Ms. Marvel's Superpower Retcon Is More Bad News For Agents Of SHIELD

Ms. Marvel appears to be retconning the titular character’s powers, and the specific way it’s doing so is even more bad news for Agents of SHIELD. Despite being the first show in the MCU, there has been less and less connectivity between Agents of SHIELD and the MCU over the years to the point where many people have declared the show to no longer be canon. Ms. Marvel doesn’t appear to be helping in that regard, as the way that Kamala Khan’s powers have been changed clashes with a major story element of Agents of SHIELD.

In the comics, Kamala Khan was an Inhuman, a subset of humanity created through the experiments of the Kree, and after going through Terrigenesis, she gained the ability to stretch her limbs and change her size at will. However, the first trailer for the upcoming Ms. Marvel series has revealed that instead of her iconic stretching powers, Kamala has energy-like abilities that she obtains from wearing a pair of bangles that are likely based on the Nega-Bands of the original Captain Marvel in the comics. Assuming that there isn’t any sort of twist later down the line, it’s likely that Kamala won’t be an Inhuman in Marvel's Ms. Marvel and will instead be a human with powers derived from some form of technology.

Kamala’s powers being changed in such a way can have a lot of consequences going forward, and one of them is making it even more difficult for Agents of SHIELD to be canon. The Inhumans were initially introduced to the MCU in Agents of SHIELD and were a vital part of the series for the majority of its run. As such, there was an easy chance for the MCU to reference the show in some way with Kamala Khan, but if Ms. Marvel is making such an iconic Inhuman in the comics a normal human in the MCU, then that’s less likely to happen, and that, in turn, makes Agents of SHIELD issues with canonicity even worse.

At the beginning of Agents of SHIELD, there was a good amount of connectivity between the show and the movies. This mostly involved a range of references made within the show, but one notable tie-in to the movies was in season 2 when Team Coulson were the ones to tell the Avengers about the Hydra base they attacked in Avengers: Age of Ultron and how Phil Coulson gave Nick Fury the Helicarrier he commanded in the climax. Season 6, however, complicated things with how it seemed to completely ignore the events of Avengers: Infinity War, despite referencing them in season 5. That, combined with a lack of acknowledgment from the film itself, started the idea that Agents of SHIELD wasn’t canon in the MCU.

With Kamala Khan being an Inhuman, there was an easy opportunity for Agents of SHIELD’s canon status to be re-established by way of Ms. Marvel, but the retcon to Kamala’s powers works against that. Kamala no longer being an Inhuman means that they’re unlikely to be used in the wider MCU anytime soon, and that, in turn, creates even less connective tissue between the show and the movies. The Netflix shows were recently reinforced as canon thanks to Daredevil appearing in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Kingpin appearing in Hawkeye, so something like that could happen later down the line, but there’s no way of knowing for sure if anything of the sort will actually happen.

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