Ms. Marvel journeys through the past
Kamala is largely absent in "Time And Again," a moving episode that also highlights the show's biggest problem
TV Reviews Ms. Marvel
“What you seek is seeking you.”
If there was a mantra to “Time And Again,” the penultimate episode of Ms. Marvel, it was this line, first said by Hasan (Fawad Khan) to Aisha (Mehwish Hayat). This outing is all about seeking and finding, whether that entails Aisha discovering love and a home with Hasan, Najma (Nimra Bucha) tracking down Aisha, a young Sana reuniting with her father at the train station, or Kamala (Iman Vellani), her mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff), and Nani (Samina Ahmed) all finally understanding each other.
But to find, something must first be lost, and the episode began with a 20-minute sequence in pre-Partition India (beginning in 1942) that sets up a discussion about loss on an individual and a national scale. It was brave for the show to dedicate such a large portion of the episode to the past, especially as Kamala wasn’t in much of it. But it also felt true to what the show has been about all along: that to understand who we are and can be, we need to understand where we came from. Looking at it that way, finding out what happened to Aisha feels essential.
We join Aisha as she is being chased by a British soldier, presumably not long after she escaped the tomb and separated from Najma in episode three. After killing the soldier, Aisha finds a village in which Hasan is giving a speech about togetherness in the face of British rule. She’s intrigued and becomes even more so when he later wakes her up in his field of roses (how romantic) and offers her shelter and food.
After initially rejecting his offer, Aisha accepts some grub (paratha, yum) from him, and we know they’ll fall in love when he quotes Rumi to her. “When the soul lies down in that grass / The world is too full to talk about,” he recites, adding “what you seek is seeking you.” Over the next few years, the pair get married (I assume) and welcome Sana to the family; Aisha still has the bangle she found in the tomb, although Sana is now playing with it more often than not. Aisha has learned that home is where love and family is, and she seems to have found her place.
But their idyllic life is not like what surrounds them: Divisions have grown between Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims to the point that no one will buy Hasan’s roses any more, and (most) people are refusing to sell Aisha milk. Hasan’s idealism—his belief that if Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus stick together, the British can be beaten—has been lost in the face of rejection by his neighbors.
Then comes the loss of his home, which is prompted by Najma finding Aisha. The pair meet at night and warmly embrace, but Aisha soon realizes that while she is content, Najma is still set on getting “home.” And so, with Hasan convinced to leave, we’re back at the train station, among the throngs of people all trying to get on a car to the newly-created Pakistan. These scenes, along with earlier aerial shots of hundreds of people on the move as flames engulf houses and fields, show the scale of Partition and the massive loss from it.
Before they get on a train, Hasan wants to know what they are running from, what Aisha is escaping, and so she reveals her powers to him. Leaving home is painful, but Aisha has already learned that home can be anywhere. “We can take our memories with us,” she tells Hasan. “So long as we’re together, we can build a home anywhere, Hasan. What you seek is seeking you.”
Obviously, moments after she says that, she makes Hasan promise to take care of Sana and then leaves the pair, having spotted Najma. Najma has guessed that Aisha no longer believes in the mission and brutally stabs her. To make matters worse, Hasan and Sana have been separated, and Sana stands on the train platform shouting for her Ammi over and over. Aisha can hear her, and she once more repeats, “what you seek is seeking you,” at which point the bangle she’s is holding lights up and she drops it to the floor. And then, Kamala’s feet enter the frame.
Kamala is drawn through the crowds to Aisha, who lies dying. She’s got enough strength to give Kamala instructions to find and save Sana and get her on that last train out of the station. Kamala might be confused, but she takes a picture Aisha is clutching and then finds Sana. Embracing her, Kamala asks Sana to play a game where she follows the lights, and she begins to set a path for Sana through the crowd using her powers. When she’s knocked off balance, the light fractures into a trail of stars that lead Sana back to Hussain.
Having now completed her mission, the bangle transports us back to the present, and we see that the veil between the Clandestines’ dimension and our own has opened up in the factory where Kamala and Kareem (Aramis Knight) were fighting them. An excited Fariha (Adaku Ononogbo) heads towards it, expecting to step through and be home, but instead she turns to stone before crumbling to dust. Whatever reaction has happened causes the veil to expand, and Kamala surrounds it with her light while Kareem gets the humans to safety.
Soon, just Najma and Kamala are left, with Najma heading to veil before she’s stopped by Kamala, who tells Najma that she robbed Aisha of the one thing she wanted—to be with her family—and that she shouldn’t do the same to Kamran (Rish Shah).
And so, we get a demonstration of the show’s biggest problem (and really it’s only one so far, but it is a huge one): its villain story. With one episode still to go, the Clandestines were dismissed entirely, and their grand plan to destroy Earth by opening the veil between their realm and ours amounted to nothing. It took mere moments for Kamala to persuade Najma (a woman so focused on getting home that she murdered her friend, spent decades on a quest to find the bangle, and abandoned her son) that what she actually wanted wasn’t to go home but to look after Kamran.
Any relation the Clandestines—and Kamala, it seems—have to the Djinn is also done, as there wasn’t any mention of them this episode. It’s a pity, because the show could have done something really interesting, pushing back against racist stereotypes of Djinn and showing it had taken the care to do something nuanced and new with the mythology. Instead, the “Djinn” mainly just vanished off our screens, literally, playing into a stereotype we’ve seen before of genies going up in a poof of smoke.
So now, after cycling through the Department of Damage Control and the Clandestines, we are left with…no villain? Or perhaps the villain is poor Kamran. As Najma stepped into the veil, she uttered her son’s name and was then destroyed, before the veil found its way (across oceans) to its new home in Kamran’s body. Not knowing where else to go, Kamran heads to Bruno’s house, where he’s emphatic in his belief that his mother would never abandon him and that she will come and find him. Will Kamran and his inevitable future abandonment issues set him on the dark path to villainy? With one episode to go, it’s difficult to see how the show will explore his newfound powers and take him from a sweet guy to one who’s so evil that he needs to be stopped by Kamala (and the owner of that drone).
In some ways, I feel like it’s reductive to think that this show, which has so wonderfully tackled the history and effects of Partition (and hey, the Brits are the real bad guys there, am I right?) should have a villain. Then again, we’re watching a superhero story, and it would be odd for there not to be a foil for the hero, especially a hero who is finding themselves.
Still, in Karachi, Kamala is happy, having found out a bit more about her family history in the most direct way possible. Muneeba and Nani have found Kamala letting go of her light in the factory—and so it’s revealed that Kamala is the “light girl” that everyone back home in Jersey City was talking about.
The discovery of Kamala’s powers by her mother seems to have repaired something between the three generations of women in the family. Muneeba now understands what Kamala has been hiding, and has realized Nani’s stories were true. And as she explains to Kamala that she was holding onto her so tightly because she wasn’t ready to let go, Nani realizes that she didn’t hold on to Muneeba tightly enough. The resulting hug between the three women is a beautiful moment, only beaten by Nani’s reaction when Kamala gives her the picture she took from Aisha: a photograph of Sana with her parents, the only portrait she has of the family together.
A lot of loose ends were tied up in this episode, which would be nice, if only there wasn’t still one episode left to go. The Kamran storyline feels too big for one episode, and Kamala finally adopting the Ms. Marvel moniker feels too small. So what on Earth is going to happen? I guess we have to hope that the satisfactory conclusion we seek is seeking us too.
Stray observations
- Now that the serious stuff is out of the way, let’s all take a moment, or 10, to fangirl over Fawad Khan. Fans of the Pakistani actor have been impatiently waiting for his appearance since it was announced he would be in the show, and he didn’t disappoint. I’m sure he will have gained a legion of new fans, thanks to his performance as the principled, generous and swoon-worthy Hasan.
- The titles for Ms. Marvel episode four were written in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan. This week, with an episode set half in India, the opening titles were written in Hindi.
- The music on the show continues to be a highlight, with songs this episode including “Tu Mera Chand,” sung by Suraiya and Shyam and from the 1949 film Dillagi. It was also lovely to hear “Aaja Ri Nindiya,” which Aisha sings to a baby Sana, and which is written by the legendary Noor Jehan.
- Kamala’s costume is coming together episode by episode, and this week we got two possible new additions: the red scarf that Kareem gives to Kamala, and the broken Kamala name necklace her mother picks up, which is now in the shape of a lightning bolt.
- I love how Muneeba was extremely worried about Kamala and her powers, until the moment she saw Kareem, at which point the fact that a teenage boy was hanging out with her daughter became the biggest concern.
- It turns out that Kamran really thought Bruno was called Brian. Huh.
- The British cinema and radio broadcasts are a nice touch and serve to show how disconnected the British were. There’s no emotion when the newscaster in the opening talks about a “decades long strategy of divide and rule,” and absolutely no sense of responsibility on the part of the British.
- The distinct visual style of words and images being found in the characters’ surroundings, which we saw so strongly in the first two episodes, has slowly dissipated. In some ways, it’s a reflection of the changing setting of the show, and it definitely wouldn’t have fit in this week’s episode. But it also means that the episodes feel slightly disjointed visually.
- Way back in episode two, I said I might be reading too much into the fact that Aisha means “she who lives.” But after this week, I don’t think I was. Aisha does live, not just in Kamala and her powers, but also in all the women of her family and in their memories of her and stories about her.
- I’m completely ignoring the technicalities of Kamala time traveling, because we all know that the Marvel Cinematic Universe likes to contradict itself. And it isn’t worth the headache to work out how Ms. Marvel’s version of time travel fits with the rest of the MCU, right?
156 Comments
and the episode began with a 20-minute sequence in pre-Partition India
in a penultimate episode that, when you take out the “previously on” and the credits, was barely over a half hour long.Every Marvel show does this, they do a very slow burn through all the episodes right up until the end, and then cram the final episode to bursting. Like, they couldn’t have added five or ten minutes to better explain or show WTF was going on with the veil and and why it killed the Clandestines? Was it because there was only one bangle and not two? Why did it even open in the first place???? Was Najima’s weapon made of the same stuff and there was some kind of reaction with the bangle????ughh
This show puzzles me. Like if somebody explained everything that happened in this episode to me, I would probably think it all sounded excellent, even if a bit confusing, and it was completely fine sit through. However, for me, the show kept fumbling the execution because either it added weird turns and just basically refused to even provide a lip service level explanation for why something was happening.The biggest example of that is the closing of Veil tear. I thought the visual of the scene was great, but Najma being basically talked into sacrificing herself in a couple of sentences and then just being able… To close it by her sacrifice was such a confusing scene as there was absolutely no ground work made to set up that moment. If that was the direction they were going for, again for me they should have focused a lot more on giving the Najra/Kamran relationship depth while also giving us a single reason to assume that she could do that to the tear.
It’s very clearly a children’s show, or at least predominantly made for them. As a result, I think they kept things super simple and focused more on the visuals and the educational parts of the show (teaching kids about their muslim classmates, cultural differences, the partition of India from a Muslim pov). It’s important that they are giving American kids some more info on different cultures, but other than that, the show is aggressively mediocre for adults.
This adult is finding it far from “aggressively mediocre.” Aside from maybe WandaVision, this show by far exceeds any of the other MCU shows in showing realistic human emotion an interaction that comes across as genuine.
That’s totally fair, and it’s obviously not a statement applicable to everyone, but if we’re going anecdotal then everyone I have spoken with about the show agrees it’s clearly for kids, and as such the stakes, conflicts, and dialogue are simplified for the audience. As a brown person (indian, not pakistani), I can tell you that a lot of the interactions they have are NOT genuine lol
Very true.My household of adults are completely drawn in by this show. We have enjoyed the previous Marvel offerings as well but this is amazing.
I agree. First of all Marvel series is not just limited to US. Being an Indian we have just learned one side of the story of partition. But this show hits majority of us deep.The emotions are raw and real.
This has been my favorite, thus far, of ALL the Marvel shows I’ve watched.The best parts are – without a doubt – the family/relationships and the culture/history. Like, those things put this show head and shoulders above anything in its class.BUT.The villain stuff (and to a lesser degree, the superhero stuff) is mind-numbingly BAD. Like, “from an entirely different SHOW” bad.I genuinely do not understand it.
they’re all children’s shows man.
I’d argue the show about the socioeconic harm done by the return of snapped people, and the global turmoil that results from it, isn’t exactly a children’s show. One about the grief of a woman losing her husband and going into a psychological break isn’t exactly one either. They might be accessible enough for a kid to watch with their parents, but they’re not understanding everything going on, maybe just surface level. and that’s not even taking into consideration the Netflix Marvel shows lol Jessica Jones is a PTSD-having alcohol abuser who bangs a lot of people.
these are for kids. we like stuff for kids. it’s okay to like stuff for kids. it’s okay to think about them like adults, but these are FOR kids.i’ll give you a bit of leeway that the netflix mcu stuff was meant for ‘big kids’ but it’s all kid shit, man. that’s the point. that’s why it’s fun!exactly the same as the comic books, which are for kids. yeah they deal with real shit sometimes, but so do all good kids properties.
Ehhh the comic books, I 100000000% agree, but to say that all of what is produced is meant for children is also not true. Agree to disagree.
Ehhh the comic books, I 100000000% agree, but to say that all of what is produced is meant for children is also not true. Agree to disagree.
All the adults in this household find this show anything but “mediocre”
Lol okay? My entire household of adults find it mediocre at best
You must live in a home of the uneducated who voted for the OrangeIdiot
Lmao my whole house is liberal as fuck but okay hahahaha my mom and my roommates mom both phone banked for Katy Porter, but sure since we think a children’s show is childish and mediocre, your neck-beard ass got big mad. You’re probably the reason we’re going to lose the primaries.
I have no beard nor was a “mad” OTOH you’re just a typical AV troll with the opinion of a moron. You really come across as uneducated with your rants.
lol in my experience, when someone tries to bring political leanings up in an argument unrelated to politics, they’ve run out of ideas and are grasping at straws. I’m sure using the word “uneducated” to insult someone made you feel smart, but in reality, you’re projecting your own insecurity about intellectual inadequacy onto others. It’s okay, buttercup, mama will be in with a juice box and cookies once she’s done tossing papa’s salad.
Actually due to your limited experience, “none of the above” is correct … like many of the bourgeoisie AV Club commenters you represent.
Lol I’m sure you’re really proud of that response, which is honestly what’s wrong with America. Dunce caps like you have been told you’re special for too long, and now you think your opinions actually matter, that your views actually matter. They don’t. You don’t. And that’s okay.
Dunce cap? Coming from a moron that produces Adam Sandler clips? That’s really rich.You are the epitome of what’s become of the AV Club comment section. You get a reply and can’t take the talkback and off you go. I’m through with idiots like you just like so many are through with this site.
Awwww it’s okay. Idk who hurt you on AV Club, and I feel kinda bad for piling onto what amounts to a shit sandwich of a human being. +10pts to Duncelpuff for googling the word “epitome” so you can use it correctly in a sentence. “I’m through with idiots like you just like so many are through with this site.”And yet here you are lol being a little edgelord douche nozzle. I guess people with no friends have to find interaction somewhere. I’m glad I kept you away from the WoW servers for a couple minutes so kids could get their quests done.
It’s quite obvious you have no friends nor is anything about your “aggressively mediocre.” life worthwhile than the copious amount of time you waste on the Internet searching for memes.Isn’t it time for your grandma to roll you over and change your Depends?
“no is anything about your life ‘aggressively mediocre’. life worthwhile”I don’t think you actually understand what you just wrote, which actually tracks with what a dipshit you are. I’m pretty sure I had a stroke trying to read it, and I definitely know you googled “epitome” now. It’s okay, big bad internet man make you cry and type so angry you no make sense. (I tried keeping it below 3 syllables since you’re, you know, an absolute dumbo)
The show succeeds for me (an adult) primarily because the performances, particularly Iman Vellani, are so strong. Turns out I’ll handwave a lot if I’m really charmed by the actors!
that’s totally fair, and I never said I didn’t like the show. You can like things that aren’t great lol
Didn’t they say they needed both bangles to open the Veil anyway? And the chase scene just happened to end up at the Veil, despite Kamala not knowing it would be there, Kareem actively trying to avoid going there, and the ClanDestines not in control of which way Kamala & Kareem ran?
I got the impression that the Veil opening happened because of the time traveling, not because it was there already.
I actually went back and rewatched that opening flashback in episode 3 and the discussion on needing two bangles is really explicit there. To the point that they are wondering where they could find that second bangle and how the British probably have it.As for the chase scene, I don’t think they ended up at the Veil as the Veil is everywhere, but rather that Kamala time traveling tore the Veil. Why? I have no idea. Especially since it was all triggered by someone hitting the bangle with a seemingly random weapon. I tried to think that maybe it was that you needed both bangles to pass the Veil and survive, but Najma didn’t even seem that interested in even that one bangle once the tear opened. Instead she just starts walking towards despite having just watch it disintegrate her companion.This show’s refusal to offer any kind of explanation to what happened there is certainly something.
The time travel of it all brought two bangles together (or rather the same one, twice) is what I think they were going for….but they did not make that bit easy to follow.Likewise, the Terrigenesis-like stone effect left me wondering if the people passing through the Veil were dying, or shedding physical form? (Najma did believe she could make it through, after seeing another of the ClanDestines getting dusted…so maybe “getting through” doesn’t look like we assumed it would.)
This episode could have used a bit more tell to go with the showing.
I enjoyed this episode a lot just due the character interactions, but the “what are the overall rules to these powers” geek in me was admittedly baffled. I first assumed Kamala was going to end up getting the second bangle from Sana in the past and return to the present with both of them… somehow (because I’m not clear on how the bangles allow for time travel to begin with,) which would essential create the second bangle out of a time loop.Now it’s clear there was never was a second bangle. Kamala only wears one in the comics. I think Najma assumed there were two due to time travel shenanigans where Kamla brought the same one back into the past, so two existed together at the same time, which opened the rift. Which didn’t amount to much because, as you note, Najma suddenly has the power to close it by… transferring it to Kamran? The show has obviously been centered around both generational familial trauma and the strength of family, but Najma was was way too underdrawn as a character for any kind of intentional sacrifice to feel earned. Because it’s not clear how any of these powers work it just comes across as a jumbled way to give Kamran powers, so he’s closer to his comicbook counterpart. I’m not 100% convinced he’s going to be an antagonist like he is the comics yet though.
Genuine question, have you ever not been puzzled, baffled, disappointed, confused, or let down by any television property you’ve ever discussed on this website?
Wish critics, like this site, spent more time being critics rather then flag waving for social things. A show can try to do a good and be called out for falling flat on its face in the effort. As this episode did. The reality is this show is an absolute mess and the latest episode being the largest example of it. It was basically three short stories crammed together and none of it handled well. Acted well, yes. Conceptionally could have been good. Execution, just a total mess.I wanted to love this show. The comics are great. I have been reading those from the very first issue the week it came out all those years ago. I wanted the show to reflect what made the comics good, something Marvel is normally great at. It covers all the same ground this show is trying to do but of course had years to do it over many issues. The comics did it better, not just do to breathing space but because it knew just letting the characters be themselves in their Muslim, friend and family environment would do the hefty lifting. The message would deliver itself as a result.Here, the show is trying to do in 10 years of story in a few episodes. Its trying to give your the hero’s backstory, cover being a teenager and superhero at same time, family problems, mother problems, Muslim in America, Muslim in India, supervillian, give America a crash course on India history, keeping secrets, white people oppressing Indians and Muslims, generational issues, and more themes than that. Its all the themes, all at once.Its like the creators had a laundry list of things they wanted to show Americans and the western world about Muslims and Indians and just forced it all in because they figure they may not get another chance or a second season (which if reports are correct, this is true). The result is incoherence as nothing has time to breath or be explored in a meaningful way. For what they wanted to cover, they would have been better off making this an anthology, the execution might have been better as a result.I want to recommend this show but cannot. Everyone thinks its for kids but it really isn’t. Its an all age show meant to be watched with the family but at this point I cannot recommend it to anyone. Its a damn shame. Kamala is hell of a character and this show failed her.
Nothing about this show has failed.Bye.
Relying on time travel instead of the psychic link the show was using for the previous four episodes is probably the biggest misstep. It now means the nerds will have to relitigate how time travel works in the MCU and it gives the Quantum Bands (yes, I know Quantum means time travel now) a TON of power that scales wildly beyond the limits of the comic version of Kamala.
i guess it’s the difference between ‘this kids property deals with some serious themes’ vs ‘this is now an adult property because of said themes’
This show is about Kamala, and from her perspective she wouldn’t have prior knowledge of all this stuff and has to figure it out in pieces.
While I have a cooled a little bit on the show after it MCU’d itself so hard in the past two episodes, I was genuinely disappointed to read reports that apparently it is currently the least watched MCU show by a meaningful margin. Especially considering the reports that Moon Knight was already underperforming compared to the other shows before this.For all the flaws I consider to have, I also think it is a really important show and it is different in very central ways, so the worry is there that Disney will revert back into keeping things closer to the movies instead of allowing things to really branch out.
It’s doing well among teens and kids which is something. Also those trackers are with smart tvs only and not all streaming devices.
to some degree I think it’s burnout. I’ve been enjoying the show but I also haven’t been streaming it day 1 like I have things like Kenobi or Mandalorian. Star Wars spaces out their content more while the MCU always seems to be on. That’s great if you’re looking to consume a lot of media but it can lead to viewers just kinda taking things in whenever they want. Admittedly with streaming, day 1 views don’t really mean as much as opening weekend for a movie. Hopefully Marvel sees that because this show has been pretty fun all around.
As lesser-known characters are introduced, it stands to reason that the audience will be smaller, but Moon Knight & Ms. Marvel are being targeted for other reasons too.
The former was shunned by people who demand everything be super-mega-connected to everything else, people who wanted it to be R-rated gore, & people who have a political grudge for one reason or another.
The latter is shunned by sexists, racists, Islamophobes, people who hate children, & people who don’t think newer characters should get any focus.
To be fair, we were promised a lot of gore and seriousness in Moon Knight and we did not get it.
If you expected “a lot of gore” from a show that was definitely gonna be rated TV-14, you were deluding yourself. And it did have seriousness.
What you just said, plus the fact that Moon Knight was just kind of tonally all over the place, and, as a result, kinda boring. (Well, that and the fact that, despite really liking Ethan Hawke, I also understand that he has a limited range, and “super-villain” ain’t in it.)
This, coming from a (general) Marvel fan and an Oscar Isaac super-fan.
99% of viewers aren’t those people. Most marvel movie fans hadnt heard of half of the characters before they debuted on film. They fucked ms marvel up by debuting it at the same time as Obi Wan. It also was initially announced as basically a Disney channel kids show. That was years back, but the reputation stuck.
Nobody said Ms. Marvel looked like “basically a Disney Channel kids show” until the first trailer hit; that wasn’t the initial announcement, & it wasn’t “years back”. Also, that’s a perfect example of the “people who hate children” thing I said, good job.
Thats not what I meant at all. When it was first announced around 2019 (years back) the way it was described as being a departure from the usual formula, skewing young, and featuring animated sequences based on Kamala’s imagination made a lot of people think they were basically making something along the lines of Lizzy Maguire. It was quite a common thing to see in comments. Personally I would be happy if they made something like that for a different demographic, but even as someone who watches stuff like Ducktales that didn’t really appeal. Nothing to do with hating children lol.
I admit to being among those who was put off by the first trailer, thinking Ms. Marvel was just some lame tween show. So glad I’ve taken the time to watch it. It’s up there with Loki and WandaVision in terms of best D+ MCU shows.
Except that the audience wasn’t smaller for Moon Knight (Ms Marvel analytics aren’t out yet). Moon Knight was right in the middle for the Marvel shows. When looking at how in demand the show was after 25 days, the order for Marvel shows has been: WandaVision, Falcon & The Winter Soldier, Moon Knight, Loki, Hawkeye. The shows tend to peak once all episodes are out.The issue Disney+ is having is that Marvel is not pulling in as many new subscribers as they want, but some are pointing out that the number of subscribers already on the service is part of the reason.
Wow, I would have thought Loki would have been higher up. I saw more coverage for it than Moon Knight or Ms Marvel.
I was honestly surprised as well by that one, but it could be higher subscriber numbers as well or the fact that people watched Loki faster.
Pretty sure you meant to reply to Hiemoth instead of to me.
No, you said the audience is smaller. The numbers don’t bear that out. It performed in the middle of the Marvel shows. The audience was as big as Loki.
…Because I was responding directly to Hiemoth bringing up that point.
So no one was supposed to respond to you highlighting that part of your comment was not supported by the actual data?
No one was supposed to erroneously imply that I was the one who brought that mistake into the conversation. You’re supposed to correct the person who introduced the false info, not the person who just reacted to it.
You built your comment around the assumption that the audience is smaller. The audience isn’t smaller. Therefore, your comment perpetuates the same inaccurate information. So that should have been fine because you didn’t mean to be inaccurate?
Unless you *also* replied to Hiemoth, all of this is just you making paper-thin excuses for pressing the wrong reply button.
I did also reply to Hiemoth. In fact, I replied to them first.Usually the purpose of comment threads are conversation. Or did you expect to be just be patted on the head for making a comment?
Kinja must’ve decided I didn’t need to see it at the time, because I looked for it when you first replied to me. Sorry.
I never joined D+ until WandaVision premiered.Then was able to go back to Mandalorian and stayed.
I personally think marvel has just had a real run of stinkers lately, and the fact that the shows usually fall off about half way through has to be a factor in this. I think we might be hitting the marvel tipping point
I don’t think you have to worry about that much. It’s a bit baffling that D+ released a Star Wars series on the same schedule as an MCU series, seeing as SW series bring in far more viewers, but D+ is still going to be the seeding ground for new characters introduced into the movies by storytellers that have the flexibility to broaden the MCU horizons. Even with Ms. Marvels lower premiere numbers it’s the highest they’ve ever had in the 20-24 age demographic and POCs.
Looking at the D+ release schedule through the end of 2023, it’s ging to become the norm for Star Wars and MCU shows to overlap by like 2 or 3 weeks.
I did this wacky thing where I watched BOTH shows, because I had at least 2 hours during the week to do so.
I think the difference to Moon Knight is that Ms Marvel is known to be table-setting. I still suspect Oscar Isaac will be back especially if Midnight Sons is going to happen and they can make it worth his while creatively, but Moon Knight was one of the first things that was introduced as truly contained – A one off with the character and no additional films contracted. Ms Marvel on the other hand is truly an origin story. She’s in The Marvels. We know this is going to be a truly “to be continued…” situation. Moon Knight underperforming is a claim that needs to be looked at with some scrutiny. According to Parrot Analytics, for a it was the most in demand show in the world and it peaked at #1. It was, at the time, 87% more popular than other shows. It was in demand longer than Loki and Hawkeye, but less so then Wandavision or Falcon & Winter Soldier after 25 days. What Moon Knight shared with all of the Marvel shows is that it is not pulling in new subscribers. It arguably helped with retaining people, but it wasn’t a big draw to get people to sign up. I do wonder if Disney should consider a binge model in that the shows are all building slow because people (like me) are waiting for all episodes to post to watch at once.
Interesting points and thanks on the reference to the Parrot Analytics. Also it is curious as Moon Knight does seem to have performed well, yet I do remember reading reports that its viewership was a cause of concern for Disney. Now I get to wonder if my memory is failing again.Something I would push back on, though, is the assumption that the big dent is the amount of people waiting to watch it in full as that requires a pretty huge assumption about there having been a radical change in the audience behavior.
I believe the concern is that none of the Marvel shows post-Falcon and the Winter Soldier have been bringing in no subscribers substantially. The flip side is the subscriber numbers are ahead of where they were expected to be.I’m basing that assumption on the 25 day post finale on demand numbers. I don’t think it’s different from the other Marvel shows necessarily, but I think casual fans are more inclined to wait. Most of the shows including some of the Star Wars shows have peaked in terms of hours watched per week and on demand qualities after the finale has aired. That may be down to word of mouth. If you don’t know Moon Knight, but your buddies are talking about that Oscar Isaac show, the timing could be coincidental.
I think the timing of Ms. Marvel’s release did it no favors because there’s been so much new genre programming from established IP out there (Obi-Wan, The Boys, Strange New Worlds, Stranger Things, Umbrella Academy, For All Mankind, etc.). It’s not surprising that a character without a deep history in the comics isn’t hooking on the way other D+ shows have.
I don’t think Marvel or D+ will go to a Netflix-esque binge model because what they gain from being part of the podcast/YouTube recap industrial complex outweighs what they lose from the segment of the audience who wants to wait and consume the season all at once. They are dialing in on the best formula and it feels like they are going to settle into a 8-10 episode season, two episode premiere and weekly after that.
And that’s fair. I get why they don’t want the binge model and the pluses. I just also find the fact that shows do peak once they’re bingeable as significant.For Ms. Marvel, it’s also summer which isn’t always ideal. Similarly, I think Hawkeye might have been hampered by the holidays.
Marvel has a run of 3-4 years where you saw the movie just because it was Marvel, and in the peak years it worked. Now? I will see it if it’s good, but not just because it’s Marvel. Skipped Eternals, Dr. Strange, now no plans to see the apparently mediocre Thor.Part of that is that I can watch them on Disney plus with a nice home TV, but I admit I haven’t watched Moon Knight or Ms. Marvel. Nothing seems interesting enough to invest more time after the just OK Wandavision and Hawkeye (some great moments, but both stumbled with the endings). They had their moments, but were meh. And I have no bias against moons or knights, no childhood trauma involving Oscar the Grouch, so it’s not an anti-Oscar thing. I just never found a reason to watch, and to involve myself in Marvel now I need to.
I was very worried for a moment that this was the finale and a slapshod one. Glad we still have an episode left.
A little annoyed they have two differing ‘arrival’ moments for Kamala – one falling in front of the train the other on the platform.
The Clandestine/Veil wrapup was disappointingly anti-climactic. Maybe they’ll pull something else with the finale and Kamran but I can’t see having him have a heel turn being satisfying.
Those minor complaints aside I really enjoyed it. The flashback didn’t kill momentum as much as I feared thanks to the strength of the cast and the emotional beats of the episode (other than Clandestine) hit really well.
Some of you indeed may swoon over Fawad Khan. Others of us are googling “Mehwish Hayat” very frantically…
Nani’s “ammi, abbu” cries in present day broke me a bit.And also I want to see these three people on the Villanueva front porch, swinging on the thing. They earned and deserve it.
These shows are too short to establish a new character. They’ve all felt very rushed. There was a reason the Netflix shows were 11 FULL HOURS long. They also had absolutely minimal interaction with the MCU, so that freed up a lot of time to just explore the characters and and their lives.
Wasn’t a main criticism of those shows that they were too long?
There was a bit of “drift” but for the better shows, like Daredevil and Jessica Jones, it didn’t matter. Their overall quality was excellent.
Don’t think that the show is too long; just that they went too big too fast. Should have kept her story smaller for the 1st whole season. DD and JJ had their share of drag too not just the other worse Netflix shows; hours of Karen crying / Nuke storyline.
Actually, I think you’re right. Technically, the problem is pacing – any writer can make a show long or short and work well if they write a well-paced story – but the stakes and world in the Netflix show were, you know, smaller. Meanwhile, FAWS is trying to introduce us to this major international conflict that it doesn’t have time to explain and by the end, even Captain America can’t figure out whether he just fought a terrorist or not. Moon Knight had Stephen go to Egypt and find out a day later that the Egyptian gods are real but no time to process that. Now Ms. Marvel races to the wedding, then the next day they’re off to Pakistan, and isn’t it still the school semester? Is she just missing like lots of class? I could keep giving examples, but the Disney+ shows expect the MCU to do a lot of the legwork for establishing the world, so we don’t have time for characters to react or stuff to sink in. I have so many questions about Loki, it’s ridiculous. In the next-to-last-episode, people were speculating that the big bad was gonna be Kang, and I said to my friend, “It can’t be Kang. They can’t both introduce AND defeat a major villain in the finale. It has to be set up.” And I was wrong. That’s some terrible pacing right there.
Yeah the pacing is off. I would argue that every Netflix Marvel show was 2-3 episodes too long, including JJs1. There ends up being a lot of wheelspinning in all of the shows as a result, and a lot of murkiness in the middle. I don’t think any season, even the best, justified their episode count and length. I did like how DDs2 and Cage s1 kind of split their seasons into “two parts’ based on the stories; albeit I loved the Punisher arc in the first half of DDs2 and the Cottonmouth arc and the back half of both seasons was lesser…But here we have the opposite problem as you point out, these shows are BLOWING through things. Hawkeye was better but it was also “smaller”; suffered from how much they needed to include for the back-half. WandaVision was much more focused. But this show and Moon Knight both clearly needed better pacing for six, or more episodes so they can breathe.What’s frustrating is that the first THREE episodes of Ms. Marvel really DID seem to have space to breathe. There was so much time spent on relationships, cultural aspects, etc. It was about their neighbourhood and community.
I would have kept the enemy DODC and possibly the Red Daggers. No issue with the story going to Pakistan just didn’t need time travel and rifts in dimensions. Ms Marvel’s initial appeal is that she like Spider-Man at the beginning was a friendly neighborhood superhero. It can be more than one neighborhood but maybe not more than 1 dimension to start with. Keep her origins a mystery and hint at and nibble around their margins. Maybe open the window just a little at the very end. Leave Kamala in a state of astonishment at the wider world in the Marvels. Also; don’t introduce yet another mystical group no one gives a crap about; just make it a Kree artifact that activates her genes.
i agree with this. the india stuff feels like it should have been an entirely different season.
They might be making Kamran the final villain after all. Or it may be Najma possessing her son’s body or something.
But either way, though, they’re definitely not done with Damage Control. Who did you think the owner of that drone is?
The way Kamran appeared behind a dumpster to startle Bruno was a classic villain foreshadowing, maybe.
The weird part of this is, is that if I didn’t know better, I’d think we still had like 3 episodes left with where we currently are in the story. The finale is gonna need to be longer to satisfying tie up loose threads (we still need a reconciliation between Kamala and Nadia, Bruno’s decision about CalTech, family fallout about her powers, Kamala’s final outfit and naming moment, Kamran’s whatever is happening, a showdown with DoDC, possible connection that will directly lead her into The Marvels, and I’m probably missing something). I’m assuming that DoDC will be the villain here excepting a very last minute heel turn from Kamran and I’m hoping they don’t go that way, as there just isn’t much time to do that. I’m still very much enjoying the show, and I find the emotional stuff, especially between the generations of women, to be pretty moving. It’s definitely fallen off a bit from its first episodes, but I’d really love a D+ Marvel show to finally knock a finale out of the park for once.
Nakia not Nadia
I think arguably we do if you consider The Marvels to be sort of like 2 more episodes of the show. I assume the DoDC will lead directly into how Kamala meets her hero, Carol Danvers, and/or Monica Rambeau. Equally, I suspect the Marvels will directly set up a season 2 of Ms Marvel in all likelihood so from there, we’ll probably have Kamran being an ongoing issue as well as Bruno leaving/coming back etc. I also wonder if they are considering floating the Inhumans again. We got Blackbolt in MoM. Kamala is buddies with LockJaw.
Probably not since they have gone out of their way to assure everyone that the Illuminati were a chance to do fancast and deep cut stuff without worrying about connecting it to the main dimension, and also they already went to all the trouble of de-inhumanizing Kamala.
‘de-inhumanizing’ is so funny.
I think the 6-episode length has hurt all of the Marvel live-action shows*. It’s long enough that they introduce a fair number more plot threads than you’d get in a movie, but not long enough to give them all room to breathe. I really like Ms. Marvel and it would have been nice to have a couple more episodes to flesh things out.
*Except WandaVision, which was 9 episodes, but they were shorter episodes than the other shows, so about the same overall runtime.
Agreed. This show in particular feels like it rushed through things because of the episode count, and we should have at *least* two more to go. Hawkeye felt okay to me, but Maya/Echo ended up getting short shrift in the end. Yesiknowshehasashowcomingup but for the first half of Hawkeye she felt important, but largely was redundant for the back half. Moon Knight felt like it needed one more.Arguably, the showrunners *know* they only have six episodes so you can tell a story that fits into those six.I have generally enjoyed all the Marvel shows so far but the only one I think I can consider a full homerun is WandaVision. Even then I understand the criticism some people have of the finale. But outside of a few things, it is IMO the show that maintains the tightest focus. Loki is pretty good, and each episode going to such different worlds was powerful. None of them are BAD. But right now it feels like the last two episodes here of Ms. Marvel are a different show from the first three, and that’s jarring.
Spitballing here: I’m starting to think that a six episode series is somewhat incompatible with American TV storytelling. It’s enough that you’re starting to get attached to the characters, to maybe learn some of their nuances, and then bam, it’s over. In a movie, by necessity they have to either paint the characters in broad strokes, or focus on just one or two characters to the exclusion of everything else, because the runtime is so limited. TV shows can breathe more, but six episodes is right around where you’re really starting to explore the gamut of what characters can do.So you’ve gotten past the broad strokes, and just started the nuances, which is a great place to start extended, deep storytelling; but if you have to wrap up your show by then, the ability to convey those nuances gets clobbered by needing to wrap up the storyline.
i honestly wish ALL shows would go back to 15+ episodes. this 6-8 stuff is weak as shit. not only do i want more episodes to flesh out the story as you said, but i also wouldn’t mind some one-off episodes that are just about character interaction and fun.
The complaint about all the 13-episode Netflix shows (yes, even the well regarded ones) was that 13 episodes was too long and that at least 2-3 of the episodes were redundant or not important and could easily have been removed, making the season tighter and better.Disney/Marvel has learned from this, but gone too far in the other direction by making every MCU series (except WandaVision) only 6 episodes long.Despite its other problems, Netflix’s The Defenders learned from the 13-episode season problem and was only 8 episodes, meaning there weren’t episodes that felt unnecessary or wheel-spinning to the overall plot.Disney has to understand that for a series that introduces a new hero, or has a really big story, 6 episodes is too short, but they don’t have to go all the way to 13.
Agreed on the episode count thing. If you are only going to do 6, then keep it tight for those 6 episodes, or make them long enough to cover everything. They have variable length to work with, but they still always come out to around the same total length as a whole season, and it’s doing these series a disservice.
“The finale is gonna need to be longer to”…include the obviously foreshadowed Jon Bon Jovi cameo.
‘B-’ feels like a very generous grade for an episode as underwhelming as this one. Everything felt rushed: the romance, the superhero stuff, the Kamala family stuff… Worst, the episode was quite short, which makes me wonder if something more ambitious was left on the cutting floor.And the logo reveal scene bordered on self-parody. This is a relatively new superhero, not Batman. Not every part of the costume needs an explanation (although I do understand that Carol Danvers never wearing her iconic black costume in the MCU left the writers in a bad position).
yeah… i kind of feel like the “parting out” her costume piece is not working.
It’s a cute thing for a preteen audience, I think, but ever since Superman’s “On my world… this is not just an S” moment it feels like parody to bring in convoluted backstories for the costume choices.
THANKS FOR REMINDING ME OF THAT DOGSHIT =D
1) Does the show even NEED a villain? Can’t it just be about this young girl learning to be a super hero? I say no personally.2) I am fairly certain Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, the director of the episode, defended the comment. As a Jew, I know there are some things people will find offensive that I don’t when it comes to our heritage so I know what it is like. However, this being a news site, I feel like there should be a mention or 2 of not everyone feeling the same way or an explanation of how it is diversive instead of coming straight out and calling it racist.3) I would imagine the summer Disney+ shows would all have lower viewer counts because there is so much more to do outside than sit inside and watch TV.
3 is an interesting point in the age of streaming tv.i don’t disagree fully, but isn’t the whole point that you can watch stuff whenever during the whole day? like if people aren’t watching that’s because they’re choosing not to. each subsequent series has a bigger potential audience because more people are signing up for disney+, too. and while there’s a lot ‘more’ tv these days, i would say stuff released weekly is pretty sparse and doesn’t usually overlap too badly.
I never thought I would be arguing for longer run times on streaming shows, but I hope the success of Stranger Things really utilizing more episodes and longer run times is a good lesson for disney with these shows. If you’re going to try and do so much in a 6 episode season, there have to be some longer episodes, otherwise too much falls through the cracks. This has happened in basically every marvel show so far (except maybe Hawkeye, and to a degree Wandavision)
Allegedly, Disney/Marvel has told the producers/showrunners of most of the series that they can be as long as they want. The Moon Knight showrunner said it was all his choice.
This is honestly mind blowing. I wonder how they almost all decided to be 6 episodes… I’ve said this a lot but most of these shows start to stumble with their internal logic/pacing at episode 3 which seems to me due to narrative constraints. I wonder whats going on at marvel right now.
Probably “They can be as long as you want, but they have to meet our standards of quality and also hit the following budget targets” has a lot to do with that.
I’m sure there are some budgetary constraints like “hey you can only have one big battle not three.” But some of the errors especially the character errors seem to be unforced. I do think right now we are in a tablesetting mode. I suspect that we might look back at some of these shows more fondly once we start moving into new phases. A lot of character beats feel necessary as opposed to rich because 80% of the goal is to take character A to situation 3 so that the next movie is set up. When we actually see The Marvels and Secret Invasion and Ant-Man 3, certain choices might make more sense and we might know why certain things *couldn’t* be done in the episode.
Yep and I think it’s been used to great effect on the Star Wars side of the mouse house. I love that Mandalorian episodes are each chapters in a story and their run times vary from under 40 minutes to over and hour
“Allegedly, Disney/Marvel has told the producers/showrunners of most of the series that they can be as long as they want.”Then they tell them what their budget is lol
I’m not saying that they provide no constraints, but the Moon Knight showrunner, for example, has said that he was offered 10 episodes based on the pitch, and he said he was good with 6. I doubt they were planning to give him the same budget for the lower number of episodes.The process seems to be Pitch/Story Break – Negotiation about number of episodes – Budget decisions. If a showrunner can give them a good reason for episodes, length or budget, they’re going to do it. They aren’t skimping on these.
Marvel really needs to get some good script doctors in to clean up the shows. All of them could have used one or two more passes before production. Ms. Marvel really needed another pass at the script to tighten up not just individual episodes, but the series as a whole.
It is like the creatives behind the show have ADHD and just hop from idea to idea while occasionally hyper-fixating on a scene/sequence before jumping to the next idea.
This was in reference to The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, but I think it’s still relevant: “Six hours is what we landed on as the best way to tell our story,” [Feige] added. “Six hours, whether it’s six episodes, or nine shorter episodes like WandaVision. The shows aren’t inexpensive, so the per-episode cost is very high and to get that bar I was talking about,” added the Marvel boss.
Even the characters seemed bored by that old “thing I’ve been concealing from my parent is revealed—and I’m accepted!” trope. I think mom made a couple faint ooh ahh expressions as Kamala popped up to the balcony?
Also, I’ve generally really liked the PG approach to effects in this show overall (particularly the sketches come to life), but that stone-skeleton-crumble isn’t going to age well.
When did we hear that it was a plan to destroy Earth by opening the veil? I thought it was more of a dire consequence that the Clandestines were willing to barrel through uncaringly.
Yeah, the ClanDestine’s plan wasn’t to destroy Earth – it was to get home. Earth being destroyed by opening the veil to get home was a consequence they were willing to live with.
– When we first saw Aisha last episode, she seemed like a strong, determined person. In the opening, it’s like she’s been held captive for months. She’s wary, skittish, and almost traumatized. It’s like they’re tearing her down to make him seem greater.
– So nobody notices those glowing discs of light?
– Why is it whenever a dimensional barrier drops, it’s our dimension that is destroyed?
– LET NIGHT LIGHT STICK!
– So there are other Red Daggers.
– Okay, I waited through the entire episode to see why Aisha changed her mind about going back. It wasn’t love because at the beginning she wasn’t in love with the guy. She could have left his house after one night. Later on, when Najma arrives, she could have just given her the bangle. What happened?
She probably knows as well as that Red Dagger guy that if she gives Najma the bangle she’s basically destroying this dimension.
But it never says that. At 40 minutes, the shortest episode so far, they could have spent 60 seconds elaborating on why she didn’t want to do it.
The show already said it once, we got a silly computer simulation and everything. I can think of other stuff I’d rather see added than a fairly obvious statement we saw last episode repeated.
No, the show showed why the Red Daggers didn’t want it. They had a almost a century more science and technology to put to it (including papers by Erik Selvig). Aisha never said anything about it. You’re simply guessing that was her motivation. A guess based on absolutely nothing.
At the very beginning she wasn’t in love with the guy, but I think it’s safe to conclude it didn’t take very long. that combined with the fact that she likely was completely worn down, being alone and on the run since we saw her last (as it opens she’s being pursued by a British soldier). It seems probable that she may have lost hope in finding the second bangle—a frankly impossible task without any leads—and quite obvious that her drive to ‘go home’ melted away as she created a new home.
B- is right… BORING minus
I’m completely ignoring the technicalities of Kamala time traveling,
because we all know that the Marvel Cinematic Universe likes to
contradict itself. And it isn’t worth the headache to work out how Ms.
Marvel’s version of time travel fits with the rest of the MCU, right?
Well clearly Kamala used magic as opposed to how Stark and the Avengers used science. Presto, problem solved!
Kamala’s time travel will be exactly the same as the Avengers, as in it was supposed to happen so the TVA doesn’t give a shit.
Nah that’s not the issue. Endgame established that you can’t affect your own past by time travelling to it, it just creates a branched timeline. But Kamala went back in time and saved her great grandmother.But different methods probably have different rules and in this case it was always a stable time loop because her grandmother was always saved by her.
“The distinct visual style of words and images being found in the characters’ surroundings, which we saw so strongly in the first two episodes, has slowly dissipated.”Great observation. I’m thinking back to the amazing eid festival scene with all the cliques, the school stuff, etc. Holy shit we haven’t even touched base with the Mean Girl in ages. A lot of the really creative and unique visual flair from the first half has vanished. I think the show made a mistake in removing Kamala from Jersey. The show and her story was focused on being a teen girl struggling with her parents. Failing her driver’s test. Pushing boundaries. Friends and school issues. Communities of family, friends, and her faith community. The relationships between the mothers and daughters have remained powerful but losing touch with the supporting cast, especially Nakia and Abbu, her brother, etc, has really made this show feel like a different show. I felt Kamala was a passenger in episode 4; I liked Aisha’s story in this one but again, it felt like Kamala wasn’t really part of it. I don’t know. It’s hardly a bad show but it feels like a lot of potential has been unfulfilled. Especially from the promise of the first two episodes.The more I think about it, the more this show needs more episodes. We introduce the Clandestine and at first I loved the show didn’t bother wasting time but how much more powerful would it have been if for multiple episodes, Kamala grows closer to Najma, who seems like a more “caring and accepting” mother-figure, before the turn? We barely knew the clandestine, their powers weren’t interesting enough to be visually 1d, and now they’re all dead. We met the leader of the red daggers and he dies 25 minutes later, and apparently Kamala did some training for days? longer?Isn’t she in school? They just… up and flew to Karachi? Her mom went for it? I dunno. It feels like the show was pacing itself wonderfully, breathing, spending time with the characters, and rooting Kamala in her home environment. It’s one reason she has that Spider-Man touch: she’s a “brown girl from Jersey.” She’s rooted in her hometown and community. Her stories are smaller and more personal. meh
It doesn’t need more episodes, it needed someone to come in and focus the story.They could of easily kept everything in Jersy, just have her grandma come in town for the wedding, having shipped some of her stuff ahead of time because it was cheaper than checking bags. Make the wedding the big event of episode 5/6 giving more time to flesh out the baddies and continue to develop the side characters and school plot. Could have even focused the stakes so that it is whoever uses the bangle to open a portal dies and that person must be part djinn part human, so the kids were to be a sacrifice, but Aisha (who was entrusted with the plot device) couldn’t go along with that and made the others think the bangle was destroyed with her (like blowing herself up or something).
Great analysis. All of these things are choices made. Thinking about your idea, as well — going to Karachi would be something to do in a season 2, after establishing everything in Jersey.
The whole trip and the introduction of the Red Daggers should all have been season 2, maybe season 3.
The show is at its best when it keeps the focus on the family and their interactions. Spending more time with Kamran and his Clandestine “family” would have been a nice contrast. Heck, I would have built up the big battle so at one point the baddies get it and Kamran is forced to wear the bangle as his mom is pressuring him to open the portal while Kamala pleads for him not to do it. Even Bruno is like don’t do it. Then he turns on his mom, blasting her back, throws it to Kamala, misses/it gets knocked mid air, then either Kamala’s mom or gran grab it and go momma bear on a bunch of the baddies before getting knocked back and Kamala retaking the bangle and saving the day (with the help of her dad providing a distraction at just the right time). Then when Damage Control shows up at the end her brother or dad or new sister-in-law says it was that Night Light girl that saved the day and took off. Everyone there totally covers for Kamala and her family and she more or less wins because she has a loving and supportive community.
SERIOUS lack of Abbu the past couple episodes!!!!
I think you then have to move the ClanDestines to season 2 as well. Because, I guess, someone has to explain what their whole deal is and how they relate to Kamala and no one in Jersey is going to have that info. And also the Red Daggers need an adversary.
But I’d be fine with that. Damage Control could totally be standalone season 1 baddies. Write a civics teacher into the HS setting and you’re set. The biggest loss is that waiting to bring in the Partition might seem like tacking on a new piece lore, but with a good plan that could be seeded in throughout season 1, just without literally traveling back to that moment.
So that whole time Sana had the bangle she never used it even though she knew it was special and that her family was “magical?” For someone who was so keen on preserving the memories of pre-partition and her mother it now seems an odd choice to just throw the bangle in a box and send it to Kamala.Im also still confused as to how Muneeba could be convinced her grandmother was a bad person. With all of the death and separation of families happening that night its seems odd for her to believe Aisha abandoned them.
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What the hell was all that talk about Aisha being the great family shame? She kept her head down and was a basic housewife for five years. As far as anyone knows, she was just left behind and probably died.
While this episode wasn’t as bad as the previous one, they take away a lot of Kamala’s agency. She gets railroaded by fate, and basically ends the episode by pressing A until she wins. And the fissure skelly effect looked terrible, like a discount version of the failed Terrigenesis effect from Agents of SHIELD, only their flesh explodes outside of their plastic skeletons. Najma was one of the worst, most unimpactful and boring villains in the entire MCU. What, so now they’re going to make the DODC the main focus now? Them? Really? After barely doing anything with them in all the previous episodes?
It feels like there was a salvageable story here that could have been told better in 13 episodes, but they found out too late they were only given 6, so they took a hammer to the story instead of rewriting it into something smaller and more economical. You can cut the entire Karachi trip, the weird visions, and the time travel where she becomes her own grampa. Nothing that happened there meant a god damn thing.
The show needed someone to come in to fix the scripts and keep the creatives in check. They just jump around from idea to idea like someone with ADHD, occasionally hyperfocusing on a story element before abandoning it for the next shiny thing.
Tightening the scripts and streamlining the story to keep the stakes personal would have gone a long way to improving the plot and pacing.
What the hell was all that talk about Aisha being the great family shame?
Right? And really specifically, as Sana was the product of Aisha playing housewife, it asks a lot to think that either Sana or Hasan would come to hate her for disappearing during Partition.I’m just not sure what the point of the shame framing was if they were going to establish that Hasan never really knew about Aisha’s lineage and Sana was so young when she last saw her. Mureena and Nani would’ve been as unable to talk about Aisha due to lack of knowledge as anything else.
“all that talk about Aisha being the great family shame”After convincing Hasan that they should leave for Pakistan, Aisha disappears. As far as anyone knows, she got rid of him so she could stay and take up with a Hindi man.
A LOT of people went missing during Partition, particularly women – and they didn’t leave voluntarily and nothing great happened to them. “So-and-so went for a bucket of water from the well in the refugee camp and we never saw her again” is a pretty standard story. But different families will deal with that trauma differently.
Even strong shows have bad episodes, and this was the worst one for this series.
We essentially learnt nothing we didn’t already know (or couldn’t have guessed from the last episode’s time-travelling cliff hanger). As a result, it served as a mostly pointless side-quest involving characters we don’t know to show us something we’ve already been told about.
Then, to compound the issue, the whole Clan Destine plotline is wrapped up in an anticlimactic way that makes you wonder why they bothered in the first place.
And then finally, the endless spectre of the main problem of all Disney+ shows (be they Marvel or Star Wars) rears its ugly head as the rigid 6 episode with 30m episodes (+18m credits) kicks in, giving us an episode that ends almost —during— a line of dialogue, at what I wouldn’t even call an act break.
I was shocked just how abruptly this episode stopped (not ended; stopped!). It didn’t even feel like we were half-way through. It felt like we were going to a commercial, and would return after the break.
Terrible.
“the rigid 6 episode with 30m episodes”…except for the seasons that are not 6 episodes…and except for the episodes that are not 30 minutes…so actually not that rigid at all.
It’s a summarising generalisation. Most of the D+ shows of this ilk are 6 episodes. Most of the episodes are around the 30-35 minute mark (plus very long credits).
But you knew that already. You were just being needlessly pedantic for reasons that will remain known only to you…
Over half the episode devoted to a flashback just showing us the details of things we already knew in outline, leaving an extremely rushed “oh hey, there’s a Tear, no wait, oops it’s gone again, haha”.I was extremely underwhelmed.BTW, did the other ClanDestines buy it in previous episodes, or are there still 2 (or however many) left? I can’t remeber because none of the second-stringers made any kind of impression on me.
I’ve enjoyed Ms. Marvel overall, but I agree with the criticisms and concerns of other commenters. We need more than six episodes, and we need the episodes to be longer. I’ve heard (through zero verification of sources) that the MCU shows have a set budget, so I imagine you can only stretch resources so much. (And boy did those stretched resources show in the horrible CGI when two characters withered into skeletons in this episode.)But I’m sure Disney is in a bit of a bind. These shows aren’t cultural touchstones in the way Stranger Things is, so they don’t pull in the demand (i.e. new subscribers) the way Stranger Things does, so Disney can’t justify spending as much per episode as Netflix might.When I think about it, the only MCU shows with serious wide shots seem to have been a bit of Loki and the train station and migration scenes in Ms. Marvel. I’m sure I’m missing some, but the shows always feel like TV because they are shot at close angles without much height (in general). Overall, they just don’t feel cinematic, and Feige promised at the outset that MCU shows would be of the same quality and scope as films, just on a different platform.
You can do a lot with fixed budget if you are smart with your story and you keep the budget in mind. The show had far more characters and locations/sets than it really needed.
Any relation the Clandestines—and Kamala, it seems—have to the Djinn is also done, as there wasn’t any mention of them this episode. It’s a pity, because the show could have done something really interesting, pushing back against racist stereotypes of Djinn and showing it had taken the care to do something nuanced and new with the mythology. Instead, the “Djinn” mainly just vanished off our screens, literally, playing into a stereotype we’ve seen before of genies going up in a poof of smoke.What’s going on with av club and Djinn talk. If the Clandestines and Aisha are Djinn. and the multiracial Clandestines are the bad djinn and Aisha (the indian/pakistani muslim) is the good djinn, how is the net result, “Djinn are portrayed as racist unnuanced stereotypes.”I’ve bounced around the internet and it seems like its only here where people are pushing that narrative. I just don’t get it. America’s only only experience with djinn are of the Will Smith, robin williams, barbara eden , Andrew Divoff variety. Its not really something that gets dinged for racist representation.Can someone explain it to me?
I suspect that “Najma being talked into self sacrifice” is a red herring. She didn’t sacrifice herself, she’s doing something as part of a larger play, and we’ll see more of this next week with Kamran.
Like she’s going to try and possess/control him and use his newfound powers to get home, and it’ll be a big punchy fight between Kamala and Kamran with some subtext of “different ways of growing up with and without your family and friends” or something. That’s usually how Marvel likes to play this stuff. We also still need to resolve the arcs with Bruno and Nakisha, so that’ll probably figure in somehow.
I have a feeling the missing bangle will come into play as well, since they’ve teased that a few times, if for no other reason than to ramp up her power levels for the upcoming film.
Does anyone else feel there’s colorism with the casting? It’s disappointing.
I thought your summary was shorter this week but it turns out, that was actually the entirety of the episode. Did they run out of budget? Lose someone pivotal? The story behind episode has been slowly brewing all season but when we finally got to it, it was rushed and so unsatisfying. The shortest episode of the season! All season we’ve been hearing about the Partition and the calamity it caused but when we finally got to it, it was all of 3 minutes. There was so much potential. Aisha’s death didn’t even move me because we didn’t even get to know her. I was kind of hoping for something like the devastating “Dos Orugitas” song from Encanto. This has very similar trauma yet without any impact. And I wanted a BIGGER reaction from Muneeba when she found out about Kamala’s powers. And when Kamala went upstairs to say goodbye, it was implied that she used her powers but it was off screen? Whyyyy? And Najma. She had the potential to be such a complex, tragic villain. The actress who played her was great but her character was very one-note. It’d have been more impressive if she killed Aisha in a misunderstanding or not knowing the whole story. She could have then been an observer and found out the truth at the same time as Kamala when she went back in time. That would have made her sacrifice at the end wayyyy more moving, and as a way of redeeming herself. There just wasn’t a compelling enough reason for her to be such a crap person. And her sudden 180? “You’re right. Bye! Kamraaaaan” If they made a stronger argument that she was convinced she was wronged or jilted by Aisha in some sort of misunderstanding, then it would have been so much better.Your B- is very warranted. Every episode thus far has been in the low A’s and high B’s but this one was so disappointing. Literally half of it was missing.
That was a terrible episode of TV.
Well, I may be hopelessly naive but I enjoyed it and I assume that all the stuff that hasn’t been explained just hasn’t been explained yet.It’s not like you’d just start filming something without working out the plot first!
This series has been excellent so far, but this episode stumbled a bit and I’m afraid the D+ directive of 6 episodes is gonna be the culprit. They had built things nicely but now it feels like they are cramming everything into the final 2 episodes.
There was no mcu time travel contradiction. This was a predestination paradox. No change in timeline.
Great review! The title cards weren’t just in Urdu though- they were in different languages spoken by people in different regions of India: Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada (I think) which was a pretty freaking big deal to a girl who grew up with zero Telugu representation and was always asked if people in India speak “Indian”
I can’t believe this recap left out the best parts – Kamran trying to bond with Bruno/Brian by saying that Argon is his favorite element, and asking about electric cars when he sees the Nikolai Tesla poster.
The best part of this episode was Kamala’s cousin telling Najma that she can locate Kamala by using the “find my phone” app on their family plan. “How is it that I am just learning about this now?”