Ms. Marvel Ep. 5 resolves a beautiful inter-generational story.
So I didn’t mind that the plot left me with more questions than answers.
The Short Take:
The series continues to build meaningful relationships between characters, making the vague hero vs. villain conflict less of a problem.
[SPOILER WARNING. Recoil your hard light fist and catch up on the series before you continue.]
The Long Take:
I ended last week’s review with some questions about the ClanDestines. Why were they exiled from the Noor Dimension? Why were they willing to do whatever it took to get back? Why exactly did Najma think Aisha had betrayed her? How much did Aisha know about the Veil and the threat to our earthly dimension? And I said I was willing to wait for answers.
This episode — though amazing for other reasons I’ll get to later — didn’t actually answer any of these questions. In the extended opening flashback, we do see Najma confront Aisha and give her an ultimatum for the bangle. But we still don’t learn anything about why Najma is being hostile about it or why Aisha wants to hide the bangle from her. When we last saw them together they were hugging. Have they really not seen each other since then? The comment from Najma about how she has been looking for her implies that they haven’t.
And if they haven’t, then why is Aisha being so cagey and why is Najma being so harsh already? I’m hoping we’ll learn more about this in the finale, but I feel like this was the logical time to fill us in on why Najma is willing to stab Aisha and why Aisha is willing to die to keep the bangle from her. I had my theories last week, but we’re technically no closer to confirming or denying them now. Najma does say to Aisha that she turned her backs on them, implying that settling down with a human family and giving up on their return home is the betrayal. But I just don’t think that’s the full story because Aisha could have just given Najma the bangle and said, “This is my home now.”
This lack of clarity ripples to in the big dimension-breaching moment we get at the end of this episode, when we return from Kamala’s trip to 1947 India and see that the bangle has torn a hole in the Veil between dimensions. When Najma stands in front of the rift and Kamala tries to convince her to close it, the emotional stakes aren’t as high as they could have been had we known more of Najma’s backstory. Kamala using Kamran to try to gain some empathy from Najma relies on us assuming a lot about that parent-child relationship as well. I don’t think these leaps actively harm the show — I’m ultimately thankful the writers chose to spend minutes elsewhere — but that particular moment, especially as we near the end of the series, had the potential to have a lot more emotional impact. Instead, it pales in comparison to the other emotional beats of the episode, which the series has carefully invested in and built towards.
Meanwhile, I have A LOT of new questions about the Veil, the bangle, and just how all of this works. Did Fariha and Najma instantly die when they tried to enter the void? Disintegrating skeletons sure seems like death, but this is the MCU so we should never assume. Perhaps they merely shed their mortal coil to pass into another plane of existence; Moon Knight paved the way for that, certainly. And if Fariha did die, then why did Najma also go in afterwards? Did she think that her death would close the rift? If so, why? How did she pass her powers on to Kamran if earlier in the series she said that she thought the bangle unlocked Kamala’s powers and hoped that someday Kamran might find a similar artifact? Why did the striking of the bangle and/or Kamala traveling through time tear a hole between dimensions in the first place?
Perhaps Bruno has been advancing his studies while we’ve been in Karachi and can answer some of these questions in the finale. The author of the academic paper Bruno references in Episode 3 is Erik Selvig, the astrophysicist we meet in the first Thor film, played by Stellan Skarsgard. The reference to Selvig could be a fun little and innocuous Easter egg, but it might also open the door for some kind of articulation of a unifying theory of dimensions in the MCU.
I want to reiterate that I don’t mind that I have a lot of questions. I don’t mind that this episode did not actually answer many of my “what are the rules of the universe” questions from last week. But it feels irresponsible to not point out these gaps in the world-building.
I don’t mind at all in this episode specifically because we get so much rich family history. I found everything related to Kamala’s family, past and present — from the Aisha flashback to Kamala’s mother seeing her use her powers for the first time — to be moving and so incredibly satisfying.
Immediately, I became enraptured with the tale of Kamala’s great-grandparents falling in love. In contrast to the Najma scenes, I found that even though we didn’t actually see Aisha and Hasan’s relationship develop over time gradually, that the writing of their scenes and the obscenely charismatic acting by Mehwish Hayat and Fawad Khan told me so much with so little. I would watch a whole movie with just the two of them, romancing one another and fighting British imperials. Unless someone Googles them like I did, Western audiences may not realize that they are superstars. Both have won high-profile awards. Hayat has starred in many of Pakistan’s highest grossing films, and Khan seems to be one of those mega-watt celebrities who can do anything. He has been in front of and behind the camera, has a musical career, stars in both Pakistani and Bollywood films, has been involved in many humanitarian/charity projects, and started a clothing line with his wife. He’s made dozens of “sexiest man alive”-type lists and fans on the Internet seem to be fanning themselves in response to his appearance in this episode. (And I don’t blame them.) Seeing Aisha and Hasan’s love blossom like the roses in Hasan’s garden acted as a shot of positive adrenaline for me, and I mostly credit the chemistry between Hyatt and Khan for that.
This is the second time we’ve gotten such an epic romance flashback in the MCU. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, some may recall, opens with an extended flashback of how Shang-Chi’s parents met as enemies and, with each passing fight, fell in love. Twitter is actually all over this parallel already, polling the Internet about which part-supernatural power couple is their favorite. I think that’s a tough call; I’m just happy we’re getting such positive representations of non-Western or, more specifically, Asian couples in the MCU. I think including this kind of romantic folk tale in the MCU in general is wonderful as well. It’s a refreshing change of pace and does a lot to balance out all the violence, grief, trauma, loss, etc. we get in so many other places. Of course, the romance turns to tragedy for both Aisha and Hasan and Xu Wenwu and Ying Li. But both Shang-Chi and Ms. Marvel have been willing to bask in the glow of their love, in that calm before the storm, for longer than some may consider necessary.
In the present day, Kamala’s time loop may crack the Veil, but it repairs the rift in her own family. When Aisha uses the bangle to summon help, which then pulls Kamala from her own time (again, not sure how that works exactly, but I’m rolling with it), Kamala is not only able to solve the mystery of what happened to Sana/her nani at the train station, but she physically retrieves a photograph of Aisha and Hasan so that Sana can finally have photographic evidence of the mother taken from her too soon. Oh, and Kamala also uses her powers to save her nani and ensure that she herself will later be born. But I don’t have the bandwidth to dig into the time travel logic at play there.
I loved how the time travel/sci-fi/fantasy elements, even if they lack definition, serve as devices to heal not two but four generations of women. Muneeba and her mother, Sana, finally reach an understanding because now Muneeba knows that her mother wasn’t actually choosing trivial fantasy over real life. And I was surprised yet heartened by Muneeba’s eyes widening and her instant acceptance of Kamala as magical. The writing in the post-Veil rift scene back at Nani’s house is full, emotionally raw, and cathartic. I always love it when characters finally say how they feel out loud to each other, and here we just get one line after the next of that. The most powerful, considering where this series started, is when Muneeba says to Kamala, “And recently, if I’ve been holding on really tight to you, it’s because I am not ready to let you go.” In Episode 1, Kamala resents Muneeba for not letting her go to AvengerCon, and Muneeba expresses deep disappointment that Kamala has her head in the clouds. So to have the sharing of family history — that young rebel Muneeba ran away to America to chase Bon Jovi at 17 — catalyze more of an openness and understanding between mother and daughter, is simply beautiful.
This is a big moment for her and actress Zenobia Shroff played it in a way that felt earnest to me and made me feel whole. Shroff, shockingly, doesn’t have her own Wikipedia page as Hayat and Khan do. But her profile on IMDB reveals that she’s had a robust career in theatre, in Mumbai and on Broadway, with her big breakout film role as Kumail Nanjiani’s mother in The Big Sick. I think we’re very lucky to have her in the MCU. The way she reacts to the news that all this time she could have been using the Find Your Phone feature to track Kamala made me laugh out loud.
These generations of women growing closer is only a small victory in the larger context of Partition. The series itself sends this message by starting the episode with documentary footage before zeroing in on Kamala’s family. This historical framing prompted me to think about Ms. Marvel as the story of peoples and nations rather than one individual family. The old timey film reel format reminded of the period vibes in Captain America: The First Avenger, which also takes place in the year 1942. I’m amazed when I think about how these two stories now co-exist in the MCU.
I am glad, though, there was no direct reference to Steve Rogers/Captain America because that, to me, would have been counter-productive for the post colonial recovery process in which this series wants to engage. Theorist and critic Edward Said — perhaps the most famous or foundational postcolonial scholar — proposed the theory of Orientalism, which argues that most Western literature describes and defines “Eastern” peoples and cultures in Western terms, or, more specifically, as “The Other” or the opposite of “Western”: foreign, different, exotic, dangerous, mysterious, savage, uncivilized, etc. This kind of patronizing, imperialist imagining gives Western culture subtextual primacy and power in those stories. As the MCU tries to branch out into other cultures and non-Western mythologies, there is the danger that it will always be rooted in an American-centrism because the key figures in earlier phases of the MCU have been heroes like Captain America and Iron Man. I’m not particularly concerned about that currently, but I’m glad that this episode of Ms. Marvel indicates that not every MCU story has to tie back to Avengers Tower in New York.
It’s hard to believe we only have one episode of this series to go! With Kamran and Bruno under attack, the finale will surely pick up where this episode’s cliffhanger left off. Can Kamala save her friends from the Department of Damage Control, figure out what’s going on with the bangle and the Veil, reconcile with Nakia, put the finishing touches on her Ms. Marvel costume, and tell her guidance counselor what she’s doing with her life, all in under an hour?