Warning: Spoilers for She-Hulk: Attorney at Law to follow

There was quite a bit to unpack in the finale for She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, the final Disney Plus series from Marvel Studios before we dive into Phase Five next year, but not quite in the way that we tend to expect from an MCU property.

Typically, fans of the franchise will skew a new Marvel movie or show for any nuances that may lead into a wider narrative, and while we did get a taste of that with the reveal of Bruce’s son Skaar, Emil getting broken out of prison by Wong, and, of course, the appearance of Daredevil, She-Hulk‘s distinction as the MCU’s take on a low-stakes sitcom meant that it was by-and-large a self-contained story.

Nevertheless, She-Hulk proved that you don’t need to rely on your shared universe to come up with a creatively juicy end product, and that’s precisely what happened over the course of the finale, drawing on homages to the protagonist’s comic book origins and shenanigans before smartly reframing them for today’s Disney Plus subscribers.

Among them was that curveball of an opening scene, in which Jen’s plight is recounted via a 70s-style television show intro, with palpable inspiration from the 1978 Incredible Hulk television series. With the protagonist’s penchant for meta-humor, it was the perfect opening to a finale that would go on to be a half-hour Hulk-smashing of the fourth wall.

And just as palpable as the inspiration for the scene was the work that went into it, as episode director Kat Coiro divulged to The Direct, noting how Jennifer’s meta-awareness and the history that the character has with the nuance managed to feed into one another as the scene was taking shape.

“We have so many homages to the original source material and in a lot of ways we skew very closely to it, even though our story is more modern. And so that was one way of really paying homage, y’know, this kind of fever dream that she has that is a recreation of the credits, because she knows she’s in a show. And in the process of storyboarding, we came up with little flairs that were unique to Jennifer Walters, like interacting with the trolls and the painted green version of her flipping the table.”

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is now streaming in full on Disney Plus.

ncG1vNJzZmivlZy8tcDHoqqcp6aav6awjZympmekq3y0tMRmn66km2Kxqr7EnKuoql2axbG4wKKlrGWYpMRuwMeeZJ%2Bhnpa5pr%2BMqKOdZaOYtbC7y2agp6yipHq4rdJmqq6qoKe2tLXNoKOyZZOkurG4xLFm