Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for the Disney+ series, Ms. Marvel.
With the end of its sixth episode, Ms. Marvel wraps up a storyline that feels both epic in scope and intimate at the same time. A young Pakistani girl living in Jersey City, Kamala Khan’s (Iman Vellani) origin story as Marvel’s newest superhero is balanced with her life as a high schooler from an immigrant Middle Eastern family. Her journey into her new powers accompanies her journey learning about her family’s heritage, taking her across the world to Pakistan and even back in time to British Occupied India and the Indian Partition.
One of the things that Ms. Marvel does so well is that, no matter how sweeping the show’s subject matter becomes, it always feels extremely personal and immediate to Kamala herself, to her culture, and to her family life. We already know that the finale isn’t the last we’ll see of her — she will make her next appearance in The Marvels in 2023 alongside her longtime idol Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), also known as Captain Marvel. However, events at the end of the Ms. Marvel finale provide some clues about her next foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Like many Marvel properties, Ms. Marvel has a mid-credits sequence through which it does most of the setting up for The Marvels. The scene begins with Kamala entering into her room wearing her superhero costume; she falls backwards, exasperated, into bed. From downstairs, her mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff) yells at her to do her science homework. However, Kamala is soon distracted by her bangle beginning to glow and pulsate with purple light. Then, she can barely scream before being thrown against her closet by an unseen force and vanishing. From the point at which Kamala vanished stands Carol Danvers, or Captain Marvel, looking with astonishment at her hands as they glow with the same purple light. She picks up a piece of the demolished closet to see a piece of a poster with her face on the other side. She looks around with growing horror at her unfamiliar surroundings, realizing that the room she’s in is literally covered with posters, art, and memorabilia of her. “Oh, no no no no…” she says, before darting offscreen. Then, of course, the screen cuts to black.
Kamala Khan’s obsession with the Avengers, but particularly with Captain Marvel, is a big part of her character; after all, it was as a personalized part of her Captain Marvel cosplay that she first put on the bangle, and at AvengerCon where she first displayed her powers. Though some fan theories suggest that Kamala shape-shifted into Captain Marvel, this seems unlikely: Carol Danvers looks shocked at her surroundings, and the camera’s emphasis on her reaction to these surroundings rather than to her physical body suggests that she and Kamala switched places. When she does pay attention to her own body, it is to look at her hands and the unfamiliar purple light they are emanating. Marvel itself has actually clarified what happened in the finale on its website, stating that Kamala was “sucked away via some unknown force.” Though Ms. Marvel can shape-shift in the comics, it appears that this is not what’s happening in the finale.
Since Carol and Kamala have switched places, we will presumably get to see what Captain Marvel has been up to since Avengers: Endgame. Maybe the switch happened in the middle of some kind of intergalactic threat — in which case it would make sense that Captain Marvel would be so distressed to find herself transplanted to a different location. And if it’s Kamala now in Carol’s place, and Carol was in fact in the middle of some cosmic showdown, that certainly doesn’t bode well for Kamala. Though Kamala has come a long way in learning to control her powers since the beginning of the show, she still has a long way to go before being able to exhibit the kind of astronomical power that makes Captain Marvel such a threat.
Nakia (Yasmeen Fletcher) and Kamala say goodbye to Bruno (Matt Lintz) before he leaves for Cal Tech. Before he goes, he tells Kamala that her access to the Noor isn’t like that of her other family members, which explains why she has superpowers and they don’t. “There’s something different in your genes,” he says. “Like a mutation.” Kamala shakes it off, not wanting to think too much about it. Of course, a superhero having a mutation calls to mind only one thing: X-Men.
Fox owned the rights to X-Men and to the idea of mutants within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, meaning the MCU didn’t have access either to the word or any of the characters owned by Fox. However, in 2017, Disney acquired Fox–and, therefore, the rights to bring mutants back into the MCU. Kamala’s character was conceived when Marvel did not own the rights to mutants; she was written as an Inhuman, a group of genetically engineered superheroes that first appeared in The Fantastic Four comics. However, it seems that now that Marvel has the rights to mutants again, the MCU will adapt Kamala as a mutant rather than an Inhuman as she was in the comics. If this is true, she will be the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first mutant. Even though other X-Men such as Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver have already been characters in the MCU before 2017, they have never been referred to as mutants; nor have the X-Men themselves ever been mentioned as an organization. This is the first time the word “mutation” has explicitly been used.
This isn’t to say that Inhumans won’t feature at all in future films. In the Marvel comics, Inhumans are the results of experiments by an alien race called the Kree, in which the Kree manipulated humans’ genetic code. In Episode 3 of Ms. Marvel, Kamala’s great-grandmother Aisha (Mehwish Hayat) finds the bangle on a blue arm that looks as though it could belong to a Kree alien. It seems possible, therefore, that the MCU may be combining Mutant and Inhuman lore: replacing the word Inhuman with Mutant, but making mutations the result of the Kree’s genetic testing. Perhaps this won’t be a general rule, but based on the presence of the Kree in Ms. Marvel, it seems fairly likely to be true for Kamala at least.
