Kamala learns some clandestine truths…

We have a wedding. Now it’s a wedding in a superhero franchise, so there’s no way anyone’s reaching the end of that particular celebration without interruption but, honestly, it doesn’t matter. This wedding has it all – joy, dancing, singing, amazing food and friends from every walk of life. It has humour and bad jokes as well as all kinds of gossip.

Ms Marvel might be facing multiple sets of antagonists, but she also gets to go to a wedding.

This is really the highlight of the week’s episode although it’s closely followed by two other beats I think are really worth talking about.

The first is how the show is portraying Kamala’s mosque’s imam, Sheikh Abdullah, played with wonderful understatement by Laith Nakli. The writing and performance are both nuanced, allowing him to deliver a man who feels rounded and lived in.

In this episode he offers advice and counsel without asking for commitment or offering judgement. He also gives space to the people around him without the show sacrificing what makes his faith the thing which gives meaning. It’s a light-hearted show but it gets this right and that’s no small thing.

The second thing I wanted to talk about are Kamala’s parents, played by Mohan Kapur and Zenobia Shroff.

They are both fantastic and, again, the material here has allowed them to be more than the disapproving parents, or the alienated religious parents that would have been so easy to rely upon. We have seen them grow into are people who love and fear and carry the baggage of the past.

In episode 1 when Mohan’s character, Yusuf, jumps into Kamala’s room in a Hulk outfit, when he explains their hopes or supports his wife, we see a man full of love and hope in spite of everything through which he’s had to fight. He’s the person you know would argue that you don’t have to suffer the same things he did – he suffered them so you don’t have to.

Her mother, and how Muneeba’s relationship with Kamala is portrayed, hits at so many elements which are true of my own upbringing that at times it’s hard to watch. The tension, the desire for the best for her children and the standards she watches them by – so often driven by a fear they will have to suffer as she did. All of it is tremendously clever and a treasure a show like this didn’t need to bring to the screen.

The most uneven part of the episode is Kamala as Ms Marvel. The antagonists this week do not feel like they earned their place or their fight. Their decisions did not make sense in the context of what was going on.

The decision not to wait a few hours more? To allow the wedding celebrations to end? It felt rushed for the sake of drama. There were other ways to deliver that same impetus that would have been more satisfying and it’s a shame the hero element of the show didn’t live up the writing and performances of the Khans’ ordinary lives.

The clash between these two sides of the show left me a little confused – because there’s a fault line here which it’s not certain can be overcome. Kamala Khan’s life is wonderful to watch because it feels authentic. Ms Marvel’s life is less fun to watch because it doesn’t feel unique or all that interesting.

I don’t know how you marry one with the other successfully because, almost by definition, Marvel is not gritty and isn’t examining the reality of how being powered might change everything. Sure there’s elements of that in the show but when Kamala is Ms Marvel, everything else is relegated to the background and it feels disjointed as a result.

Verdict: Episode 3 hits some tremendous highs but also a couple of odd lows. Without spoiling it I suspect there’s a left turn coming next week which I’m really looking forward to.

Rating? 7 wedding dances out of 10.

Stewart Hotston