Ms. Marvel

Each episode of Ms. Marvel gets increasingly better and I am so happy with the way the show is written, paced and developed. But as we are now halfway through the action and story should kick up. So here we go with Episode 4.

We open on Kamala on a plane with her mom on their way to Pakistan. The way that they projected Kamala’s texts to Nakia on the airplane window was so so cool. We see text a lot in film and TV but that was really creative. They are there to see Kamala’s grandmother and I am interested to see the family dynamics. One of my favorite parts of this show is the relationship between Kamala and her mother so I also like seeing the relationship between Muneeba and Sana.

Kamala’s grandmother tells her the story of the bangle and how it's she needs to figure out what it is trying to tell her. What I love about this scene is it showing that Kamala has multiple strong, caring women in her life that love her.

This episode is doing a great job of showing how mixed up and stressed Kamala is. She is under a lot of pressure and has a ton of responsibility thrown on her AND she’s just a teenage girl dealing with hormones. It’s just a lot and she’s doing her best to navigate. I also want to point out that of all the coming of age stories that Marvel has given us, Kamala’s has the highest stakes. The fate of the world, an entire people and her family's history is at stake, she literally has something to save at every level of intensity.

She is gradually getting more control over her powers and I love that she made a gradual change as opposed to mastering them all at once. She meets a young man in Pakistan that starts his introduction by attacking her. He brings her to like this lair, home of the “red daggers”. The banter between this kid and Kamala is great. The red daggers fill Kamala in on the mythology of the bangle the other dimension. The show did a very good job of making sure that the explanation scene wasn’t too expositional or information heavy, a pitfall a lot of shows fall into.

The department of damage control has Kamran and the Djinn (I spelled it wrong last time I am so sorry) and as they escape Kamran’s mom totally leaves him behind.

Ah! The red dagger dude sent her a text and they showed it in confetti in the sky! The creativity on this show is brilliant. Well I got my scene between Muneeba and Sana and it was a very tedious scene performed so beautifully. These women were subtle and emotive with their acting and it was so engaging, I loved it.

The red daggers are trying to help Kamala discover the extent of her powers. As they are doing so they are attacked by the Djinn and have to run away. This show’s narrative writing is so goddamn good. The leader of the red dagger’s had like 2 minutes of screen time but when he was killed my heart ank, the emotional connection they were able to build and Iman was able to convey in such a short time is phenomenal.

Kamala is either transported back to the partition or she is just having a really intense vision of the escape from India but either way the weight of that scene was incredible. Damn does this show do a good job of leaving you on a cliffhanger. I always want more as these episodes end and I really hate having to wait another week for more. Anyway Ms. Marvel continues to be brilliant and I am totally in love with it.