Welcome to our coverage of part five of Disney+’s Ms. Marvel:
“Time and Again”
Written by Fatimah Asghar
Directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
The fate of Kamala’s great-grandmother Aisha in 1947 is revealed, while the space-time rupture created when Najma struck her bangle opens a rift to the Noor Dimension. Back in New Jersey, Kamran persuades Bruno to let him hide at his apartment.
1. Whoa, This Was Bold
The moment the Marvel Studios titles turned sepia, I knew we were in for something special, and I wasn’t disappointed: the first portion of this episode (after the newsreel, which was a great counterpart to Kamala’s YouTube video from the first episode) was an extended flashback depicting Aisha’s life from 1942 to 1947, including meeting her husband Hasan (Fawad Khan), the birth of Sana, and the night they departed for Karachi. Although the sequence uses as much English as Urdu, it still feels like you’ve watching a short film from another country depicting a painful piece of its history, instead of a Marvel project — yes, we know the fantastical, in-universe reason Najma turned on Aisha, and fatally stabbed her, but it could just as well have been because she married a Muslim man.
2. Kamala’s Predestiny
I saw Kamala being the one who led her grandmother back to Hasan coming, even before Aisha’s death, but it was still an astonishing way to cement the main character’s agency over her story, after last week left her at the risk of just becoming a protégé for Sana, or another Red Dagger. That isn’t the case: Kamala, and her family, exist because she was there to help a little lost girl back to her father, a simple act of kindness others were unfortunately too panicked and preoccupied to do. Aisha was there too, guiding her great-granddaughter to where she needed to be via their connection through the bangle, but that’s beside the point: as the Muslim and Jewish saying goes, Kamala saved a whole world by saving her young grandmother.
3. What’s Really Going on Here?
Her destiny fulfilled, Kamala returns to present day Karachi, where a tear in the Veil between dimensions has been created. Fariha, Najma’s last fellow surviving Clandestine, tries to enter it, causing it to envelope her in crystalline energy, leaving behind only her skeleton. My feeling is that she didn’t return to the Noor Dimension, because why else would we get such a macabre visual?
Najma is similarly consumed closing the rift, however, her energy goes to Kamran, imbuing him with his comics counterpart’s bioluminescent powers, indicating she did harness its energy to transform him. It should also be noted there is a strong visual similarity with how the Terrigen crystals cocoon Inhumans on awakening their powers, but this is another universe, and we should not be holding out hope the show will introduce Inhumans into Kamala’s MCU story by the backdoor.
4. Muneeba, Are You OK?
Muneeba and Sana show up on the scene thanks to the helpful advice of Kamala’s cousin Owais, and Muneeba is amazed to discover her daughter’s powers, realizing she is the powered girl from the mosque, as well as that her mother’s stories were true. She processes it pretty quickly, her steely exterior vanishing in a blink of an eye, as she looks at Kamala in awe and with pride. Zenobia Shroff really sells the childlike wonder in this scene, because it is a really fast transition, that could’ve done with an additional beat to sell the truth sinking in; that said, my heart swelled when Kamala gave them the photo of Sana with both of her parents, so the scene still landed emotionally for me, despite how hurried it was.
5. An Abrupt Cliffhanger
Kamran finds refuge at Bruno’s apartment, where he finally learns the guy’s name is not Brian — well done Kamran! Unfortunately, this burgeoning new bromance is interrupted when a DODC drone shows up and identifies Kamran through the window: he responds by striking it with his new powers, causing it to fire a missile on the ground floor. This is the shortest episode of the season (it’s about 35 mins without credits), so the final scene could’ve also done with an extra beat, instead of cutting to black the moment Circle Q explodes — if they needed to, it could’ve been a mid-credits scene, which always end suddenly, but Marvel gets enough grief for placing the actual endings of projects in those.
Continued belowBonus Thoughts:
– I shudder to think at what’ll happen when Bruno’s nonna finds out Circle Q was destroyed.
– I’ve been wondering how the show will introduce Ms. Marvel’s lightning bolt symbol since Carol Danvers never wore it in the MCU, and after all this time where it was hinted at from the shape of the lights created by the space-time rifts, it seems it’s going to be inspired by Kamala’s broken necklace: well, I guess sometimes the best ideas are the simplest ones.
– The poem Hasan recites to Aisha is taken from the great Sufi poet Rumi, or more specifically, Coleman Barks, who reinterpreted his work for a Christian audience: now, I don’t blame the show for using the most popular English translation, and to be fair it doesn’t attribute it to him, but it’s a controversy you ought to be aware of (that you can read up on here for instance.)
– Fatimah Asghar and head writer Bisha K. Ali have put together a partition reading list, which you can check out at Google Docs.
See you all next week for the finale, and in the meantime, please enjoy Thor: Love and Thunder!
