Review: Ms. Marvel, "No Normal" | Season 1, Episode 6
Despite its title, Ms. Marvel’s great finale grounds itself in the street-level world of its hero
Over the weekend, I asked for your take on the state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I’ll be sharing my own thoughts on this tomorrow. But I think the simplest overview of the situation is that for a variety of reasons, there are no clear expectations for what a MCU project will be in Phase Four, and it’s straining the franchise to varying degrees among the broad, diverse audience Marvel has generated over the past 14 years.
And while every MCU TV project has carried some degree of this burden, I would argue that Ms. Marvel has been the most shaped by the discourse around it. It’s an origin story, but one that is steeped in the diegetic lore of this universe, and which we know is meant to lead into a big film project featuring an existing character. It’s sort of if you uncoupled Kate Bishop’s origin story from telling an actual story about Hawkeye: whereas that project got to be both an epilogue for an Avenger and a launching pad for a Young Avenger, Ms. Marvel is only the latter, but in a way that we all feared would be swallowed by the needs of the MCU around it. It may seem contradictory, but after wishing that Moon Knight had done more to connect to the MCU, I spent Ms. Marvel’s six-episode run girding myself for the moment where the show it was would devolve into the MCU connective tissue it seemed like it would be.