Ms. Marvel journeys through the past

“What you seek is seeking you.”

If there was a mantra to “Time And Again,” the penultimate episode of Ms. Marvel, it was this line, first said by Hasan (Fawad Khan) to Aisha (Mehwish Hayat). This outing is all about seeking and finding, whether that entails Aisha discovering love and a home with Hasan, Najma (Nimra Bucha) tracking down Aisha, a young Sana reuniting with her father at the train station, or Kamala (Iman Vellani), her mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff), and Nani (Samina Ahmed) all finally understanding each other.

But to find, something must first be lost, and the episode began with a 20-minute sequence in pre-Partition India (beginning in 1942) that sets up a discussion about loss on an individual and a national scale. It was brave for the show to dedicate such a large portion of the episode to the past, especially as Kamala wasn’t in much of it. But it also felt true to what the show has been about all along: that to understand who we are and can be, we need to understand where we came from. Looking at it that way, finding out what happened to Aisha feels essential.

We join Aisha as she is being chased by a British soldier, presumably not long after she escaped the tomb and separated from Najma in episode three. After killing the soldier, Aisha finds a village in which Hasan is giving a speech about togetherness in the face of British rule. She’s intrigued and becomes even more so when he later wakes her up in his field of roses (how romantic) and offers her shelter and food.

After initially rejecting his offer, Aisha accepts some grub (paratha, yum) from him, and we know they’ll fall in love when he quotes Rumi to her. “When the soul lies down in that grass / The world is too full to talk about,” he recites, adding “what you seek is seeking you.” Over the next few years, the pair get married (I assume) and welcome Sana to the family; Aisha still has the bangle she found in the tomb, although Sana is now playing with it more often than not. Aisha has learned that home is where love and family is, and she seems to have found her place.

But their idyllic life is not like what surrounds them: Divisions have grown between Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims to the point that no one will buy Hasan’s roses any more, and (most) people are refusing to sell Aisha milk. Hasan’s idealism—his belief that if Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus stick together, the British can be beaten—has been lost in the face of rejection by his neighbors.

Then comes the loss of his home, which is prompted by Najma finding Aisha. The pair meet at night and warmly embrace, but Aisha soon realizes that while she is content, Najma is still set on getting “home.” And so, with Hasan convinced to leave, we’re back at the train station, among the throngs of people all trying to get on a car to the newly-created Pakistan. These scenes, along with earlier aerial shots of hundreds of people on the move as flames engulf houses and fields, show the scale of Partition and the massive loss from it.

Before they get on a train, Hasan wants to know what they are running from, what Aisha is escaping, and so she reveals her powers to him. Leaving home is painful, but Aisha has already learned that home can be anywhere. “We can take our memories with us,” she tells Hasan. “So long as we’re together, we can build a home anywhere, Hasan. What you seek is seeking you.”

Obviously, moments after she says that, she makes Hasan promise to take care of Sana and then leaves the pair, having spotted Najma. Najma has guessed that Aisha no longer believes in the mission and brutally stabs her. To make matters worse, Hasan and Sana have been separated, and Sana stands on the train platform shouting for her Ammi over and over. Aisha can hear her, and she once more repeats, “what you seek is seeking you,” at which point the bangle she’s is holding lights up and she drops it to the floor. And then, Kamala’s feet enter the frame.

Kamala is drawn through the crowds to Aisha, who lies dying. She’s got enough strength to give Kamala instructions to find and save Sana and get her on that last train out of the station. Kamala might be confused, but she takes a picture Aisha is clutching and then finds Sana. Embracing her, Kamala asks Sana to play a game where she follows the lights, and she begins to set a path for Sana through the crowd using her powers. When she’s knocked off balance, the light fractures into a trail of stars that lead Sana back to Hussain.

Having now completed her mission, the bangle transports us back to the present, and we see that the veil between the Clandestines’ dimension and our own has opened up in the factory where Kamala and Kareem (Aramis Knight) were fighting them. An excited Fariha (Adaku Ononogbo) heads towards it, expecting to step through and be home, but instead she turns to stone before crumbling to dust. Whatever reaction has happened causes the veil to expand, and Kamala surrounds it with her light while Kareem gets the humans to safety.

Soon, just Najma and Kamala are left, with Najma heading to veil before she’s stopped by Kamala, who tells Najma that she robbed Aisha of the one thing she wanted—to be with her family—and that she shouldn’t do the same to Kamran (Rish Shah).

And so, we get a demonstration of the show’s biggest problem (and really it’s only one so far, but it is a huge one): its villain story. With one episode still to go, the Clandestines were dismissed entirely, and their grand plan to destroy Earth by opening the veil between their realm and ours amounted to nothing. It took mere moments for Kamala to persuade Najma (a woman so focused on getting home that she murdered her friend, spent decades on a quest to find the bangle, and abandoned her son) that what she actually wanted wasn’t to go home but to look after Kamran.

Any relation the Clandestines—and Kamala, it seems—have to the Djinn is also done, as there wasn’t any mention of them this episode. It’s a pity, because the show could have done something really interesting, pushing back against racist stereotypes of Djinn and showing it had taken the care to do something nuanced and new with the mythology. Instead, the “Djinn” mainly just vanished off our screens, literally, playing into a stereotype we’ve seen before of genies going up in a poof of smoke.

So now, after cycling through the Department of Damage Control and the Clandestines, we are left with…no villain? Or perhaps the villain is poor Kamran. As Najma stepped into the veil, she uttered her son’s name and was then destroyed, before the veil found its way (across oceans) to its new home in Kamran’s body. Not knowing where else to go, Kamran heads to Bruno’s house, where he’s emphatic in his belief that his mother would never abandon him and that she will come and find him. Will Kamran and his inevitable future abandonment issues set him on the dark path to villainy? With one episode to go, it’s difficult to see how the show will explore his newfound powers and take him from a sweet guy to one who’s so evil that he needs to be stopped by Kamala (and the owner of that drone).

In some ways, I feel like it’s reductive to think that this show, which has so wonderfully tackled the history and effects of Partition (and hey, the Brits are the real bad guys there, am I right?) should have a villain. Then again, we’re watching a superhero story, and it would be odd for there not to be a foil for the hero, especially a hero who is finding themselves.

Still, in Karachi, Kamala is happy, having found out a bit more about her family history in the most direct way possible. Muneeba and Nani have found Kamala letting go of her light in the factory—and so it’s revealed that Kamala is the “light girl” that everyone back home in Jersey City was talking about.

The discovery of Kamala’s powers by her mother seems to have repaired something between the three generations of women in the family. Muneeba now understands what Kamala has been hiding, and has realized Nani’s stories were true. And as she explains to Kamala that she was holding onto her so tightly because she wasn’t ready to let go, Nani realizes that she didn’t hold on to Muneeba tightly enough. The resulting hug between the three women is a beautiful moment, only beaten by Nani’s reaction when Kamala gives her the picture she took from Aisha: a photograph of Sana with her parents, the only portrait she has of the family together.

A lot of loose ends were tied up in this episode, which would be nice, if only there wasn’t still one episode left to go. The Kamran storyline feels too big for one episode, and Kamala finally adopting the Ms. Marvel moniker feels too small. So what on Earth is going to happen? I guess we have to hope that the satisfactory conclusion we seek is seeking us too.

Stray observations

• Now that the serious stuff is out of the way, let’s all take a moment, or 10, to fangirl over Fawad Khan. Fans of the Pakistani actor have been impatiently waiting for his appearance since it was announced he would be in the show, and he didn’t disappoint. I’m sure he will have gained a legion of new fans, thanks to his performance as the principled, generous and swoon-worthy Hasan.
• The titles for Ms. Marvel episode four were written in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan. This week, with an episode set half in India, the opening titles were written in Hindi.
• The music on the show continues to be a highlight, with songs this episode including “Tu Mera Chand,” sung by Suraiya and Shyam and from the 1949 film Dillagi. It was also lovely to hear “Aaja Ri Nindiya,” which Aisha sings to a baby Sana, and which is written by the legendary Noor Jehan.
• Kamala’s costume is coming together episode by episode, and this week we got two possible new additions: the red scarf that Kareem gives to Kamala, and the broken Kamala name necklace her mother picks up, which is now in the shape of a lightning bolt.
• I love how Muneeba was extremely worried about Kamala and her powers, until the moment she saw Kareem, at which point the fact that a teenage boy was hanging out with her daughter became the biggest concern.
• It turns out that Kamran really thought Bruno was called Brian. Huh.
• The British cinema and radio broadcasts are a nice touch and serve to show how disconnected the British were. There’s no emotion when the newscaster in the opening talks about a “decades long strategy of divide and rule,” and absolutely no sense of responsibility on the part of the British.
• The distinct visual style of words and images being found in the characters’ surroundings, which we saw so strongly in the first two episodes, has slowly dissipated. In some ways, it’s a reflection of the changing setting of the show, and it definitely wouldn’t have fit in this week’s episode. But it also means that the episodes feel slightly disjointed visually.
• Way back in episode two, I said I might be reading too much into the fact that Aisha means “she who lives.” But after this week, I don’t think I was. Aisha does live, not just in Kamala and her powers, but also in all the women of her family and in their memories of her and stories about her.
• I’m completely ignoring the technicalities of Kamala time traveling, because we all know that the Marvel Cinematic Universe likes to contradict itself. And it isn’t worth the headache to work out how Ms. Marvel’s version of time travel fits with the rest of the MCU, right?