She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is making good on the legacy of She-Hulk comics by coming up with as many obscure superheroic legal situations as it can.
And in this week’s episode it created not one but two Marvel Cinematic Universe firsts, one that’s likely to become a big deal in the show’s rising stakes, and one that’s… probably definitely not.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for She-Hulk episode 6.]
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24044731/Screen_Shot_2022_09_22_at_11.31.43_AM.png)
In episode 6, “Just Jen,” Jen attends an awkward Thursday wedding, while her paralegal Nikki and colleague Mallory Book are back at the office to handle the episode’s subplot: a “divorce” case featuring that famous founding Avenger, Mister Immortal.
Mister Immortal has the superpower to return from death almost immediately whenever he is killed. Unfortunately, he’s used that power to fraud his way out of seven marriages so far, by faking his death and disappearing the moment he gets bored with it. Through an online forum called Intelligencia, his seven former spouses discovered his deception and are suing him for damages, and he needs the help of GLK&H. The character choice made comic readers perk up, as She-Hulk’s references tend to do.
Who is Mister Immortal?
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24044197/IMG_682E72056BDF_1.jpeg)
Oh, you’ve never heard of Mister Immortal? Well, he founded the *cough cough* Avengers. Sorry, I’ll say it more clearly. He founded the *mutter mutter* Avengers.
OK, he founded the Great Lakes Avengers. The Avengers of the Midwest.
Created by John “Put She-Hulk on the Map” Byrne in the pages of West Coast Avengers, Mister Immortal’s powers in the comics are essentially as they are in She-Hulk. It’s not that he can’t die, but rather that he dies all the time and always comes back in a minute or two, which is horrifying. His real name is Craig Hollis, and he discovered his inability to die after — you know what? It’s a depressing story, let’s skip it. Together with a few more Midwestern superheroes, he created his own local superhero team, the Great Lakes Avengers.
Here’s a more fun fact about Mister Immortal: He’s on a short list of Marvel characters in the running to be the last being alive at the death of our universe, and someone who could potentially become the Galactus of the next cosmos. Neat!
But Mister Immortal’s case was a chance for She-Hulk: Attorney at Law to hint at what could potentially become the series’ final climax: the Intelligencia.
In She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Intelligencia appears to be a Reddit-style forum, with both public and private subforums. In the subforums, Mallory and Nikki discover one dedicated to She-Hulk hate, full of violent threats and other nastiness.
What is the Intelligencia?
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24044289/IMG_D7D4B44B4387_1.jpeg)
Hulk fans will immediately perk up to mention of the Intelligencia, an alliance of the biggest evil brains in Marvel Comics against the biggest good brawn: the Hulk and all his gamma-irradiated counterparts. And it looks like She-Hulk is, if not setting up the folks behind the website as the big bads, at least using that “Intelligencia” term to echo an existential threat to Jennifer Walters.
As seen in the final moments of She-Hulk’s sixth episode, some tech-equipped organization appears to be connected with Intelligencia, as well as the construction crew guys who tried to jump Jen back in episode 3. They’re secretly observing Jen, and they want her blood for assumedly nefarious purposes.
With only three more episodes to go — and a Daredevil appearance to weave in — we can expect the action in She-Hulk to start to rise, and it looks like Intelligencia is going to be a big part of it.