Review: Ms. Marvel, "Destined" | Season 1, Episode 3
A second-act episode is stuck in second-gear, but in ways that still serve the story being told
Given that I was at Walt Disney World last week, I wasn’t able to watch Ms. Marvel live, and when I had some time at the end of my day I chose to watch and review the Obi-Wan Kenobi finale because it felt like it would be more likely to be spoiled. And that turned out to be a good decision, because to be honest I saw absolutely no discussion of last week’s episode of Ms. Marvel in my admittedly less-than-normal time online in the days since.
This is primarily because “Destined” is, like a lot of mid-season episodes in these six-episode Marvel seasons, stuck doing a lot of procedural work without really delivering much payoff. This isn’t to say it’s a bad episode, but we’re past the point of initial discovery and worldbuilding, but not yet at the stage where the full picture is coming together. As a result, while there are some developments to unpack, there’s not that moment where things click over into something transformative. It is, in other words, an episode stuck…