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The latest episode of Ms. Marvel is called ‘Time and Again’ and it completes the classic predestination Terminator (the first one) time travel loop style that was set up in the last episode. The episode gives us a glimpse of the story of Kamala’s great-grandmother (and Djinn) Aisha and how that left us to where we ended up. We start with a pretty effective sort of old newsreel program explaining the horrible situation during the Partition in 1942, cutting straight into a fleeing Aisha who then kills a chasing British soldier.
There’s not much time for a long burn here, so we see how Aisha meets her soon-to-be husband Hasan and their initial romantic rapport, with their daughter Sana arriving shortly after. Hasan is the one that drops the great line ‘What you seek is seeking you’ from a poem by the 13th century Persian poet Rumi. This line is then repeated a few times through the episode and eventually comes true quite literally, as she summons Kamala from the future who has been trying to figure out her origin too.
This set of scenes was quite nice, especially set against the real historical events of terror and bigotry. Our old friend Najma shows up to threateningly get Aisha to use the bangle for them to get home, and then ends up stabbing her in the train station. I wasn’t sure if she’d be still alive later (or honestly still might come back anyway) but the final moments between her and Kamala were also well done, if way too short.
The entire episode suffers from a compressed feeling — it barely seems to have a chance to fully breathe except in a few key moments. This is part of the classic Disney+ issue, which is that they all are forced to be in six episodes of usually only 30 to 40 minutes of content. For some stories, maybe only three-and-a-half hours is enough, but for a TV show like this it feels like we could really be exploring even more.
After Kamala touchingly saves Sana (which we knew would happen by that point of course, but it was still a sweet moment), she returns back to the future where the Veil has now opened. There one of the random Djinn baddies with no personality and with a name I’ve forgotten touches it and instantly turns into a spooky skeleton. After a hurried plea to Najma not to forget her son, the Djinn somehow sacrifices herself (maybe?) to send Veil powers to Kamran (I guess?). It’s all very fragmented and seems shortcutted.
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I don’t know if the Djinn will be an issue in the final episode, or if that is only something because Kamran might still expect his mom to show up, but ultimately the ‘Djinn’ have not really been the most compelling of villains. One of the problems with this classic ‘mystery box’ approach is that the Djinn’s motivation is so vague and boring that it’s hard to really relate or understand them. They want to go home but will destroy our universe by doing so — or just Earth? Again it’s not really clear.
The strength of the show has never been the comic book nonsense and action beats, which aren’t really the most interesting, but the character arc of Kamala and the well-considered character beats with her and her family. Here that’s mostly true too, with a touching moment of three generations of women in the family embracing at the end of the episode — but it’s also super accelerated, with barely any real emotional discussions about it. Feels too short, especially considering how much we’ve gotten from there before.
The actual final moment of Kamran and Bruno talking was alright, but then Damage Control tries to blow them up? It’s an insane acceleration of stakes, but does that mean that the iffy level of competence from them means they’ll be a compelling final villain or not? It’s fine not to really know where things are going in the final episode but I’ve been a little disappointed by the pacing (which is unfortunately a common complaint for these Disney+ shows).
At this point only Loki really stuck the landing completely for me of those shows, but I’m willing to give Ms. Marvel a shot to recover from this somewhat shaky episode. I do like the cute moments of Kamala slowly building her costume, even if some are a little too cutesy (another victim of too fast pacing). But the acting from our leads remains quite compelling, and Iman Vellani is a great ambassador for the next generation of Marvel fans.
New episodes of Ms. Marvel stream Wednesdays on Disney Plus.
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