Headscratchers / Ms. Marvel (2022)

---

Wanda

• How is it possible that there is Scarlet Witch merchandise at the AvengerCon? Considering that the show takes place after WandaVision, Wanda Maximoff should be hated by everyone for what she did in Westview, not to mention her former alliance with Ultron and her accidental destruction of that building in Lagos. Not to mention all the atrocities she committed in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but given her last-minute redemption and Doctor Strange's pity, it's likely Strange didn't tell the world about what Wanda did to the Masters of the Mystic Arts and the hero massacre she carried out in Earth-838...
  • Wanda's actions as the Scarlet Witch are limited to Kamar-Taj and a completely different universe, meaning that the last thing the public has heard of her is the Westview Incident as: 1. The common population has no knowledge about the Multiverse, 2. Gargantos' rampage doesn't have any connection with Wanda as far as people are aware (not even Strange and Wong connected him with Wanda at first), and 3. Strange and Wong likely didn't tell anyone outside the Masters of the Mystic Arts how badly they were beaten by a single person. And given that the Westview Incident had zero casualties, Jimmy Woo and the FBI likely used Hayward and his crimes as a scapegoat, making him the bad guy of whatever they used as an "official story", downplaying Wanda's actions, namely that she can mind-control people, to avoid a collective hysteria episode so soon after the Blip.

Loki fans

• So from the perspective of people in the MCU, Loki is an alien supervillain who led an attack on New York City that resulted in the deaths of dozens of people. Wouldn't going to a convention dressed like him be akin to someone going to a convention dressed as one of the Tsarnaev brothers or a mass shooter?
  • Banner or Thor probably revealed to the public that Loki redeemed himself trying to stop Thanos and that he helped stop Hela.
  • Or maybe used Thanos as The Scapegoat and told them that Loki was being controlled by the Mind Stone during the Battle of New York.
  • As Thor: Love and Thunder shows, the residents of New Asgard no longer seem to view him as a villain (his Big Damn Heroes moment rescuing them from Hela probably helped) as they continue featuring him as a heroic character in their plays.

Where's your respect for Black Widow?

• When Kamala practices the use of her powers with Bruno's assistance, she nearly falls off a roof. Bruno takes her hand and tries to pull her up, but she insists that he let her go and falls, fortunately over another roof, proving that she wasn't in danger of falling to her death. However, the over-dramatic feeling of this scene makes it resemble the iconic scene of Avengers: Endgame in which Black Widow asks Hawkeye to let her fall to her death so he can retrieve the Soul Stone. Two things then: first, how can Kamala know about how Black Widow died to imitate her death if that's only something Hawkeye saw and would have likely not told anyone due to the PTSD (this was shown in Hawkeye, after all) he was left with? And secondly, doesn't doing this mean that Kamala is disrespecting the heroic sacrifice of a member of the superhero community she idolizes who gave up her life to revive most of Thanos' victims (Kamala herself could have been one of the Snap's victims) and restore the world?
  • Most likely Kamala was not aware of the similarity, and Bruno was simply being overprotective. In-universe, this is nothing more than a coincidence.
  • Just because the writers intend the similarity doesn't mean the characters do.
  • It could also be a reference to a scene in Encanto, when Bruno drops Mirabel into a chasm...that turns out to be a fall of about two feet.

Why was Najma so irrationally impatient with Kamala?

• OK, picture this scenario. You've just convinced the granddaughter of Aisha, the woman you murdered, that you're a good person and not a psychopath. You've made a good impression on her, and she seems more than willing to help. Not to mention she's clearly attracted to your son, which you also use to your advantage to manipulate her even more. However, just the next day, Kamala sends your son a text that just says, "Hey. Wanna help but it could be dangerous. Need more time," and your son just tells her to focus on her brother's wedding. So, do you just wait until the wedding is over and have your son text her back? You've waited over a century, you can wait another day, right? OR do you immediately march to the wedding with the intent to murder Kamala, in public, for the bangle. If Najma was just going to take the bangle anyway, why not when she was already in her grasp at her house? If Najma really was going to just manipulate Kamala into helping them, why immediately buckle at the tiniest sign of delay?
  • Episode 5 explains this a bit. During the Partition, when Najma approached Aisha to get the bracelet, she was given a very similar line, with Aisha claiming she'd need time to recover the bangle, only to take the opportunity to flee instead. Essentially, Najma was probably acting on the "Fool me once" scenario.
  • Still seems irrational, given that Aisha was an adult with experience using her powers and a ready escape route, while Kamala was a teenager with tenuous control over her powers and lacking even a driver's license. Plus, Aisha knew Najma and what she was capable of, but as far as Najma knows, Kamala has nothing but a positive impression of her and would therefore have no reason to flee (even if she were capable).
  • Najma is the same woman that effectively disowned Kamran as her son for the sin of making sure they didn't kill Kamala, but had otherwise been steadfastly loyal. Rationality was never her forte. In her mind, she waited long enough, Kamala and everyone would likely die from them crossing over to their home dimension anyway so there was no reason to play nice anymore. Rational? Of course not, she had long since lost any rationality when it came to returning home.
  • That last part might be a big factor, actually. "I need time to see if it will be dangerous" is a big threat when you know for a fact it is dangerous. Najma was basically striking before Kamala could realize that she could never help.

Easier option

• While visiting Karachi, Kamala and her cousins are denied entry to a restaurant's buffet because Kamala is wearing jeans, which is apparently against the establishment's dress code. This is much to the chagrin of her cousins, as they are dying to get into the buffet, but, because of Kamala's clothes, they are forced to order à la carte. Wouldn't it have been easier for the cousins to leave Kamala outside so she could order what she wanted to eat while they entered and checked the buffet? Kamala doesn't seem that disappointed about missing the buffet...
  • I think it's a cultural thing- Leaving a guest behind while you go do something else would be considered being a bad host. Considering that they do also eventually leave Kamala alone later on, I think the presence of Muneeba also made them think twice.

Time loop

• So the stars that led Sana back to Hasan were created by Kamala, who realized that she was part of a Stable Time Loop. The thing is though, that time loops are incompatible with Professor Hulk's explanation in Avengers: Endgame that a time traveler changing the past won't affect their present, they'll just cause the timeline to branch. Is Kamala's involvement in the past a special case or something?
  • This just show that Banner doesn't really know a shit about time travel. Also, Kamala reuniting Sana with her father needed to happen, because that allowed Muneeba and, by extension, Kamala herself to born.
  • Not really an explanation but here's the thing: we don't know much about the bangle's technology/magic, but it doesn't seem connected to the Quantum Realm, so it could have different rules.
  • Professor Hulk said that you can't change the past (Back to the Future-style) with time travel, but Kamala did not change the past, but ensured it unfolded as recorded. On the other hand, killing Thanos like Rhodey suggested would definitely have changed it.
  • Quantum time travel doesn't allow for changing the past, but magical(?) time travel might.
    • We very much know that magical based Time Travel can change the past, as both Doctor Strange and What If...? have shown with the Time Stone. Bruce is not an expert on every single form of time travel there is, and we know that there's at least more than one.
    • This appears to be very much the case, as there are multiple types of time-travel present in the MCU, and each has different rules. Professor Hulk knew only about time-travel using the Quantum Realm, and even then, his knowledge is very limited. However, he didn't know much about the Time Stone, the time monolith, Chase's wristband, or Kamala's bangle.
  • The difference seems to be a... metaphysical one. The proposed "fix the past" type of time travel in Endgame hinges on the participants knowingly and deliberately attempting to change the past, and then trying to return to their own time in which the "fixes" have altered their reality but they still, somehow, traveled. That's the classic temporal paradox, because if events have been changed, there is no reason for you to go back, but if you don't go back, events don't change, etc etc. Hence why their type of time travel, rather than create such paradoxes, simply creates alternate timelines. It's impossible for you to travel if there's no reason to make you travel, so you're forced to stay in a timeline where you do travel and can't affect the circumstances of this. But in this show, time travel was completely accidental, and Kamala never intended to change anything—even when she fulfilled the "trail of stars" story, she herself says "[she] can't make stars, but [she] can make circles." Her circles are then shattered by the crowd and turned into the glimmering "stars" of the tale. So it becomes a different type of paradox, the predestination/causal loop paradox where her actions were always part of the timeline. She never went back to change reality, she went back to fulfill the conditions that would, decades later, send her back.

The letter Bruno puts in the locker

• Near the end of the finale when done over shots of the characters living their lives we see Bruno putting a mysterious letter into a locker at school. Though it isn't outright said, whose locker it is and what the contents of the letter are, I would assume its probably Kamala's and since he is leaving for Caltech, it would be about telling her about how he feels, because otherwise why would he decide to put it into a letter. But in the last scene, which takes place Bruno and Kamala are behaving same as normal. So did Bruno put that letter into a different locker than Kamala's, did it have a different message than I assumed or did they sort out a, "Bruno, your my best friend and I love you but I just don't feel that way about you,", thing but did it offscreen which would be lame.
  • Maybe it's only a watered down version of his feelings, that Kamala understood as simply regretting how far apart they will be. This would be what she assumes he's talking about when he tries to tell her that she's a Mutant.

How does Sana know about her mother's background

• When Sana confirms to Kamala that her mother was a Djinn and therefore the whole family are part Djinn, she tells Kamala that she learned this from her father. But as we see in the episode "Time and Again", Aisha kept Hasan in the dark about her mysterious past right until the day she died, and even then Hasan only learned that her bangle is magical; Aisha didn't tell him anything about Djinns or her heritage in general. So, where did Hasan get this information so he could pass it on to Sana?
  • Hasan probably started searching information about the bangle, just like Bruno. After all, Bruno found some old stories about the Clandestines, even if he needed Yusuf to translate it.
  • "Djinn" is a sort of catch-all term for supernatural entities, so Hasan didn't need to know any details about Aisha's heritage. Once he had reason to believe she was supernatural, it's reasonable he'd decide to use that term to describe her.

What was Agent Deever's deal, anyway?

• Seriously, her motivations seem really unclear. We get hints that maybe she's racist (or prejudiced against superhumans), but it seems like we get almost nothing concrete about her that would explain why she would risk her job or even prosecution by disobeying a direct order in order to fire deadly weapons on teenagers (not to mention sending a drone to blow up an apartment containing two teenagers, one of whom was un-powered).
  • Was anything concrete about her character really needed? Overzealous government agents or law enforcement based on potential prejudices is nothing new to the world. She shows consistent disregard and mockery of cultural customs and norms, and her going out in the last episode boils down to likely believing that if she succeeded or if Kamala and Kamran go wild destroying everything then all the orders she disobeyed are irrelevant as she would be proven right. She doesn't really need a complex backstory when we see people like her every day in real life.
  • Fair enough to a certain extent, but I do think there's a distinction between the standard overzealous/prejudiced cop she was in the first few episodes and the extremes she's willing to go to in the last two, including deliberately attempting to murder multiple teenagers (one of whom is Bruno, who is neither superpowered nor obviously Muslim). I also think there's a difference between being willing to go to extreme lengths in situations where a low profile or your position of authority means you're likely to escape consequences and being willing to do the same in situations where you have neither. She's willing to risk the consequences of disobeying a direct order in public, in a situation where there's no obvious reward. If a character puts themselves and their career on the line, it really seems like there should be a reason beyond "she's a bad cop/person."
  • Probably the reason why the cops switched sides in the end when Deever goes too far: they have a case of Everyone Has Standards, they realized that they didn't want all the bad press from starting an unprovoked attack against two Muslim teenagers that's being mass recorded, or a combination of both.
• Also regrettably there are a lot of cops who do use lethal force when it's not necessary, especially against minorities. Given the number of unarmed people who get shot it wouldn't be surprisingly if some cops used the existence of superpowers to become even more trigger-happy since they don't even need to claim they saw a weapon.

Hunting Superhumans

• Why is Damage Control hunting Superhumans? While it was justified with Spider-Man, seeing as how he has been publicly accused of murder, but Kamala hasn't even done anything. Is the whole manhunt just because of Agent Deever's racism/prejudice?
  • It is worth noting that Agent Cleary's approach after discovering Kamala's powers seems to be more like "bring that new super-powered girl here to question her about what her intentions are". Also, he even seems displeased with Agent Deever's bigotry when they're interrogating Zoe, and warns her to be careful about dealing with Muslims because he's aware that pushing too hard will result in being accused of racial bigotry.
  • Kamala did cause some property damage and put some people in danger. The audience knows that she's heroic and that any damage was an accident due to Power Incontinence, but from Damage Control's point of view, they have plenty of reason to think she's a threat. They are damage control, they're trying to contain her before anything else happens.

Super Strength

• In Episode 2, Bruno and Kamala explicitly state that she doesn't have super strength. Yet this never seems to bother her again, and in the finale, she's able to make herself ten feet tall without any strain, saves the onlookers from some very heavy falling debris, and punches a hole all the way into the tunnels under the city. When did Kamala's strength level change so drastically?
  • It never did. Her physical body did not gain any super strength; any "feats of strength" she performs, like catching a car in the air, are entirely through her command of the noor. It's the light constructs, not her physical muscles, which are carrying the weight or punching through objects.
  • In fact, we can see that she's straining when she catches the car.

Aisha's Reputation

• Why is Aisha regarded as such a shameful figure by the modern-day gossips and even by Muneeba? Except for Hasan and Sana, all that anyone knows about Aisha is that she disappeared during the Partition; but the same could be said for a lot of people caught up in the chaos and violence of that time.
  • She was an outsider who came into the village under mysterious circumstances and "seduced" one of its most prominent men. We didn't see her interacting much with anyone, but it wouldn't be a leap to assume she was defensive and stand-offish, at least at first. That's the kind of thing that can get you a reputation in a small village. Then her daughter spent decades babbling about magic, and everyone can say that she's strange "just like her mother."

Spider-Man

• Why wasn't Spider-Man included at AvengerCon even though Scarlet Witch was? Even if his civilian identity was erased, his heroic deeds in New York and with the Avengers are still known. It's shown that there were still Spider-Man supporters in NWH. How could the backlash from Mysterio be worse than Westview?
  • As discussed above, it's likely the public doesn't know the details of what happened in Westview, nor that Scarlet Witch was behind Gargantos, so Wanda is still generally known as a hero. Spider-Man, while he has supporters, is still at the center of a pretty big and ongoing controversy. The organizers of AvengerCon likely chose to keep him out of their event, or keep him in the background. It's the very first one, they don't want it to be Overshadowed by Controversy before it even gets off the ground.
  • The pragmatic answer is Writing Around Trademarks. They can get away with a name-drop, but they probably can't actually depict him without paying Sony.

Red Daggers

• How do the Red Dagger know who Aisha is? We know they operate in Pakistan and according to Kamran, The Red Daggers have been hunting the Clandestines down for decades. We see Kareem and Waleed are willing to work with Kamala and take in Kamran. Waleed speaks highly of Aisha too. But when did Aisha meet them? Before she met Hassan at his village? Coz she didn't seem to be all that friendly to any non-clandestines until after meeting Hassan. Also Kareem says he sensed the Noor, how? With tech? Does MCU Kareem have enhanced senses making him an Adaptational Badass?

Mutation

• Spoilers. The final episode hints that Kamala has powers due to a mutation. Whilst her brother and parents don't. But then Kamran has extremely similar powers to her. So is he a mutant too? Also why is Kamala's mutation activated by the Noor Bangle? But Kamran's seems to be by whatever Najma did when she sacrificed herself to close the portal. Why do the Clandestines not have any energy crystal powers (except Aisha when using the Bangle). But Kamran and Kamala do?
  • The Clandestines don't have their powers on Earth because they have to pull energy out of the Noor dimension to use them, which they can't do normally without the bangle. Kamala's powers still come from her being part Clandestine, it's just that she's able to access them while other hybrids can't because of her mutation. As for Kamran, it's not very clear what was happening, but best guess is that Najma was tapped into the Noor dimension at the time of her death and was able to unlock Kamran's Clandestine abilities using that energy. To be totally fair, this is all way more confusing than it needed to be and reeks of "set-upitis".

Captain Marvel fandom

• How do ordinary people on Earth know anything about Captain Marvel? Her activities in her own movie were part of SHIELD activities and thus presumably classified. She then wasn't seen again on Earth until Fury paged her at the end of Infinity War. She spends the next five years doing aid work elsewhere in the galaxy, leaving terrestrial heroes to help with Earth's problems. How could Earth's civilians have possibly learned the name Carol Danvers?
  • Because she was one of the heroes who defeated Thanos and helped bring back half of the population of Earth (and the universe). Other movies and series have established that the whole battle with Thanos's forces and who took part in it have become public knowledge, and it was probably recorded on camera by a lot people. And there's no real reason for her to keep her identity secret, so she probably allowed the media to report that Captain Marvel is really Carol Danvers. Since she was clearly the most prominent and most powerful woman in the battle, it's not that hard to see why teenage girls especially might idolise her.

---