Ms. Marvel Is the Best MCU Show on Disney+ Yet

It’s not perfect, but other MCU shows should tear a page out of Ms. Marvel’s playbook

Disney’s entrance into episodic TV in the MCU has not been perfect, to say the least. The formula that Kevin Feige and the Marvel bullpen of writers and directors have used for the last 13 years to make a preponderance of cinematic hits doesn’t appear to apply to the streaming episodic television format. The first wave of Disney+ live action Marvel shows (Wandavision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, and Ms. Marvel) have enjoyed some middling critical success, but reactions from both fans and critics have been much more mixed than with the MCU feature films, generally. Speaking only for myself, I don’t think any of the Disney+ shows has surpassed the quality of, say, Jessica Jones’ first season on Netflix.

This is probably at least partly due to Disney being, well, Disney. The Netflix run of Marvel shows was spotty, quality-wise, too, but I never feared the content was being kept deliberately light on adult themes so that it would appeal to a younger Disney-friendly audience. So far, even the darkest of these new MCU shows (Wandavision, I would argue) could still reside in the young-adult section of the bookstore compared to any of the grittier Netflix offerings. And while “grittiness” is certainly no guarantee of quality (insert Zack Snyder quip here), it does seem like these Disney shows, in an attempt to maintain a “Disney” wholesome brand, aren’t accessing a full range of human emotions and experiences where stories and characters are concerned, and the shows feel hampered by that.

I felt this tension the least in Disney’s most recent MCU offering, Ms. Marvel, and it’s perhaps because of this that I found it to be the most enjoyable entry so far on the small screen. Ms. Marvel is, after all, a young adult story to begin with, featuring a literal young adult protagonist facing lots of problems that teenagers can identify with. So it’s perfectly appropriate that the show traffics in young adult concerns and drama and it doesn’t seem like the creators are holding anything back.

Ms. Marvel’s titular character, Kamala Khan (played with wit and charm by the amazing young Canadian, Iman Vellani), is just a regular American girl, struggling with the coming-of-age part of her life in Jersey City. She’s got some issues fitting in at high school, but she has some great friends to help her out. She’s a big fan of Captain Marvel, into cosplay, and her parents are a little on the helicopter end of the scale, but it’s a loving family full of humor and kindness.

The show is outstanding at subverting dumb tropes. A lesser show would have made the tension between her parents’ desire to control her and her need to become independent a whole subplot, where mom becomes a foil for Kamala’s progress. Nope. We get hints of that but familial love and understanding win out surprisingly fast. A lesser show would have made Kamala’s status as a Muslim American a major plot motivator and hung a lamp on her religious background. Nope. She’s a Muslim and there are scenes that take place in her Mosque and in Pakistan, but the fact that these characters are Muslim carries about the same importance as the characters in The Godfather films being Catholic does: it matters, but it’s not at all what the story is about.

And not for nothing, but the idea that this show is “woke” or whatever just because it features Muslim main characters is pure racist xenophobia. The show is not preaching at us about the virtues of Islam. It is not castigating or denigrating white Americans. It’s just telling a story whose main characters happen to be Muslim American. More than 1% of the US is Muslim. Muslim Americans pay taxes, go to school, eat in restaurants, have boyfriends, go to church, and watch sports. They’re Americans (well, except Iman Vellani, she’s a filthy Canadian![JK]).

I’m heartened to hear that Disney is adding Deadpool and Logan to it’s service as the first R-rated films to be streamable on Disney+. I hope that this loosening of the family-friendly mandate extends to Disney+ original content too (Star Wars suffers from a similar stricture). Time will tell. For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think shielding younger audiences from adult emotions and themes is helping them any. Watching sophisticated, complicated and messy narratives will help to yield sophisticated, complicated and messy adults, and we need more of them right now.

As lovely and unexpectedly delightful as Ms. Marvel is, it’s not without its faults. As with the rest of these new Disney+ shows, there is at least one major flaw in the show’s conception, and in Ms. Marvel’s case, it’s with the motivation of the villains. [spoilers for season 1 follow from this point]

So if I understand this right, the “Clandestines” are these beings from “The Noor Dimension,” an alternate universe (not like from the multiverse, a different “dimension,” which is somehow different? — it’s not super clear). They have been hanging around in our world for a really long time, hoping to locate this bangle (a wrist gauntlet, essentially, that confers Ms. Marvel’s powers to her), which will help to open a gate between worlds so they can finally go home to their own dimension. Our team learns that opening the gate will cause a cataclysm that will destroy our own world in the process, and so Ms. Marvel and friends must fight to prevent the Clandestines from succeeding, but here’s the thing — it’s never made clear if the Clandestines (Najma, in particular) understands what’s at stake if they open the gate. Do they know it will destroy the Earth? Do they care? Any answer to that question is more interesting than no answer. If they do understand the terrible holocaust that will occur, but are still not willing to sacrifice their ability to go home in order to save Earth, that’s messed up and makes them an adversary worth defeating. If they simply don’t understand the danger (or perhaps don’t believe it), that’s also an interesting way to go. Either way requires more depth and sympathy for the villain’s point of view, and it just seems lazy to me that the show never even asks these questions.

With any other show, that oversight on the part of the writers would be a death blow, but Ms. Marvel triumphs in so many other ways that it’s actually my favorite Disney+ MCU show so far, despite having a fundamentally two dimensional primary antagonist (there’s a similar problem with the Dept. of Damage Control folks, who have scenes where they are apparently real people with motivations, but we are never invited to know what those motivations actually are). It’s an interesting problem to have because I think the protagonists in the show are all well rounded, three dimensional characters in genre-subverting ways. It’s almost like there’s this huge blind spot when it comes to the bad guys.

Ms. Marvel may just be the most radically progressive thing Disney has ever done as a company. Marvel superhero content, made by Disney, is arguably the most middle-American intellectual property possible in the 2020s. You literally can’t get more wholesome, mainstream, appeals-to-the-broadest-possible-audience content than Marvel/Disney. And yet, here is Ms. Marvel: a show featuring a Muslim, Pakistani-American, teenaged girl as its hero. Perhaps it’s an indictment of how bad American media is at multiculturalism that the mere fact of Ms. Marvel’s protagonists being incidentally Muslim seems like a radically progressive decision for Disney to make, but here we are.