Ms. Marvel, Season 1, Episode 5: Time and Again
Okay, questionable disintegration CGI aside, this one is a pretty good episode. Again, I'm not someone that has a particularly high bar in terms of how good CGI looks -- and in fact just roll my eyes at people who constantly bitch about sub-par CGI. (I don't mind Kamala's crystal powers either, unlike half the internet) But I have to admit that the effects of the Clandestines disintegrating into rock and showing pearly-white skeletons within? Now you could chalk that up to different djinn morphology, but nah. In this case, I do have to admit that for the first time in a long, long while, I went 'well, that's just dumb looking'.
Anyway, I got that out of my system, so let me talk about the rest of the episode. Which is pretty spectacular! Ms. Marvel is strongest, I have said in my previous episode reviews, when it focuses on the stories it wants to tell. In this case, it's definitely the story of the Khan family. And honestly, with the benefit of having watched the next episode, I do really think that this episode offers a much more compelling season finale.
The episode does take around a third of its runtime just giving us the story of Kamala's great-grandmother Aisha, the djinn who found love in a human, the crippled Hasan. The show does a pretty great job at showing us how their love blossomed, and how everything got screwed up by all the political events happening in pre-Partition India. I am readily someone who's not well-versed in that part of history -- in fact, it's only after this show that I've began reading up about it. It's all the British's fault, really, but it's also depressing to see everything happen frm the eye-level of the common folk. The cultural context is very well done, I am sure, but what's done beautifully is how much the theme of family shines through it all. Aisha has left behind her original djinn family and found love with Hasan and baby Sana. And so much of both the present-day Kamala and Sana's motivations are all driven by their own family. It's something that's so lovingly done and feels just so authentic.
Now it is arguable just how effective spending nearly 20 minutes on Hasan and Aisha, since it doesn't have Kamala in these scenes, and Aisha's death at the end is already set in stone. Perhaps those could be trimmed down a little, or to include a bit more Najma in order to build up this poor, under-developed antagonist and make what she does in the climax a bit more believable.
But the story about loss and the discussion of finding your own history and all that? That works out amazingly. Yes, the show could have done with a bit more of a superhero comic-book explanation on how Kamala actually traveled in time beyond 'djinn bangle powers' -- and Aisha imparting the bangle to protect baby Sana. Especially since time travel was treated as kind of a big deal in the MCU's primary movies. But presumably Kamala also gets to see the same events being told about Aisha and Hasan that the audience does, and when we cut back to our main heroine, she does seem to feel the same oomph given by the backstory that we did.
And as Kamala gets transported back in time to 1942, amidst the bustling and confused people on that fateful train station, as Aisha gets stabbed by Najma for her supposed treachery, Kamala puts things into full circle by being the trail of stars that little Sana sees which leads her back to Hasan. The bangle and the mantra of 'what you seek is seeking you' ends up bringing Kamala to the past, allowing her to save her grandmother.
And then we cut to the present, with the whole space-time rift between our dimension and the djinn's home dimension (is that why Kamala was able to travel to the past?) and we get to see that the veil... is apparently destructive. Oh, hey, Bruno and Kamala's warning about doing some research before broaching the interdimensional borders turns out to be true after all! Fariha, the only Clandestine member left* other than Najma excitedly reaches out towards the way to her home and gets disintegrated in the aforementioned bad CGI death.
*I am genuinely not sure what happened to the two men, did they die in the action scene last episode? The wikis all list them as deceased...
Kamala uses her crystal forcefield powers to try and contain the veil, while Red Dagger evacuates the civilians. All that's left is Kamala and Najma, and Kamala gives an impassioned speech -- that she has robbed Aisha of her family, and she shouldn't do the same thing to Kamran. Iman Vellani's acting and delivery is good and all, but here's the problem... I just really don't care about Najma as a character. The Khan family, Kamran, Bruno, Nakia? Them, the show does a spectacular job of making me care for them. Najma's just... she's just kind of there. I do feel like the flashback could've devoted a bit more time between Aisha and Najma to build Najma up without compromising on what we got.
But when Najma end up going "yes I have made a mistake", it feels flat for me. She really does remind me of the Flag-Smashers from Falcon and the Winter Soldier in that the prompt to write them and their backstory is pretty good. In Najma's case, she's someone so obsessed with a single goal that she forgets all about her family, the exact opposite of Kamala's situation. Even when Fariha disintegrates before her eyes, even when she has to leave her son behind, even when she stabs Aisha to death, Najma is only consumed with a single goal. To return to her dimension. That is interesting, right? You could write a whole show just about Najma, even. But we barely know the woman, so when she does her anime-villain death-and-redemption moment, I just shrug. She dies helping Kamala close the rift with her undisclosed powers (again, another complaint is that they could've given these djinn some actual powers) and dies, but the glowing power flies halfway across the world and infects Kamran because we still need some plot for the final episode.
Oh, and Kamran, confused with how the powers has found him (a twisted mirror to how the bangle's powers found Kamala), goes to find Bruno, and as the two of them try and figure things out one of Damage Control's Mysterio drones blows up the house. Oh no!
But it's hard to get mad about how the next episode goes when this episode does end up concluding what I felt has been the most well-done conflict, which is Kamala hiding her superhero identity from her family. Muneeba and Sana, with the joys of the amazingly-delivered line of "spyware for parents", arrive in the alley just to see the back-end of Kamala and Najma's confrontation.
It's a sweet, sweet and amazingly acted moment between the three actresses as they bond over the fact that, hey, Kamala Khan is that 'light girl', and that everything nani Sana has been saying, all of her crazy theories... are actually true. Kamala gives her nani that photograph from 1942, and we get to see this old family matriarch just crumble as she basically goes back to when she was a scared little child looking for her parents. It's beautiful. And Muneeba? Muneeba, after so long of trying to be the one sane person in her family to try and hold her mother's crazy theories and her daughter's strange escapades, finally manages to understand everything that's going on and they finally bond.
And, hey, as underbaked as his character was, it was nice that the show does treat Red Dagger's exit with some dignity. I was a bit too hard on him last episode and while he won't be anywhere close to being the most memorable thing from this show, having the guest star get a good exit is pretty nice. Kamala even gets Red Dagger's red face-scarf, which magically becomes much longer than it looks on Kareem's face. I guess that became her sash when her costume becomes complete?
Anyway, despite my misgivings with the handling of Najma's character, this episode and the previous one are easily two of the strongest ones in Ms. Marvel.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- A rather obvious one, but when Muneeba picks up Kamala's mangled necklace, it is twisted into the 'S' lightning bolt symbol associated with Ms. Marvel.
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