MS. MARVEL: Episode 1.1-2: “The Why Generation” and “Crushed”

The first two episodes of MS. MARVEL on Disney+ show a teenage Muslim girl in New Jersey finding a magical family heirloom that gives her superpowers and enables her to make a giant fist, stretch out her arm and hop around on glowing platforms. The first two episodes of Ms. Marvel are rather dull until the final scenes, where some action occurs, but the bigger problem is that the episodes infantilize their teenage heroine and contain heathen Muslim prayers and greetings that are empty of meaning if you don’t know Arabic and the violent, tyrannical, idolatrous history of Islam.

Kamala Khan, the Americanized Muslim heroine of MS. MARVEL, lives at home with her nominal Muslim father, Yusuf, her devout, old-fashioned mother, Muneeba, and her devout older brother, Aamir, who’s engaged to be married. Kamala’s mother is very strict with her, but her father is more lenient. Both her parents, however, are worried that Kamala’s head is always in the clouds. She loves superheroes, especially Captain Marvel, and is always daydreaming and drawing.

As Episode One opens, Kamala wants to go to a local science fiction convention about the Avengers with her friend, Bruno. Her mother is absolutely opposed, but her father convinces the mother to let her go, if Kamala goes with him. He dresses up in a Hulk costume and wants Kamala to wear a Hulk costume too, but Kamala had her heart set on wearing a Captain Marvel costume she made. Also, who wants to go to a science fiction convention with their father???

Anyway, Kamala refuses and even insults her father. She then sneaks out of the house at night to attend the convention (this is kind of stupid, because most of these conventions start early in the morning, not at night, because they’re always meant to be family friendly, despite some of the adult events that may occur later). Of course, Kamala puts on her Captain Marvel outfit. To finish off her costume, Kamala found a cool-looking wrist brace, an old family heirloom from her grandmother and great grandmother.

At the convention, the bracelet starts to emit beams of energy that create havoc. Then, Kamala uses the bracelets magical powers to stretch out a magical arm that saves her high school rival, Zoe from falling and seriously injuring herself.

Meanwhile, two agents at a secret government agency keeping tabs on superheroes and supervillains, including people displaying new superpowers, agree to travel to New Jersey to find the new superbeing and detain her.

In the second episode, Bruno helps her learn the nature of the bracelet’s superpowers. Also, Kamala tries to investigate the origin of the family heirloom with magical powers, but she hits a blank wall with her grandmother and mother. Kamala learns from her father, however, that her great grandmother was always a bit mysterious. He tells her a story about how, during the tumultuous (and very violent) separation of Pakistan from India, her grandmother had suddenly disappeared at the train station but mysteriously found her father, who thought she was lost forever.

Meanwhile, Kamala, a high school sophomore at 16, meets Kamran, a handsome high school senior from India. Kamala’s friend, Bruno, is clearly jealous, although he’s been too shy to admit any romantic feelings toward her.

Kamala’s Muslim community is planning a local Eid festival, a semi-annual religious festival with food, games and ethnic wares. The festival starts on Friday, but on Friday morning, Kamala and her friends attend services at her local mosque. During the imam’s sermon, however, Kamala and her female friend, Nakia, complain that the females must sit in the back, behind a partition that has an obscured view of the imam. Kamala encourages Nakia to run for the mosque’s executive board, which is all male.

At the festival that night, a boy climbing a nearby building slips and Kamala, who changed into her costume, must use her powers to save him. This exposes her, however, to the two agents from the Department of Damage Control and their men.

The first two episodes of MS. MARVEL have some briefly funny and exciting moments, but they are otherwise a little dull, especially the second episode. The episodes use Kamala’s drawings to create cartoon images to liven up the story, but this doesn’t improve matters. They’re more annoying than informative or plot-driven. Also, the teenagers in the episodes, including Kamala and her close friend, Bruno, are not all that interesting or smart. They seem more like a dumbed-down version of what Hollywood thinks are typical teenagers in America. Frankly, the portrayal of teenagers in MS. MARVEL seems a bit condescending.

Finally, though the first two episodes are pretty much free of objectionable foul language, violence and lewd content, they contain heathen Muslim prayers, greetings and cultural references. Such prayers and greetings are empty of meaning if you don’t know Arabic and the violent, tyrannical, idolatrous history of Islam. Ultimately, the Muslim prayers, greetings and cultural references in MS. MARVEL are just being used by “woke” Hollywood liberals and leftists to normalize Islamic religious and cultural ideas. This is a foolish undertaking that obscures the attack on truth and the evil that Islam has done and represents.

As MOVIEGUIDE® Publisher Dr. Ted Baehr writes in his upcoming book, THE SCREEN-WISE FAMILY:

“Muslims deny the deity of Christ. To the Muslim, Jesus was a good man, but not the Son of God. Islam also denies the Holy Trinity and the vicarious atonement of Christ on the Cross. In fact, there is no atonement or reconciliation of the sinner to God. Neither the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, nor by any other sacrifice in Islam, can sin be forgiven.

“Much of the Qur’an, Islam’s ‘holy book,’ is made up from Bible stories, but they are often misunderstood. For example, the Qur’an says Adam and Eve sinned not in an earthly garden but in paradise. They were cast down to earth after they had sinned. Also, Noah had only one son, and he drowned in the flood. Moses, in the Qur’an, was adopted by Pharaoh’s wife, not his daughter. Although the Qur’an recites Moses’ confrontation with Pharaoh 27 times, the most integral part of the story, the Passover, is omitted.

“The Tower of Babel, according to the Quran, was built by Pharaoh in Egypt. The Qur’an teaches that Mary, the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, was the sister of Aaron, and the daughter of Imran, who lived 1,500 years before the birth of Christ.”

Also, an examination of the historical evidence shows that Islam is one of the worst religions on Earth when it comes to mass murder, tyranny and slavery. For example, Muslims actually started and spread the slave trade throughout Africa. Also, according to the best historical research, Muslims murdered between 60 to 80 million Hindus in their attempted conquest of the Indian subcontinent between 1000 and 1525 AD. Of course, in the last 200 years, both Muslims and Hindus have engaged in atrocities against one another.

It should concern all people, but especially Christian parents, that MS. MARVEL seems to reflect the current politically correct, radical left approach to “diversity.” Sometimes described as “Cultural Marxism,” sometimes described as “Identity Politics” and sometimes described as “Critical Theory” or “Critical Race Theory,” the leftist approach to “diversity” or “identity politics” usually, if not always, minimizes the dangerous, freaky, erratic, and evil nature of Islam while smearing America, the Bible and Christianity. This leftist approach, especially when it comes to Cultural Marxism or Critical Race Theory (which can be seen as a recent branch of Cultural Marxism), divides humanity into two broad categories, the oppressor and the oppressed. Thus, Muslims, along with blacks, Hispanics, women, the poor, workers, and LGBTQ people are among the oppressed and Americans, Christians, men, whites (including white women), rich people, middle class people, business owners or capitalists, and all heterosexuals are oppressors. The biblical view, however, sees all people as terribly flawed or sinful beings who have the ability to oppress but who also can be oppressed.