Review: Ms. Marvel, "Time and Again" | Season 1, Episode 5
A flashback reinforces the show's strengths, but the jury's still out on the season's toughest task
I’m still not sure if it’s fair to say that Ms. Marvel has fully embraced televisuality in its short six-episode run—in the early episodes we got a few more subplots with things like Nakia’s run for mosque leadership, but this has still been a very linear story, without the kinds of divergences and tangents that longer television seasons allow for. However, in addition to just feeling a bit more televisual based on how the stories are being told, “Time and Again” indulges in a distinctly televisual tradition by spending half its running time in flashback, delving deeper into Aisha’s story than a film ever would have allowed.
This is perhaps the best way to describe Ms. Marvel’s approach to storytelling: it’s not necessarily diverging from the basic plot of what a film origin story would look like, but it’s allowing itself to spend more time on specific parts of that story as the format allows. Here, you could easily tell a 2-minute version of the first half of this e…