How 'Ms. Marvel' Just Laid The Groundwork For The X-Men
The first season of Ms. Marvel has come to an end, and while the show may have seemed slightly unfocused at times, it also arguably rediscovered a feeling of freshness that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been sorely lacking lately. Plus, most importantly, it contained precisely zero scenes of Oscar Isaac attempting a British accent.
Perhaps the most interesting tidbit from the finale, though, was Bruno’s discovery that Kamala’s powers were the result of a “mutation.” A revelation that was accompanied by a brief snippet of the classic theme song from the ‘90s X-Men cartoon, which keeps showing up in MCU projects in three-second increments.
This makes sense since, in the comics, Kamala’s powers were tied to the Inhumans, who first appeared back in the ‘60s but were more recently frontloaded by Marvel as a kind of understudy for the X-Men, who they didn’t have the rights to until Disney’s acquisition of Fox in 2019. So following the merger (and also presumably the abject failure of the Inhumans TV series), it makes sense that Ms. Marvel would be connected to the X-Men rather than their foggy, less-popular counterparts.
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But even before this bomb dropped, the finale was distinctly X-Men-y; after Damage Control, the anti-superpower bureaucrats last seen in Spider-Man: No Way “Clandestines” were dispatched of in the previous episode, the finale’s main villain turned out Home. Some folks had already speculated that their presence in the series was teeing up the introduction of the X-Men into the MCU, and this episode seemingly confirmed that interpretation. The finale made several thematic connections to the X-Men franchise, starting with the fact that the big battle between Damage Control and Kamala and her pals takes place at their local high school.
Not unlike Stryker’s raid on the Xavier school in X2 …
And Kamala has to stop her friend (and very nearly more than a friend) Kamran from hurting, or even killing agents, establishing a Prof. X/Magneto-esque dynamic. It already made sense that Ms. Marvel would pull from past angsty teen superhero movies, as they have with Spider-Man, but clearly, in light of that twist, they’re also using this series as a bedrock for an incoming X-Men franchise – and hopefully, Marvel will finally give us Wolverine as played by Glenn Danzig.
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