The character of Ms. Marvel was created long after I’d stopped reading comics but I’d always thought it was a great idea and my impression was that they pulled it off very well. Introducing the character to the MCU was a natural choice so even though I’ve stopped watching most Marvel content, I wanted to give this a fair shake. As it turned out, the character as played by Iman Vellani is very likeable and it offers an intriguing look into the Pakistani Muslim community in the US. Yet it’s a pretty mediocre superhero show with poor action choreography, weak villains and weak worldbuilding. It’s about what I expected really and it’s a shame that this seemed to have been one of the least popular MCU shows.

Teenager Kamala Khan is a 16-year-old superhero fangirl who lives in Jersey City. Together with her friend, the science nerd Bruno Carrelli, they plan to attend AvengerCon with her cosplaying as Captain Marvel. Her protective mother Muneeba refuses to give permission, so she sneaks out. To add a personal touch to her costume, she puts on a bangle sent by her grandmother who is still living in Pakistan. There is a flash of light and it seems to activate latent superpowers in her, giving her the ability to create energy constructs. Her lack of control causes chaos at the convention and she ends up saving a classmate from school in the process. Her antics are noticed both by the government, in the form of the Damage Control agency, and by a group of enhanced humans who calls themselves djinns. They reveal that Kamala is part-djinn herself and they need her help to open the way back to their home dimension. This ties in with Aisha, Kamala’s great-grandmother who was the original owner of the bangle and disappeared during the traumatic partition that divided Pakistan from India.

There’s a lot of like about this show: Kamala’s infectious enthusiasm, the kinetic, vivid art style, how the teenagers in it are all in tune with social media and livestreaming. Most of all, it goes all in with its portrayal of ordinary life of Pakistani Muslims in the US: the local mosque and how Kamala’s friend Nakia runs to become a member of its committee, their festivals, their music and their food, even jokes like how the US government habitually treat all Muslims as criminal suspects. Sure, it’s an abbreviated, sanitized version of reality but it feels so satisfying to see this being included as an official part of the MCU. Later events involve Kamala travelling to Pakistan. Although this seems promising at first, it’s ultimately a letdown as they mostly try to use it as a backdrop for badly made action scenes. In any case, it’s not even the real Pakistan as the scenes were shot in Thailand.

Unfortunately the superhero portion of the show is totally lame. Not only does Marvel resort once again to inventing a completely new humanoid subtype and their own dimension to explain the origins of the character, they need to make it another potentially world ending threat too. It’s like it’s not even worth getting out of bed for any lesser stakes. Yet that is absurdly overambitious given the limited budgets of their tv shows. The djinn of the Clandestines are less of a threat than a squad of armed US soldiers. Kamala’s own powers make for a pretty lightshow but the budget clearly prevents them from showing her using them too much or on too large a scale. Given the parallel stories going on with her friends and family members, it would have been fine to restrict this to being a neighborhood-scale type of story. Instead they had to create implausible globe-spanning secret organizations, stage a dumb looking street chase scene in a fake Karachi, have Kamala cause property damage to artificially up the stakes yet escape being blamed for it and so on. It’s incoherent and half-baked, especially compared to how much care and consideration they put into Kamala’s cultural and ethnic background.

It’s pretty great of Marvel to make this television show and they even followed through on their plans to feature Kamala Khan in an MCU film too. But it seems that cultural inclusion alone isn’t enough to draw in audiences as this was apparently the least watched series in the entire MCU stable. As much as I want to applaud Marvel’s courage here in offering something Americans might not be quite ready for, this is just not a very good show overall. It would have been better to just eject the superhero parts entirely but then it wouldn’t be a Marvel show at all.