All but three scenes of “Seeing Red†take place in Karachi. One opens in the air right before Kamala Khan lands in Pakistan for the first time. Another is set at a classified Department of Damage Control (DODC) black site to reintroduce the show’s antagonists. A third unfolds somewhere in India in 1947 — a vision or perhaps something more — ending this week on a cliff-hanger that’s both audacious and emotionally charged. Along the way, Kamala begins to find herself not merely through the discovery of her remixed lore but through a trip to a homeland she doesn’t know and through quiet, intimate experiences that make her feel as though she can eventually carve out a place for herself as a teenager torn between worlds.
The episode has plenty of bombast and a zippy, claustrophobic chase sequence to boot, but much of its running time is spent following Kamala through Karachi as she catches up with family and discovers parts of the city (and its history) on her own. It makes sense, then, to hand the reins to Pakistani-born director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, whose documentary films (including the exploration of jazz-classical fusion Song of Lahore) beat with lived experience and whose animated work, such as the moving Netflix short Sitara: Let Girls Dream, blends grim reality with gorgeous fantasy. The decision pays dividends the moment Kamala steps out of Jinnah International Airport; she may be an outsider, but the setting is more familiar to her than foreign or exotic. Her initial rendezvous are captured with the verve of the show’s introduction to Little India in Jersey City, with the same focus on color, fabric, and street-side delicacies — not to mention the same use of lens flare to denote heat (courtesy of cinematographer Jules O’Loughlin) — only turned up a notch. Apart from a few aerial shots of Karachi’s architecture, Bangkok stands in for the Pakistani metropolis, but the detail in Christopher Glass’s production design spikes the location with nostalgia.
What makes the episode work more than anything else is its characters. Muneeba gets some much-needed downtime with her mother, shedding light on their dynamic (and her childhood love of toffee). Kamala’s cousins, the spoiled Zainab (Vardah Aziz) and the sassy Owais (Asfandyar Khan), aren’t so much invested in her as they are in running through the motions of showing her around. There’s a hint of enmity on Owais’s behalf as a modern subcontinental teen forced to deal with “ABCD†(American-born confused Desi) ignorance, but the real shot in the arm is Kamala’s naani, or maternal grandmother, Sana, who displays a shocking casualness about her superhuman origins. “I don’t see what the whole fuss is about,†Sana (Samina Ahmad) says with an amusingly dismissive tone. “It’s just genetics.†While the episode provides plenty of quick-fire answers, Sana’s nonchalance about these questions creates room, textually and meta-textually (“You’re focusing on the wrong thing,†she tells both Kamala and the audience), for what’s more important. The story of Kamala’s bangle is about purpose. It saved Sana’s life as a baby, during the bloody partition of India and Pakistan, and it now offers Kamala a new path in life through its very presence as an object imbued with history and as a plot point that forces Kamala to take a closer look at where her family came from.
When Kamala separates from her cousins, she dons her domino mask and inspects the cordoned-off corners of the local railway station. A historical restoration sits behind a barrier — a border of sorts, thematically in tune with the rest of the episode — and for a moment, she seems to step into a different realm. Not literally, of course, but the episode’s tone and aesthetic warp around her in this brief moment; the soundtrack’s wall-to-wall pop tracks finally fade out and are replaced by an ominous score. The camera tilts on its axis as Kamala nears what could perhaps be an answer about her past. The debris on the ground, likely as unassuming as construction, conjures images of chaos and disarray, the kind she associates with her family’s partition stories. However, before she discovers what history is being preserved in these hidden nooks, she comes face to face with comics favorite Kareem (Aramis Knight), a Red Dagger. A fight ensues, but it’s more of a tête-à -tête; Knight and Iman Vellani have an immediate and palpable chemistry. All we see of Kareem, from behind his red bandit scarf, are his eyes and the loose strands of hair falling over his face. He’s a charming mystery made all the more alluring by the fact that he seems familiar with Kamala’s family and with the Noor (her “Clandestine†powers).
Kareem, it turns out, is an ally in more ways than one. In the comics, his Red Dagger title (Laal Khanjeer) is his own, but the show expands on the concept, introducing a long-standing league of heroes protecting Karachi’s streets — a peek at a wider world of super-heroism and a refreshing change from Marvel’s western-centricity. In addition to being a fellow superhero, Kareem proves to be a friend in his brief appearance, inviting Kamala to a fun evening getaway around a bonfire with his pals. They strum and sing and eat biryani out of plastic bags. With the city lights in soft focus in the distance, capturing Vellani in the form of a gentle portrait, Kamala smiles as she takes a bite not only because she enjoys the taste but because she seems to understand, on some level, the importance of food as ritual and culture. It offers her a sense of belonging before things turn upside down again.
The Red Daggers’ leader is named Waleed, and he’s played by Bollywood superstar and director Farhan Akhtar; if you’re familiar with his work, his presence in one of these shows is downright surreal even though he mostly serves an expository purpose. The Clandestines, we learn, occupy an invisible dimension that shares space with our own, and using the bangle to access this realm could wreak unintended havoc. While the stakes were bound to become world-threatening sooner or later, their framing stands apart in the Marvel landscape. For one thing, the Clandestines just want to return home (they’re made even more sympathetic when we next see them in U.S. government shackles; they escape, but they leave poor Kamran behind), so destroying the world isn’t exactly their priority. For another, this explanation is accompanied by a floating graphic that depicts our world and that of the Clandestines side by side, separated by a border.
This is Kamala’s story on several fronts. She’s a descendant of supernatural beings from another universe, but she lives in this one. Her grandmother was one of millions of refugees from India who made the perilous journey to Pakistan. Her mother, born and raised in South Asia, now lives in the United States. One of these histories is fictitious, but two of them are real, and all three inform Kamala’s character in interconnected ways as a young girl searching for her place in the world. Back in Jersey, she’s persecuted for her faith and her appearance, which the DODC can discern even when she wears a mask. She knows so much about Indian and Pakistani culture, but she’s learned it all from afar, and she’s clocked as a tourist by local shopkeepers who immediately know to up-charge her. (1,500 rupees for a photograph? Come on!) She’s an outsider no matter where she goes — which is what makes one particular detail of her powers especially meaningful. As Waleed explains, the reason she can turn light into physical constructs is because she’s connected both to the energy of the Clandestines’ world and to the matter of our own. Being from two worlds is her superpower. Vellani’s expression when Kamala first learns this information is an utter delight: It’s like she’s found a missing part of herself.
Changing Kamala’s body-morphing Inhuman origin from the comics may have irked some viewers, but this culturally specific revamp imbues the show with thematic richness. The specifics of her powers may be rooted in fantasy, but rather than the show letting its metaphors stand in for real-world ideas altogether, it immediately ties them to something tangible. This discovery of Kamala’s origin is accompanied by Waleed gifting her a blue tunic, bringing her one step closer to her “complete†comic-book appearance. Thus far, her costume is composed of this Pakistani fabric, with its own history, and the domino mask typical of American vigilante characters (handcrafted by her best friend, Bruno). It’s a small step on her journey, but it weaves together two cultural parts of herself that often feel irreconcilable.
However, the show doesn’t seem to want to make things too easy for our hero. After she and Kareem escape a close-corners Clandestine chase, and after Waleed sacrifices himself (good on Akhtar for cashing that Marvel paycheck and bouncing), Najma attacks her and triggers something in the bangle. The next thing Kamala knows, she’s in a train yard somewhere in India — presumably Bombay, if the show follows her family history from the comics — and she immediately recognizes the setting. Friends and relatives bid each other farewell, possibly for good. Others scramble to board the last train over the newly etched India-Pakistan border. Her eyes well up. She knows the devastation that’s about to occur and has already occurred, but until now, she’s only known it from afar in the form of hushed whispers and family secrets half-revealed.
Is this another vision? Or a form of time travel, perhaps? Either way, as the camera pulls out to reveal the sheer scale of this inhumanity, the episode’s closing moments promise the kind of challenge Kamala hasn’t yet had to endure. Her borders are mostly internal. They’re rooted in the history of partition, yes, but she hasn’t walked in her naani’s shoes; she may feel as though she’s “breaking more than I can fix,†but as Sana says, she hasn’t “lived like I have, lost what I have†before learning to find beauty in broken pieces. Kamala hasn’t understood, firsthand, what it truly means to be torn apart. And perhaps what she’s about to witness or endure will make stitching together the disparate halves of herself all the more difficult, if the next episode plays its cards right.
Kamala’s Corner
• How nice of the show to open with onscreen Urdu text for its “Previously On†segment and close with images of Karachi where it usually features Jersey City.
• South Asian passengers standing up to grab their luggage before the plane has even landed is such a hilarious satirical detail.
• The Ant-Man mural at the train stations tells us two things: that Scott Lang is the world’s most popular Avenger and that Ms. Marvel artist Adrian Alphona exists in the MCU.
• Shout-out to the Karachi street photographer (Om Narayan) for his authentic pronunciation of donkey (“dunkeeâ€).
• Rukshana Aunty (Anjana Ghogar) calling out “Ka-maa-la†as a non-Pakistani name is both an unnecessary (yet true-to-life) overstep and a nice acknowledgement of the less thought-out cultural elements of Kamala’s comic-book creation.
• When Kareem asks, “Do all masked Amreekans have superpowers?†Kamala’s response — “Well, how do you know I’m not Canadian?†— feels like a fun salute to Vellani and Obaid-Chinoy.