The season finale (series finale? It’s always hard to tell with these shows) of Ms. Marvel just aired over on Disney+, and it was pretty good. But you know Marvel: they’re always setting up the next thing, and this episode set up something huge.
Don’t read further if you don’t want to be exposed to SPOILERS for Ms. Marvel…and for the MCU at large.
Ms. Marvel is a mutant
SO, at the end of the finale, after the main plot had wrapped up, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) has a chat with her brainy buddy Bruno (Matt Lintz), who had been trying to help her figure out her newfound powers. He took a look at her DNA, which is something any high school can do, and found something odd. “Kamala, there’s something different in your genes,” he said. “Like…like a mutation.”
At the word “mutation,” we hear a snatch of the theme music from the animated X-Men cartoon from the ’90s; we also heard that snatch when Professor X appeared in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The implication is clear: The X-Men are coming, and they’re starting with Kamala Khan.
Up until recently, 20th Century Fox controlled the screen rights to the group of Marvel mutants known as the X-Men. But Disney has big ambitions and deep pockets, so it simply bought Fox for a ridiculous $71.3 billion back in 2019. Now the X-Men are Disney’s to do with what they like, and they’re doing this.
This turn is unexpected. In Marvel Comics, Kamala is an Inhuman, which is a whole different group of superheroes the MCU hasn’t really engaged with. On TV, apparently she’s a mutant. It’s hard to know where this will lead. Are Wolverine and Storm and Cyclops and the rest already out there, just waiting to be found? There are surely a few more turns in the story before they’re properly introduced.
For right now, X-Men fans can just ride the wave of enthusiasm. “They sent me, and only me, the draft , and I immediately freaked out,” Vellani told Marvel.com. “I emailed Kevin Feige in all caps. I was like, ‘Are you doing this like for real? Are you sure? I’m so honored!’ I was like yelling at him through an email. I was freaking out. This is the biggest deal in the world, and the fact that it’s happening in our show is crazy.”
"It took a really long time to film that scene because any time Matt would say that word I’d start giggling. I think we got the one take. The one you see in the episode is one of two that we got where I was mildly serious. It was really, really, really difficult. I think we have so many outtakes of me just breaking because I was so excited and giddy over this."
She wasn’t the only one. According to Lintz, members of the crew were “all screaming and the excitement and joy that they had was really, really funny. It’s a very big moment. I was just blessed and lucky enough to be able to share that with Iman and everybody else.”
It wasn’t always the plan to make Kamala Khan a mutant
Apparently it wasn’t always the plan to make Kamala a mutant, as producer Bisha K. Ali explained. “With Marvel, something’s always a moving piece, and we’re trying to solve this question of, ‘If any of put the bangle on, would they have powers?’ The answer was always no, from a character perspective, no.”
"I feel so excited as a viewer of my show. The Bisha teen fan girl in me is like, ‘I can’t believe it.’ And the fact that it’s Kamala — it’s her. It’s like her wildest dream already came true over the show [gaining powers], but then we just gave her one more bit of the dream. It’s incredible. I’m overjoyed."
Where does this go next? Well, the next Marvel show on the docket is She-Hulk, but somehow I can’t imagine it’ll come up there. Maybe in next year’s The Marvels?
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