The first season of Ms Marvel has ended, with Kamala Khan coming into her own as a superhero. But saving the world and Jersey City are not going to be the end of her adventures and the two scenes at the end of the season finale point in very interesting directions as to what those adventures might entail. Spoilers following…
There’s Something Different…
The first scene is actually more of a coda to the main episode, coming before the end credits begin. A graphic lets us know that it has been a week since the climactic action where Kamala has managed to get her friend Kamran away from the clutches of the Department of Damage Control. She is meeting up with her friends Bruno – who helped her figure out her powers are activated by something in her genetic makeup – and Nakia. Bruno is getting ready to head to CalTech and the three are having a good-natured discussion as to whom should get possession of Kamran’s sports car now that he is out of the country and unlikely to return.
But Bruno breaks the mood when he tells Kamala that he has something important to tell her. He says that he has gone back and reviewed her families genetic information again as her brother Aamir had been pestering Bruno as to if he could have powers as well.
“I think we got it wrong,” Bruno says, explaining that there is something in Kamala’s genetic makeup that is not in the rest of her family’s. “There’s something different in your genes… Like, like a… mutation.”
And if the word “mutation” doesn’t prick up your ears, then you are probably a newcomers to all things Marvel Comics. The word mutation is an obvious pointer towards Marvel’s X-Men group of characters, superheroes and villains whose powers are derived from genetic mutations that mark them apart from us regular humans. (Additionally, the scene’s score included a brief reprise of the theme from the poplar 1992 X-Men animated series to underscore the point.)
The addition of the X-Men characters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been something hotly anticipated by many fans ever since the deal for Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox – who had bought the film rights to the X-Men characters from Marvel Comics back in 1993. At the time that the merger was finalizing, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige stated that he had no immediate plans to incorporate the X-Men character into the mainstream Marvel Cinematic Universe.
However, that was in early 2019 and even with the ongoing rollout of MCU installments in both film and television series having been somewhat delayed by COVID – remember that the just released Thor: Love And Thunder had been originally slated to be released last Thanksgiving – the studio has to now be thinking about where and when they will start seeding the X-Men characters and concepts into the MCU. We have already seen the X-Men’s Professor Xavier, or at least a parallel Earth version of him, show up in Dr Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness earlier this summer.
This is clearly a new step on the road that leads to the MCU introduction of the X-Men, though when the next step will be taken remains to be seen. Perhaps Feige will have something to say during Marvel’s presentation at the San Diego ComicCon next weekend.
As for her reaction to news that, for fans at least, seems momentous? Kamala, to her credit, seems nonplussed. She merely just shrugs her shoulders and says “Whatever it is, it’s just going to be another label…”
THE MARVELS
The second scene comes at the mid-point in the finale’s closing credits. In it, we see Kamala flopping down onto her bed in her Ms Marvel costume, perhaps coming home from an evening’s worth of superheroing. But regardless of where she is coming from, school still beckons as her mother calls out to her that she should be working on her science homework. But as she gets up to head over to her desk, Kamala is suddenly surrounded by energy that seems to emanate from the bangle that allows her access to her powers, throwing her through her closet door.
But it isn’t Kamala who emerges from the hole in the closet door but her hero Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel. Carol is at first confused as to where she is as she looks around the teeneaged-Kamala’s room which has a number of Captain Marvel posters on the wall. “Oh no no no…” she mutters just before the scene cuts to black.
Well, if anyone had any questions as to how Kamala Khan/Ms Marvel was going to factor into the storyline for the Captain Marvel sequel The Marvels, this scene answers that. Sort of.
At least, this scene hints strongly that there is a connection between the two heroes, through the cosmic power that they wield. Kamala calls the energy that she uses “noor” and it seems to have a connection to the dimension that the djinn she encountered during the series have come from. However, Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel’s powers are derived from her exposure to energies from the Tesseract, aka the Space Stine, one of the six Infinity Stones. How are these two energies related? If Kamala and Carol exchanged places, as it appears to have happened, where was Carol right before that swap happened? More importantly, how is Kamala’s feisty mother Muneeba going to react to the fact that her daughter has disappeared and her daughter’s hero has somehow materialized in her bedroom?
As the end title card that reads “Ms Marvel will return in The Marvels” promises, we should get our answers when The Marvels hits theaters on July 28, 2023.
