Main cast: Iman Vellani (Kamala Khan/Ms Marvel), Matt Lintz (Bruno), Yasmeen Fletcher (Nakia), Zenobia Shroff (Muneeba), Mohan Kapur (Yusuf), Saagar Shaikh (Aamir), Laurel Marsden (Zoe), and Azhar Usman (Najaf)
Directors: Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah

I suppose, with the MCU being pretty much the M-She-U these days, Ms. Marvel is going to happen no matter what, no matter how many times the character’s comic series get cancelled. After all, Sana Amanat wants her royalties, and nobody is going to deny her that, plus Disney is all about that inclusiveness and diversity these days, even if they didn’t bother to figure out the difference between someone from India and someone from Pakistan. They’re all brown-skinned, so they are all the same!

Before I get into Generation Why, the first episode of this show, all I’ve heard about it is that it’s “diverse” (a word that is now twisted to mean “not led by a white actor”, it seems, because the uniformly Indian and Pakistani cast means that it is not diverse), and that if I don’t want to have babies with this show, that means I am a racist white male that vote Republican and own assault rifles.

This tired form of marketing seems to be losing its shine, as Ms. Marvel is the latest in a long lines of shows that is marketed as diverse and inclusive, who cares about the plot because YOU BETTER WATCH THIS CRAP IF YOU WANT TO BE SEEN AS A GOOD PERSON and ends up under-performing. How shocking, that people don’t like it when they are subjected to such scolding from people that want their money!

I wonder if this show would have done better if it hadn’t been marketed in such an obnoxious matter, because this episode, at least, is pretty fun.

Mind you, I almost tune out in the few minutes, because Kamala Khan, our protagonist, tries to bluff me that Captain Marvel was the one that saved the world from Thanos.

Uh, no. That wretch got swatted like a fly and was sent flying like the basic filler material that she is.

Also, this lady’s obsession with Captain Marvel makes no sense, because in her timeline, all the latter did was to show up like some failed deus ex machina during the battle with Thanos and then got curb-stomped. Kamala won’t know of anything that happened in Captain Marvel, so that character should be a nothing-burger to anyone on Earth.

Still, I have to remember that this poor thing is just a gimmick created to sell more MCU crap, so this show doesn’t have to be logical.

From the get go, it is obvious that this show is designed to be a sitcom meant for a much younger audience. Kamala is like a present day Clarissa Explains It All (only more “diverse”, of course—diverse shades of brown), playfully almost breaking the fourth wall now and then by looking right at the audience as she delivers her one-liners, and the set is bright and colorful.

However, if I forget that this is a supposed to be a superhero thing, the episode is fun and even hits home at times to me.

One thing this episode captures perfectly, albeit in a sitcom-y way, is the frustrations of growing up in an Asian household—the kinds that people don’t usually manage to define until they have lived long enough to realize what their parents had done to them, and usually by then, they have already turned into their parents, shudder.

The mom that uses guilt-tripping and emotional blackmail to get her way;  the “cool” dad that is actually mostly absent and distant, and he is only cool because mom is always more annoying in comparison; the grandparent that can afford to be the kid’s partner-in-crime in most things because by that age they realized how they messed up their kids and now they just wanted to do the opposite of everything they did back then—yup, they’re all there.

However, there are also some depths to these characters, and this is what Kamala will slow discover by the end of this episode: mom isn’t a controlling freak just because, for example.

Kamala is also a likable character here. Sure, her obsession with Captain Marvel may seem a bit much to other people, but she’s a lonely girl that feels disconnected from the rest of her world. She has two good friends but aside from that, she feels isolated from everyone else. It’s a typical kind of teen angst, but it’s done in a way that makes me understand this 16-year old girl. She should do well to look for a more interesting role model, sure, but for the most part, I get her.

There isn’t much excitement here, as this is, after all, the first episode, and it serves as an introduction to Kamala and her friends. Sure, this one is more teen sitcom than MCU, but I like it. At the very least, I’m intrigued and I empathize—a far cry from my lack of enthusiasm while watching previous MCU stuff on Disney+!