We’re one episode away from the Ms. Marvel finale, with episode 5 now available on Disney Plus. The latest episode delivers precisely the kind of action fans of the series would expect, considering how the previous episode ended. But in doing so, Ms. Marvel offers a mind-blowing twist that could be one of the biggest MCU plot holes so far.
However, there is a way to explain it, and we’re going to need Doctor Strange, Avengers: Endgame, and Loki to make sense of it all. Mind you, big spoilers will follow below.
Ms. Marvel is an origin story for the show’s protagonist, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani). She learns that she has magical powers and has to find ways to manage them in a situation that escalated beyond her wildest dreams. In the process, Kamala discovers that her powers are deeply rooted in her family heritage. As a result, she gets on a journey to discover who she is and where she comes from.
What’s the Ms. Marvel episode 5 big plot hole?
With that in mind, we expected Ms. Marvel episode 5 to focus heavily on the action involving Kamala’s grandmother and great-grandmother during the partition of India.
Little did we know that Kamala’s bracelet would actually let her travel in time to the precise moment where her powers were needed to save young Sana (Zion Usman), who would become her grandmother.
We thought Kamala would only witness the past events, which would inform her future actions. But it turns out she had to jump back in time to save her grandmother and ensure she could be born.
This is the kind of mind-boggling twist that you’d expect from time travel movies like Back to the Future. Not from MCU movies where time travel works differently. That’s why the events in Ms. Marvel episode 5 can constitute the series’ big plot hole and a massive plot hole for the entire MCU.
Ms. Marvel episode 5 feels rushed, as Marvel might have spent a few minutes to at least attempt to explain why/how Kamala went back in time at that precise moment. But Marvel doesn’t do that, and we can understand why. Kamala is a teenager. Everything happens quickly, and she only has time to react to everything. She doesn’t fully grasp the situation. And neither do we.
Why it makes sense
But, unlike her, we do have MCU training. If you’ve done your homework and watched all the MCU movies and TV shows, then you might already know that the time travel that Kamala experienced isn’t exactly a plot hole. Well, come to think of it, only if you’ve done your homework you’d think that what Kamala experienced is a plot hole.
We know from Endgame that you can’t travel to the past to change the events in your life and, therefore, the future. Traveling back in time and changing it would result in a different timeline. One where a variant of yourself might experience a different future.
Also important to note is that you’d have to want to travel in time and make those changes, something that doesn’t happen in Ms. Marvel episode 5. Kamala goes back to the past because of the magical bangle she’s wearing and her ties to her family. She’s only reacting to what’s happening. And she’s not changing the past. She’s just performing specific actions that already happened. Her actions.
Then there’s Loki to tell us that everything that happened up to a point in the MCU primary reality was predestined. It was decided ahead of time. Therefore, Kamala’s quick dash in time isn’t something that the TVA would have observed. So if Kamals could do that, then Kang (Jonathan Majors) deemed it necessary to happen.
Marvel has some explaining to do
Finally, the Doctor Strange time travel-like shenanigans establish that you can manipulate time in specific ways. And that time loops exist. You might not be able to go back to the past to change the future, but you can mess with time.
With that in mind, the time travel in Ms. Marvel episode 5 isn’t the big plot hole you might think it is. However, we’re still waiting for Marvel to provide a better explanation about what has just happened.
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