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“I don’t see what the whole fuss is about,” Sana (Samina Ahmad) says with an amusingly dismissive tone. 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. 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. Muneeba gets some much-needed downtime with her mother, shedding light on their dynamic (and her childhood love of toffee). What makes the episode work more than anything else is its characters. 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. 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. 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. 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 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.

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. 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. Another is set at a classified Department of Damage Control (DODC) black site to reintroduce the show’s antagonists.

One opens in the air right before Kamala Khan lands in Pakistan for the first time. All but three scenes of “Seeing Red” take place in Karachi.