The She-Hulk finale is now streaming on Disney Plus after the episode’s entire plot leaked online a day early. We had no idea how Marvel would close out this MCU chapter after episode 8, and the plot leak seemed insane. But in a good way.
Now that it’s all out in the open, we can tell you that the She-Hulk finale will get a lot of attention. If you’ve ignored the Disney Plus series so far, the buzz about the finale might make you reconsider. And now we know how and why Marvel went with this crazy idea.
The Kevin Feige rumors
Fans of She-Hulk who had followed the rumors ahead of the show’s premiere probably already knew the Kevin Feige rumors before the finale’s plot leaked. They said that Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) would literally break the fourth wall to complain to the show’s writers about the plot. This would escalate to her meeting with Kevin Feige, Marvel’s president.
The Kevin Feige rumors started making sense when the finale plot leak dropped. The high-ranking exec and the mind responsible for the massive MCU success story would not cameo in the MCU after all. Because the K.E.V.I.N. that Jen goes after is an artificial intelligence machine. A robot. Frankly, that does explain a lot.
How Marvel pulled off the She-Hulk finale
Marvel.com published an interview with She-Hulk head writer Jessica Gao. She revealed the secrets behind the finale and why Jen felt like she had to correct the show.
“She’s so self-aware, and she knows she’s in a show, and she knows that there is somebody writing this and pulling the strings for now,” head writer Jessica Gao said.
“Up until now, she always played along because she felt like, ‘OK, well, this is the story that I was meant to live out.’ There was this unspoken assumption that whoever was doing it had more or less her best interest in mind or at least didn’t have any malicious intent. In this moment [at the end of Episode 8], it was the betrayal of knowing that they didn’t have her best interests in mind.”
As a result, Jen broke through the screen in search of those responsible for the show’s finale. That’s how She-Hulk found the Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus, otherwise known as K.E.V.I.N.
Gao acknowledged speculations about a Feige cameo in She-Hulk, saying that fans probably didn’t imagine K.E.V.I.N. would be the Feige replacement.
The She-Hulk creator also explained why the finale deviates from the MCU norm. A regular end did not feel right for this story.
“I think I probably wrote like, 20 versions of a finale that went all over the place, and I started feeling like, ‘Well, this is a Marvel show, I better give them the classic Marvel ending,'” Gao continues. “Big villain fight, big finale. But it never felt right because I was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”
The real Kevin approved the AI variant
The way episodes 1 through 8 went, a traditional big villain fight finale seemed out of the question. That’s why we worried about the ending in the first place.
Apparently, it was real-life Kevin who told Gao that it would be ok to step out of bounds and do something other than a traditional finale:
Why? No one’s telling you to do that, you don’t have to do that, you can do something completely different, we should be doing something completely different because this show is so different from anything that Marvel has done.’
Gao further revealed that the writers toyed with the idea of having George Clooney or Jon Hamm cameo as Kevin Feige, but ultimately, they went with a robot. And she said the real Kevin had a problem with the robot’s hats.
“I wrote in the script that when she sees this big AI machine, it’s wearing a little black baseball hat, a classic Kevin Feige-style black baseball hat,” Gao told Marvel.com. “When the [visual development team] was showing us different possible sketches of K.E.V.I.N., they were all wearing little hats. No matter what type of robot or machine it was, it was wearing a little black baseball hat on top.”
“[Human] Kevin said, ‘Well, that doesn’t make a lick of sense, why would a robot wear a hat?’ I said, ‘That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to you, Kevin, that is the line of logic that you won’t cross, we have you represented as an AI brain that is controlling all of the Marvel Cinematic Universes, but the thing that you can’t get past is that it might have a hat on top of the machine?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.'”
Eventually, the robot came with a built-in hat, which settled the matter. And just like that, the She-Hulk finale became one of the craziest finales in MCU history to date.
When will we see She-Hulk after the finale?
We’re not even going to try to wrap our minds around what K.E.V.I.N. means for the rest of the MCU. But we know who to blame for all those plot issues in the MCU so far.
Finale plot aside, the entire She-Hulk series is available on Disney Plus right now. And if you take anything away from season 1, it’s that Maslany’s Jen is a character we need to see more of in the MCU. And that Jennifer Gao should return for other Marvel projects as well.
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