Ms Marvel Season 1 review: A superb Iman Vellani headlines a flawed but irresistible teen superhero excursion

The first season of Ms Marvel ended the same way as it began — by radiating a rousing, pulsating energy that’s utterly irresistible. Co-directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallair (slated to helm Batgirl, the upcoming DC film), both episodes are tasked with doing the same thing: setting the foundation stone for imaginative 16-year-old Pakistani-American high-schooler Kamala Khan’s transformation to conscientious teenage superhero Ms Marvel.

If the whimsical first episode, designed itself to announce the arrival of a teen superhero in the Marvel cinematic universe, then the animated season finale — simultaneously tender and fiery — peeled its eyes on a different kind of beginning: Kamala Khan wholeheartedly embracing her identity as Ms Marvel. In that, Ms Marvel proves to be the kind of a superhero excursion that sticks — or at least wants — to being a character-driven story; a series that doesn’t always lose sight of what it really means to craft an origin story from scratch.

Created by Bisha K. Ali, Ms Marvel tracks Kamala, an awkward Avengers — especially Captain Marvel — superfan as she discovers she might possess superpowers after putting on a bangle passed down by her great-grandmother. Over the course of the six episodes that make up the first season, the show utilizes the machinery of Kamala’s superhero coming-of-age story to allow room for the harsh truths of her heritage.

For one, Kamala learns that her great-grandmother Aisha (Mehwish Hayat), who was the original owner of the bangle, had ties to Islamic spirits called “djinns” and belonged to an alternate dimension. It’s confirmed by the fact that once she lays her hands on the bangle, she is hunted by Aisha’s old friends, known as The Clandestines. Led by Najma (Nimra Bucha), the mother of Kamala’s potential love-interest, Kamran (Rish Shah), the group wants Kamala to use the bangle to open the gates to their realm, doing which would cause sufficient damage to the real world.

As the first episode indicated, the series deviates from the comics in its translation of Kamala’s powers — and the show is better for it, considering it displays the ambition of a writing room willing to take risks instead of playing safe. In the show, Kamala isn’t exactly a polymorph; instead her superpowers rest on her being able to manifest glowing constructs made out of hard light and energy that she can use to make shields and platforms. Even then, the season finale did offer the one moment that Ms Marvel comic book fans might have been waiting for: Kamala “embiggening” herself — contorting her limbs and stretching them, giving off a mini-Hulk-like appearance — in the middle of a terse showdown. As we witness in the finale, the result is a rich send-off for one of Marvel’s pluckiest superheroes.

Still, what elevates Ms Marvel from a standard Marvel offering is its insistence on being culturally specific — through atmosphere, emotion, and mood but also through narrative commentary. One of the larger themes of the show is how it uses Kamala’s superpowers as a device to set her on a course of self-discovery, which traverses her family’s fraught past. The writers connect her powers not only to Partition-related trauma but also to a language of intergenerational grief and loss that feels distinctive to the sub-continent.

Take “Time and Again” for instance, the show’s standout fifth episode that (physically) throws Kamala back into a flashback, detailing Aisha’s backstory as well as the story of how she met her great-grandfather Hasan (a delightful cameo by Fawad Khan), the handsome freedom-fighter. Besides its extraordinary recreation of the horrors of recently-partitioned India that put Muslim lives in danger, the episode proves to be the connective tissue between past and present; between family and memory; and destiny and duty. Written by poet and screenwriter Fathima Asghar, whose parents were one of the countless victims of Partition-related violence, the episode bustles with the luminous power that comes from turning the political into personal.

That’s not to say that the first season is exactly flawless or that it doesn’t occasionally fall into the standard traps of the MCU universe. The lacklustre third and fourth episodes (directed by Meera Menon and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy respectively) drown itself in the dreaded pothole of superhero exposition that takes away from the intimacy and self-contained universe that the show manages to build in the opening two episodes.

There’s so much to take stock of: a trip to Karachi, the introduction of Red Daggers, a group of vigilantes whose leader Waleed (a miscast Farhan Akhtar with way too much kohl) leaves as soon as he arrives. Not only does his brief cameo feel redundant but it is also rendered joyless, given that his character fails to invoke any emotional resonance with either Kamala or the audience. The choppy, chaotic editing, abrupt fight sequences, questionable casting decisions (an American actor playing a Pakistani character in a show that insists on representation is a sore point) and a dull pace end up giving off the impression that Ms Marvel may not always have a grasp over the direction it wants to take.

There’s also the Marvel villain problem to address. By the fifth episode, Najma, the leader of The Clandestines, introduced in the third episode, is killed off, leaving the show with no real antagonist. Granted that the depth of Kamala’s origin story proves to be enough to round off the first season, the lack of a suitable foil does dampen the show’s electric tonality and energy. Both Waleed and Najma’s quick, empty deaths (I’m not even counting Aisha here) come off as stark evidence that Marvel should really rethink its six-episode format for original series. If there’s one thing Ms Marvel, despite its achievements, really needed, it was some breathing room to flesh out the humanity inside its characters instead of turning them into a footnote.

The rushed approach of the show also meant that the complex makeup of characters like Nakia (Yasmeen Fletcher), Zoe (Laurel Marsden), and even Bruno (Matt Lintz) — Kamala’s friends and classmates — remained undeveloped. In that, they ended up appearing on screen and disappearing from it as per narrative convenience, which was a shame given how likeable all of these characters turned out to be. (In fact, my one main grouse with the show will remain that Nakia, Kamala, and Bruno are depicted in almost the same fashion as the lead characters in Never Have I Ever, which made me question whether South Asian representation has itself become a cliche in itself?)

If the shortcomings feel all the more glaring, it’s only because over the course of its first season Ms Marvel has effortlessly displayed how it is truly capable of distinguishing itself with its attention to detail in the smallest of moments. The soundtrack, replete with bangers from the sub-continent (yes to more Ritviz and Ali Sethi), provides a thorough glossary of the sonic diversity of South Asia for anyone not acquainted with it. The technical ingenuity and the visually striking storytelling reimagined what it means to be cool while being unabashedly brown. The way the quirks of Kamala’s parents (Mohan Kapur and Zenobia Shroff in top form) are lovingly rendered eschews turning the excesses of brown parenting into a punchline.

My favourite moments however are the show’s throwaway lines and implications that articulate a lifetime of oppression and alienation without saying anything at all: the mosque being a site of refuge even as authorities treat it with suspicion (Nakia describes the cops entering the mosque as “invasion”); the levels of hierarchy present even in a place of worship; the dangers of America’s pervasive gun culture with a high school almost being the centre of a shootout.

Even though Ms Marvel ends with two rewarding MCU references and a tender father-daughter scene that will be talked about for days to come, I’d prod you to watch a scene from “Crushed,” Ms Marvel’s second episode closely. In it, Kamala and her new crush Kamran bond on their favorite Shah Rukh Khan movies, settling on Baazigar as the actor’s best work. Kamala’s best friend Bruno, harbouring his own crush on her, watches them bond in silence before jumping in to claim that he’s watched Baazigar as well. It’s probably the first time I’ve seen brown characters being depicted as insiders and a white character feel like an abject outsider. That’s not something that happens everyday on TV.

Ms Marvel is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on Twitter.

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