‘Ms. Marvel’: 2 Deleted Storylines Revealed by Head Writer Bisha K. Ali
Ms. Marvel introduced a new corner to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) is a Pakistani girl living in New Jersey with her family. The show highlighted both the Pakistani culture and new legends of Marvel comics. Still, there was only so much they could fit into six episodes. Head Writer Bisha K. Ali revealed some of the deleted storylines from Ms. Marvel.
[Warning: This article contains spoilers for Ms. Marvel Season 1.]
Ali was a guest on The Hollywood Reporter’s TV’s Top Five podcast on July 15, two days after the finale premiered on Disney+. Ali shared two of the stories she had to take out of Ms. Marvel and also some others she had to got shorten.
COVID-19 deleted these ‘Ms. Marvel’ storylines
Ali said that after writing the six scripts, the coronavirus (COVID-19) hit. As Marvel finished The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and figured out how to film Loki, Ms. Marvel had to consolidate for added production protocols. Ali was sorry to see one storyline go.
“One of the big storylines that went was a throughline about gentrification,” Ali said on TV’s Top Five. “There was a community center and Muneeba is kind of fighting to keep this community center alongside Nakia. You have this parallel of Kamala looking at Captain Marvel who’s a superhero in episode 1 but her mom’s kind of heroing in her own community and she can’t make that connection. It’s how that all comes together so that whole arc about gentrification got lifted and the community center died a quick death.”
‘Ms. Marvel’ doesn’t miss this deleted story
Another deleted storyline got the axe rightfully, Ali conceded. Ms. Marvel scripts originally included a competitive theater team at Kamala’s school.
“Once I heard about what competitive theater is I lost my mind,” Ali said. “I thought, ‘This is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. We have to put this in.’ There just wasn’t the space for all these threads. Competitive Theater is bananas. They have time limits and they’re racing to compete with theater, building sets, putting on the show. What? It was so funny to me that that’s a real thing. I think competitive theater, to be fair, rightfully removed from the show.”
2 other stories were abbreviated, too
While Ms. Marvel deleted two whole storylines, Ali said she also streamlined other existing storylines. There could have been more to the Clandestines seeking the bangle for their own purposes, and also more Red Dagger.
“There was a lot more with the Clandestines,” Ali said. “There’s the Red Daggers of it all. We wrote textbooks of every character’s life story and how they interweaved, how the Clandestines are put together, how that was a juxtaposition against Kamala’s family. And looking at those differences helped to see more in her own family. A lot of that got lost as a result of you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. I miss some of that.”
