Kamala learns more about her powers – and begins to have visions…

Ms Marvel has the feel of the old and beloved syndicated comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson. For those of you who don’t know it (stop reading this and go find it now – it is all the cosy you need), it follows the adventures of Calvin, a somewhat wild 6-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes.

Hobbes is both his cuddly toy and a real talking tiger. It’s never quite clear which is real and this deliberate approach to telling Calvin’s story allowed Watterson to seamlessly combine what was happening in Calvin’s world with those snapbacks to ‘reality’ where Hobbes would be nothing more than a stuffed toy when Calvin’s parents were in the room.

So far so much me talking about something not Ms Marvel. I start with Calvin and Hobbes for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, Ms Marvel captures the same joy and cosy feel as that wonderful comic strip. Secondly, this approach is a cunning way of showing what is happening in our protagonist’s mind by overlaying their perception onto the screen without having to segue into alternate fantasy worlds or create odd diversionary moments. As a mechanism it is super smart, not least because when used right it is also extremely charming.

Ms Marvel is extremely charming.

What’s also wonderful to this creaking hulk of aging male viewer is how it’s completely committed to seeing the world from Kamala’s point of view. Not simply overlaying her experience onto a normalised mainstream point of view but actually inhabiting what Kamala is feeling, experiencing and hoping for.

I did not feel this way about Hawkeye whose secondary protagonist, Kate Bishop, is only a couple of years older than Kamala Khan.

It is no small thing to capture this so well (and the face of my similarly aged daughter during this show does, I think, support my conclusion that this show is truly capturing her experience rather than me wishfully believing it is).

In my review of the first episode I suggested that we’d see more about Kamala’s Muslim culture than we would about her faith.

This episode anticipated my comments and shoved them right in my face. In several extended scenes about Kamala’s ordinary life we see not only her wider community (and the phrase Illumin-aunties will live in my head rent free until I die) but also how that community is inherently religious in its expression.

Too often religion is portrayed as something overlaid on otherwise ‘normal lives’. This exceptionally capitalistic reading of civil society is post-religious and reflects the experience of many people in the industry, but it is also entirely tone deaf to how people of faith actually live (for better or worse).

My experience of faith is one where it suffuses what I do like flour in a cake rather than getting laid over the top like ketchup on a burger. Apologies for the clumsy similes but I think popular media gets this wrong so much of the time.

I think it’s doubly hard for a franchise like the MCU which is cosmic in premise, has ‘gods’ such as Thor and Zeus, and is therefore very much constrained by its own ideas in discussing the potential veracity of the divine within the context of its creative boundaries.

That it gets this so close to being right in Ms Marvel is more than I ever expected.

Equally important is the presentation of family history on the screen. How Partition (the disastrous splintering of British India into India, Pakistan and, two decades later, Bangladesh) arrives on screen is both unexpected but also really welcome. Countless people died, families were utterly ruined and the shadow of the event continues to fall across much of the world today. I know people who fled their homes because of it, I know their families and their children and grandchildren.

When Aamir says ‘every family has a story about partition and none of them end well’ it is both true and almost entirely impossible to really grasp what this means for the literal millions of people involved.

It brought home the huge pressures Kamala’s parents were and still are under. It highlights why they fled, what they were hoping for in arriving in America and contrasts their lives in exile as the ongoing irreconcilable contradiction between what they lost in their exile and the future they hope for their children.

There is a reason exile has long been a punishment considered equal to execution.

This depth of history, of substance, to Kamala’s story brings it to life like almost nothing else Marvel have done. Just like with Moon Knight this ability to move away from a shallower hero’s journey narrative into one focused on people looking to tell their own stories in their own way? For me it is pure gold and at risk of sounding like I’ve lost my mind – this fanciful story about a teenage girl is the MCU’s most literary piece of story-telling.

Ironically the superhero piece of the story is good but it is the least interesting part right now. That balance will change and I hope they build from these strong foundations to tell a story about how these powers are part of Kamala’s heritage and not something separate to it. However, so far, the super-heroing piece is woven into the narrative well with a strong eye onto seeding that perhaps Kamala’s family has always been a little different. By the end of this episode (one full of code switching, cultural representation, learning about powers and unexpected romance) we’re moving into Bollywood stylings as much as we are into MCU superheroes.

Verdict: A strong second episode in the series. I’m fully expecting things to switch up a gear next week.

Rating? 9 pool diving hunks out of 10.

Stewart Hotston