals that Jen asking K.E.V.I.N about the X-Men was one example of a line that was "added way late in the process."

Jen returns to Emil's compound just in time to find him being re-arrested and Todd also being arrested. She arrives as She-Hulk but switches back to Jen, proving you don't always need to be a superhero to win. 

Daredevil (Charlie Cox) also makes a return, albeit after that action is handled but just in time to sit down to a meal with Jen's extended family, including Bruce and his mysterious son Skaar (Wil Deusner). 

"With Skaar, he really is intended to just be a hint to whet people's appetites for what is to come," Coiro says. "It wasn't like there was some elaborate thing that we cut. It was always just, 'He exists!'"

The very last scene with Jen is her walking back into court, once again in her Hulk form since the ban on her transformation was lifted. She still has to deal with ridiculousness, such as a reporter asking her what designer she is wearing, but she is back on track to help people the way she wants to.

Coiro admits that earlier versions of the finale considered ending on Jen, not She-Hulk, but "part of the excitement of the arc of the story, to me, is a woman coming to terms with both sides of herself. There's the regular side of herself and there's the big, large and in charge glamorous side of herself. And so, ultimately it was like, why not embrace whatever she feels like in that moment? We know at the barbecue that she can be a regular human and then we end up going, 'She's also being cool with being this.' And she started off so not cool with it. And so, to me, that really speaks to the evolution of character."

All may have ended how Jen wanted it to, but it may not have ended truly well for the world, as the end credits scene sees Wong (Benedict Wong) breaking Emil out of prison.

Originally, the show was set to end with Bruce spilling the secret of Captain America losing his virginity as well as this piece with Wong and Emil, but the former was moved up to be the end credits scene in the premiere, leaving only the latter as the true end note. But what it means for these characters in the future MCU projects, "only Kevin knows where it's all going," Coiro says, pointing to Feige, of course, not the AI.