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Kamala heads to Karachi to find some super answers (plus a team-up!) in 'Ms. Marvel' Episode 4
“What you seek is seeking you.”
Episode by episode, Kamala Khan is having pieces of her family history revealed to her. In the process, we’re getting more of a sense of what this incarnation of Ms. Marvel will be in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Episode 4 of Ms. Marvel, the MCU’s latest streaming series, fulfilled the promise that this would continue.
Kamala’s grandmother Sana (Samina Ahmed) insisted that both Kamala (Iman Vellani) and Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff) come to see her in Karachi. It’s Jersey girl Kamala’s first trip to Pakistan, and she gets more than she was expecting in more ways than one. Some of her journey is good, and some of it isn't. Some of it involves her taking a lot of guff about her "napping pillow."
***WARNING: From this point forward, there will be spoilers for Episode 4 of Ms. Marvel. If you have not watched yet, then platform jump out of here.***
It is clear right away that Muneeba clashes with Sana in the same way that she clashes with Kamala. The roles are reversed. Sana tells Kamala that Muneeba herself was once “quite a bit of a rebel.” Sana opens up to Kamala in ways she doesn’t open up to her own daughter, and tells her how she managed to survive Partition. She is still figuring out the puzzle of her own life, but she’s managed to “find beauty in the pieces.”
As for the bangle and Kamala’s powers, Sana says “it’s just genetics” and probably nothing to be worried about. All she knew is that Kamala had to physically be with her to figure it out, especially after the visions of the train in the last episode. She confirms that the train they both have been seeing is the same train used by their family during Partition. Aisha used the bangle to follow a trail of stars back to her father.
Kamala is still having trouble putting her own puzzle together. As she says, “I’m just breaking more than I can fix.” She tries to find answers at the train station, but ends up tussling with a mysterious attacker instead. Kareem (Aramis Knight) stops the fight once he realizes that Kamala isn’t with the Clandestines. He then shows her to the hideout of “The Red Daggers” and introduces him to Waleed (Special Guest Star Farhan Akhtar). According to him, the mission of the Red Daggers is “to protect our people from threats of the unseen.”
Waleed shows Kamala a 3D map of how Aisha’s dimension is connected to ours, but hidden behind a veil of Noor. “If the Clandestines use the bangle to tear down the veil, they’ll unleash their world onto ours,” he says. He adds that Kamala might not be an actual mythological Djinn, but something else. “If Thor would have landed in the Himalayas, he too would have been called a Djinn.” They’re really gonna make us wait to hear what Kamala actually is, aren’t they? It’s surely going to be connected to something from Marvel Comics. Or not.
Waleeb notices an inscription on the bangle: “What you seek is seeking you.” Kamala definitely isn’t seeking trouble from the Clandestines, but she gets a fresh bag full of that anyway. Najma (Nimra Bucha) and the rest of her group escape Damage Control and hit the scene in Karachi very quickly, and following a lovely scene where Kamala bonds with Muneeba over toffees, she and the Red Daggers get attacked. A chase through the streets proceeds, with Kamala using her powers to get the upper hand. Waleed gets stabbed in the back by Najma after he chooses to sacrifice himself to save her and Kareem, and soon the two of them have no choice but to fight the Clandestines.
Kamala holds her own, but Najma ends up stabbing the bangle. As a result, Kamala is fully thrown into the train vision. It’s not just an image this time— she finds herself fully there, witnessing the beginning of Partition. She gets a personal look at the size, the chaos, and the pain of the event.
Marvel-ous Connections
-Kareem, aka the Red Dagger, first appeared in Ms. Marvel #12. In the pages of Marvel Comics, he actually lived with Kamala’s grandmother. He protects the people of Karachi, just as he does in this episode.
-The series will surely return to Jersey City at some point, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see Kareem again. In the comics, Red Dagger lived at the Khan house for a time while he was an exchange student.
-Unlike in the comics, the MCU makes the “Red Daggers” a group. Waleed is one of them, and he is played by Bollywood legend Farhan Akhtar.
-Najma leaves Kamran (Rish Shah) behind when they escape from Damage Control. He’s made his choices and he’ll have to live with them. That’s cold, Najma.
-Kamala wears her new mask plenty of times in this episode, and receives a vest from Waleeb. He tells her that it isn’t armor, “but there is history in every thread.”
-Kareem gets to say something to Kamala that he’s always wanted to say to someone: “Come with me if you want to live.” It probably goes without saying, but this is a famous line from the Terminator movies.
-An update on Kamala’s driving: she’s still bad at it. She gets in a truck during the chase, and the first thing she does is accidentally reverse once again.
-Our favorite scene in the episode was between Muneeba and Sana. Muneeba asks if it is time for Sana to join them in America, and Sana says she thought Muneeba left in the first place to get away from her. That wasn’t the reason she left, but she admits it wasn’t easy being connected to all of Sana’s odd theories.
-Our favorite line of the episode is Sana’s response to this: “I just thought I’d share them with you.” It is laced with heartbreak and longing, and though Muneeba goes on to say that she needed her mother more than she needed that, it really made us feel for Sana. It made us feel for them both.
-On the bottom of a painting at the train station, Kamala sees the words, “You can start small but still be larger than life.” Is this a clue that Kamala will eventually learn to change her size in ways both big and small? We hope so.
Ms. Marvel streams on Disney+ every Wednesday.
Looking for more sci-fi? The entire run of SYFY’s Battlestar Galactica is streaming now on Peacock, along with the second season of Resident Alien, which returns to SYFY this fall with new episodes.
