If this week’s episode of Secret Invasion feels like it’s over quickly, that’s only because it is. At 38 minutes, it’s the shortest episode of any of the MCU’s one-hour Disney+ shows since WandaVision’s early episodes, which were aping the half-hour sitcom structure. (What If…? and She-Hulk, Attorney-at-Law were both half-hour shows.) However, once you get to the end, you can see why: they spent all their money on the big-ass fight scene at the end…
Of the four episodes of Secret Invasion so far, three have ended with a major character being shot and left for dead, including this one. Of the first two, one has been pretty clearly established as permanent, that being Maria Hill’s tiresome death in “Resurrection.” The other is G’iah, shot by Gravik at the end of last week’s “Betrayed.” This week, we kick off by finding out that G’iah was only mostly dead, not all dead. Off-camera last week, but shown in flashbacks this week, G’iah used the process Gravik described last week that would create Super-Skrulls on herself. So now she has a version of Extremis coursing through her body. We already know that Gravik has already used the process, as last week when Talos stabbed him in the hand, the Extremis effect was seen to heal him, and this week, Gravik uses both that and Groot’s plant-extending powers.
Anyhow, while we get G’iah back, we appear to lose Talos this week, as he’s shot in the midst of the aforementioned big-ass fight scene while trying to save President Ritson’s life, and Fury is forced to leave his at-the-very-least-unconscious form behind in order to get Ritson to safety. Talos was bleeding out slowly (reverting to Skrull form in bits and pieces, which is actually a very effective visual) before collapsing, and it’s possible he’s still alive, at least.
Talos also speaks to G’iah about what his plan is to counter what Gravik is planning, and his notion is cooperative, symbolic, hopeful, and also painfully naïve, especially in a world like the MCU that has a certain amount of mistrust of aliens (given in particular what happened in New York in 2012, which the episode itself reminds us of by having a flashback to Fury and Priscilla having a post-Avengers meet-up in Paris) and which also went through the Blip. It’s not clear what will happen with G’iah now, since she’s no longer on either Gravik or her father’s side.
Well, okay, it’s a little clear: since she and Gravik both have powers now (beyond shape-changing), they’re probably going to wind up confronting each other in the climactic superhero battle that this storyline really calls for, thus saving them from having to pay for a famous actor to show up in episode 6.
There are two other surprises this week, besides G’iah’s miraculous recovery from being shot in the chest, one a genuine surprise, one not so much.
The latter is that Priscilla is working for Gravik (which was pretty clear last week) and has actually been a deep-cover agent whose mission was to seduce Fury and be an asset who will keep track of what Fury is doing. However, she has genuinely fallen for Fury, and when they confront each other in the kitchen over tea, she makes it clear that she’s not going to kill him. She explains her reasoning, beyond the fact that she really loves Fury: the person whose face she took was a woman with a congenital heart defect, who had three dying wishes after she agreed to let a Skrull take over her life: to be buried at sea, to still be a daughter to her parents (both of which she has done), and to not hurt Fury.
Both Fury and Priscilla have pistols out on the table when they have this talk, and they fire their weapons off-camera, leaving us to—very briefly—wonder what’s happening. But we’re not kept in suspense long. They both deliberately had Greedo’s marksmanship and missed each other. It’s actually very sweet.
The other surprise was genuine: Rhodey, it turns out, is also a Skrull, and working for Gravik. He’s the one Priscilla was on the phone with last week being given an assassination assignment, and this week it’s made clear that her target is Fury—and Rhodey is the one giving her the assignment. To reinforce the point, we see “Rhodey” as a Skrull taking a shower then changing shape back into Don Cheadle. Fury shows up in Rhodey’s hotel room to share a bottle of expensive bourbon and try to mend fences—but it’s all a ploy to get Rhodey to drink a liquid tracker.
I will give the producers credit, I did not see that coming at all. Though it does take the wind out of the sails out of the conversation between Fury and Rhodey in “Promises,” as a big part of the appeal of that conversation was that it was between these two particular Black men who have had to struggle to succeed while being impeded by mediocre White men.
One-on-one conversations is still what Secret Invasion does best. As with the previous three episodes, “Beloved” is a mix of great conversations mixed with dopey action that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Both scenes with Fury and Priscilla—the flashback to 2012 and the confrontation in the kitchen—are magnificent. And for all that it mutes their previous tête-à-tête, the hotel room scene with Fury and Skrull!Rhodey is searingly good.
The tracker Fury puts in the fake Rhodey’s drink leads them to a presidential motorcade in Russia, with Ritson en route to a summit meeting with the Russian president. Gravik and his Skrulls pose as Russian soldiers who ambush the motorcade. The entire sequence is terrible, a loud, awful mess. What’s particularly absurd is that the Secret Service and U.S. military guarding Ritson are doing so poorly until Fury and Talos show up, and then suddenly they turn the tide, which is, um, not convincing.
Also, a major flaw in this entire ambush setup: how is Skrull!Rhodey supposed to explain why he didn’t put his armor on and defend the president? Indeed, the fact that we have yet to see the War Machine armor in a series for which Don Cheadle is in the opening credits is kinda ridiculous…
This and that
- The title of this week’s episode comes from Raymond Carver’s poem “Late Fragment.” It’s quoted by Fury and Priscilla twice, once in the 2012 flashback, and again in the present right before they pretend to shoot each other. The poem’s text is one person asking another if they got what they wanted from this life, with the other replying in the affirmative, for what they wanted was “To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth.”
- This series is the first time the Extremis project from Iron Man 3 has even really been mentioned since that now-ten-year-old movie. It’s kind of more surprising that nobody else has tried to revive it…
- When the Skrull changes shape into Rhodey after showering, my first thought was, “Okay, so that’s why he used to look like Terence Howard…”
- Now I’m wondering how long Rhodey has been a Skrull. I mean, isn’t that the sort of thing the doctors who treated him after his massive injuries in Captain America: Civil War would’ve noticed? Then again, the now-dead Skrull who posed as Everett Ross in “Resurrection” is probably a more recent infiltration (like, since Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), so it’s possible that Rhodey was replaced more recently also…
- Apparently Skrulls like good booze. Ritson can still smell the Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve on Skrull!Rhodey’s breath when the latter meets Air Force One in Russia, which leads to a rather cranky request by the fake Rhodey for a mint…
Keith R.A. DeCandido has stories in two new anthologies out now: Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups, which he also co-edited with Jonathan Maberry, and which features team-ups of classic characters (Keith paired H. Rider Haggard’s title character from She with the Yoruba goddess Egungun-oya), with other contributors including New York Times best-selling authors Kevin J. Anderson, Greg Cox, Delilah S. Dawson, Nancy Holder, David Mack, Jody Lynn Nye, Scott Sigler, and Dayton Ward; and Sherlock Holmes: Cases by Candlelight Volume 2, which has four tales of Holmes & Watson by Keith, Christopher D. Abbott, Michael Jan Friedman, and Aaron Rosenberg.
