Review: ‘Ms. Marvel’ Episode 4 – ‘Seeing Red’ Raises the Stakes in Unnecessary Ways
Ms. Marvel is back this week with episode 4, titled Seeing Red. The new episode travels all the way to Pakistan and lets us meet Kamala’s nanny and her slightly annoying Pakistani cousins.
Before I dive into the episode, let me clarify my overall feelings on Ms. Marvel so far. I thought the trailer released in March was delightful, and I started to look forward to the show even more than I initially thought I would. Episode 1 delivered everything I thought it would, and more. While the second episode worked for me, the series started to go off the rails in the third episode when they introduced the ClanDestines and the Djinn (more on that later), and this episode solidified those thoughts for me. I hope they can come back in the next two and deliver a strong ending, because I absolutely love Iman Vellani in the role, and I wish her nothing but the best. Her personality has taken over the entire series for me, and I love every single interview she has — her enthusiasm and youth spirit are hard to dislike, so I’m on board just for her.
Spoiler alert for Ms. Marvel Episode 4 ahead.
Now, on to the episode! I’d like to address some of the positives for me first, and then I’ll discuss what didn’t really work for me (which sadly, was a lot). I loved seeing Kamala play fish out of water in Pakistan. While I’ve never been there, I have heard stories about people who lived in Asian countries for a few months and it was pretty much everything I imagined when hearing those stories. I especially enjoyed seeing locals amuse themselves by watching the American girl taste their spicy food — it played out exactly as I’d been told.
I also thought the scene where the Red Dagger (played by Aramis Knight) was introduced was rather well shot. I appreciated the steady cam and I love what the fight tells us about where Kamala is in her training. A trained person with her abilities should be able to easily defeat a ninja throwing daggers, and Kamala is already able to use her powers in battle, but she still has a lot to learn. The Red Dagger was able to get her multiple times and I’m not sure there was a clear winner. I also love how this shot would make Josh Whedon shake in his sleep:
My biggest negative so far is that with this episode, Ms. Marvel has become yet another save-the-world mission for our title hero. I was very much looking forward to the series because I thought it would be very refreshing to see a teenage girl trying to save the neighborhood while figuring out who she really is. The first episode, which was featured rather heavily in the trailers, was everything I hoped the series would be. But as the series progresses, the stakes are raised even more, and now Kamala is in charge of saving the reality.
I’m almost apprehensive about saying this, because someone could easily counter by saying that after many white men have saved the world in past MCU projects, so maybe it’s time for a Muslim woman to do the same. And I get the representation angle here, I do, but it just feels like overcomplicating a Disney Plus series that could have been just as (or even more) fun if it had stayed in Jersey City. I don’t mind that she’s visiting Pakistan, of course, and as I said, the fish-out-of-water story was one of my favorite parts of the episode. But we just went through having our reality almost collapse in Doctor Strange 2 and Loki. Eternals, Shang-Chi, Moon Knight, and so many other recent MCU projects also featured almost-world-ending events, and I sort of needed a break from that.
And that doesn’t mean I don’t want to see Kamala Khan save the planet, the universe, or the multiverse. In fact, because they’ve already announced she’s gonna be in The Marvels, I thought this series would be the perfect opportunity for them to introduce the character and show us her origin story. Have her help out her neighbors and deal with teenage stuff, and leave the save-the-universe part of the character for her cosmic adventure next July.
When they started to toy around with the idea of the bangle coming from another reality in the previous episode, I rolled my eyes. I was hoping that they would course-correct in the next few episodes by saying that the ClanDestines were just another made-up story, in the vein of what Mysterio did in Far From Home. Their story strongly implied they were from another universe and had somehow traveled to Earth-616. Kevin Feige has said multiple times that it was the end of Loki season 1 that allowed multiversal travel to occur, both in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. But now Ms. Marvel may be overwriting that? For that reason, I thought the story was very strange, especially since the show was made now, and not ten years ago when they hadn’t figured out all of this yet (see Thor: The Dark World).
Well, episode 4 now explains that they are not from another universe, but from another dimension. I have a ton of questions about how those two things co-exist, and why aren’t they the exact same thing. I hope we get some answers soon, and I really hope that they somehow overwrite this and erase any concept of multiple dimensions living inside the multiverse. There has to be a simpler way to tell this overarching story, and if they continue down this rabbit hole, they are gonna lose audiences really fast.
The ending was rather intriguing, and it definitely teased that we are getting some answers in the next couple of episodes. I just hope they are satisfying enough. I have been rather critical of all the season finales of all Marvel Studios shows on Disney Plus so far, and I fear Ms. Marvel won’t be the exception. However, for all of them, episodes 4 and 5 were the best episodes of the season, and so far, this wasn’t the case for episode 4 of Ms. Marvel (I still think episode 1 is the best, by far). So maybe I won’t hold on to their past mistakes and just enjoy the trip
Ms. Marvel will be back next week with episode 5. Look forward to our review! Next week will also see the release of Thor: Love and Thunder, so it will be filled with Marvel Studios goodness. Stay tuned!
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
