Ms. Marvel Episode 4: Seeing Red

Laal Khanjeer! an exploration of cultural disconnection and insecurity and complex grandmother mother daughter relationships!! a SWANA country depicted WITHOUT THE GAUDY YELLOW FILTER??!!

this show…this brilliant show always knows the way to my heart.

and they DID end up heavily softening that Djinn thing I was worried about before by explaining that yes it’s just a lack of a better word term used to describe these inter-dimensional beings who are similar to Djinn of Islamic belief but aren’t actually those very things. another win!

Plotlines I Would Enjoy Seeing In the Next Season of This Is Us

A return to Jack and Rebecca’s courtship in the seventies, as we watch Jack progress from a troubled, reticent recent veteran to the sexy, confident Jack we first met at the start of the series

Filling in the plot holes in some of Jack’s backstory. I’m sorry, but you can’t drop that kind of revelation about a family member he successfully hid for decades after his death and be done. The writers set up this plotline and it’s their responsibility to follow through on it. How exactly did Jack get away with all of this? His mother was still alive when he started dating Rebecca. How did she not spill the beans about Nicky at some point? Where was Nicky when he returned from Vietnam? Prison? A mental institution? Did Jack cut off contact right away or was it gradual? How exactly did he go from “I’m not going to clean up my fuck-up brother’s messes” to “I’m going to pretend that he’s dead?” We need to know some of these answers, and the writers owe it to Milo to allow him to play them out instead of sneaking Jack into a random scene every other episode.

Some acknowledgement that Jack’s decision to distance himself from his brother may have prevent a damaging influence from visiting his home. I kind of think Rebecca believes this and doesn’t entirely resent him for it, but if they’re going to revisit that storyline to add the context to it that it needs they need to acknowledge that it was more complex than Jack failing a relative who needed him. 

Rebecca and Miguel: The Early (Dating) Years. I want to see Rebecca happy and fulfilled with the second great love of her life, not grief-stricken and alone.

Beth and Randall being awesome and taking on the world together.

Tess getting her first girlfriend.

Unraveling the mystery of Kevin’s baby mama. I hope that it’s not Sophie (let that girl have a drama-less existence offscreen, please) or some other random love interest that won’t last because it’s well, Kevin but that he becomes a father through surrogacy or adoption.

Storylines I Do Not Want To See Next Season on This Is Us But That We Will Probably Get Anyway

Rebecca as a new widow alone in the world as her adult children continue to flounder. We’ve already been warned that this is what we’re getting, and based on the post-Jack flashbacks we got last season, it will prove to be depressing and boring.

Kate and Toby’s marriage falling apart. Pass.

Before the Beth/Randall version of Japril: The Movie I would have loved to watch nothing but flashbacks between the two of them. However, I do not desire to watch any more of Randall being oblivious while Beth makes sacrifices. If they can put out flashback episodes that are more balanced than the last one we received, I’m game for it, but I don’t want a one-sided morality play where Randall is the villain and Beth is the saint. 

Jack being sidelined to occasional appearances when there is clearly potential to expand upon the plotlines they have already set up, as referenced above. I also don’t want any more stupid ret-conning of past episodes in order to make a point, like we saw in the finale (we’ve seen Jack cook more than corn sandwiches in the past, show. Don’t be dumb).

The deterioration of Rebecca’s marriage to Miguel or any plotline where he dies tragically. Miguel’s lived through more than a decade of being reminded that’s he not Jack every single day and he’s still an awesome husband and grandfather. Let the worst thing that happens to him to be dying peacefully in his bed of old age.

Nicky and Rebecca becoming romantically involved at some point. ICK.

I’d like to say here that while I still adore the characters I’ve grown to love on this show, I have not been happy with it since the big Nicky reveal. The show seems to want to introduce this storyline where Jack is seriously flawed and has had some serious failures, but they don’t want to commit to it because they still want to idealize Jack as this saintly figure. So instead of dealing with the implications that they set up, they give us him throwaway storylines when they choose to include him at all. They’re not doing Jack or Milo right this way, and I’m not sure it’s going to get any better.

The reason why I fell in love with this show was because it gave us two former teen idols all grown up as the perfect OTP and let us travel back to the 80s and 90s with them. It also gave us Beth and Randall as the perfect modern OTP. It was basically crack to a baby Xer/geriatric millennial. I also loved that Randall and Jack were not the typical stereotypes of family men that you usually see on TV: they were decent, honorable men who were devoted to their families and didn’t see them as a burden. Now it seems that there’s an effort to twist Jack and Randall into these caricatures that we see on every other TV show and the writers don’t seem to want to spend the time in the past that they once did. I’ve been really unhappy with the vast majority of post-finale interviews that I’ve read because they aren’t talking about any plotlines that involve Jack and the only flashbacks they seem invested in are the post-Jack ones (which if what we’ve seen so far is any indication is going to prove to be really depressing). There are occasional mentions of going back to the seventies, but I’m not even sure they’re committed to that at this point.

On top of all of that, it appears that both Kate/Toby and Rebecca/Miguel are not OTPs we can count on in the future. I’m not sure what there is to look forward to.

All of this is why I’ve started to wonder if a plan to officially reduce Milo’s role in the show is why it still hasn’t been officially renewed. I can tell you with confidence that if they go ahead with this I will stop watching. Hopefully I’m just being paranoid and the show can get back on track. But at this point I’m very cautious.