TV Review: Ms. Marvel (2022)

Ms. Marvel (2022) created for television by Bisha K. Ali

Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) is a Jersey City teenager obsessed with Captain Marvel. Kamala is the second child of Pakistani immigrants who are overprotective and don't understand the appeal of those Avengers folks. Her older brother Aamir (Saagar Shaikh) is about to get married, so the family's attention is divided. Kamala sneaks out to the local inaugural Avengers-Con, dressing as Captain Marvel for the cosplay competition. While searching her home for some extra bling for her outfit, she finds a cryptic bangle sent from a relative back in Pakistan. She brings it to the con and wears it during the cosplay. She starts manifesting superpowers, creating objects from solid light. Chaos breaks out and her constructs cause some damage that threaten the lives of everyone else. She saves some people and flees, though plenty of cell phones catch the action and she is nicknamed "Nightlight," a name she does not like. Kamala and her nerdy school friend Bruno (Matt Lintz) work on using her superpowers while she starts digging into the family past to find out more about the bangle.

The show is a mish-mash of qualities. Kamala is a charming character and her imaginative world view is shown through a lot of creative visuals and background animations, reminiscent of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The second episode has a lot less of that style and by the fourth episode the visual amazingness is relegated to the end credits. She has some standard drama around who is popular and cool in her high school, the stuff you've seen in every other high-school drama. More interesting is her mosque, where she tries to get information out of her "aunties" and others while an evil government agency starts harassing them because they've identified "Nightlight" as "brown or Muslim or foreign." The agency people are almost universally bad, though the show bends over backwards to portray the British as even more evil (at least RRR had one or two good British people in it!). The family dynamic, especially with her over-sheltering mother and father, is the best part of the show, with a lot of interesting and relatable mother-daughter, parent-child, and sibling misunderstandings, conflicts, and love. The writing is a bit choppy, with some plot holes and head-scratchers that could have been easily resolved or left out (what was that about a second bangle?). Some of the scenes and episodes look like they were made by different people who didn't talk to each other. I found myself wishing for a tighter vision for her character and the overall story, or just staying with the family story and minimizing the superhero stuff that they don't seem certain about.

Mildly recommended.