One of the reasons why Marvel Studios doing TV shows on Disney+ was so compelling a notion back when they were first announced as part of Phase 4 was because it promised opportunities to do things the movies didn’t have the storytelling space for. It also would enable secondary characters to get a spotlight.
As we finish off this season of Secret Invasion, the biggest takeaway I have from it is that this would’ve worked so much better if it had been a movie. Which marks the first time since WandaVision debuted in 2021 that I have thought that about an MCU Disney+ show.
The second biggest takeaway, sadly, is that this episode feels like the first episode of a much more interesting show than the one we’ve been saddled with the past month and a half. I have no idea if season two of Secret Invasion is even going to be a thing, but despite my disappointment with most of the first season, I would very much like to see a second one, only to see if the promise of this final episode could be fulfilled.
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Although if it does happen, I would hope they got new writers, because the ones responsible for this season (under the direction of show-runner Kyle Bradstreet) did a poor job of fulfilling promises.
The whole premise of Secret Invasion (both the original comics series and this TV show) is that Skrulls are everywhere and have infiltrated the planet Earth and we don’t know who’s a Skrull and all that. We don’t know who to trust. And yet, with the exception of Everett Ross, who’s revealed as a Skrull at the very beginning of the premiere episode “Resurrection,” and Rhodey, whose replacement with a Skrull was a genuine shock in “Beloved,” there are no surprises here. Every Skrull is pretty much revealed straight off.
Worse, the series kills off two really strong supporting characters for no compellingly good reason. Cobie Smulders’ Maria Hill—who has been a steady presence in the MCU since 2012’s Avengers—is dispatched at the end of “Resurrection,” and then Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos—who was delightful in Captain Marvel and whose cameo in Spider-Man: Far from Home promised further delight in subsequent MCU appearances—is similarly dispatched in “Beloved.” In both cases, it was hoped that the deaths would be meaningful: Hill’s death would be a kick in Fury’s hindquarters and get him back to his badass self, and Talos’ death while saving the life of the President of the United States would be a step toward reconciliation between humans and Skrulls.
Neither promise is fulfilled even a little bit. Fury’s return to badassitude doesn’t happen until the end of last week’s “Harvest,” and Talos’ role in saving President Ritson’s life is never even mentioned.
I will give this finale credit for fulfilling one promise, at least: the climactic fight is indeed between G’iah and Gravik, the two Skrull children who grew up on Earth and who initially were allies and are now enemies—and both of them have the powers of multiple Avengers and Thanos henchthugs. It’s fun watching them each play around with different powers, from the Hulk’s strength to Ebony Maw’s telekinesis, though my favorite was G’iah cleverly using Mantis’ abilities to temporarily put Gravik to sleep.
The setup for that scene is well handled, also, though it also points up to a major frustration. We see Fury driving up to the Skrull HQ in the Russian nuclear power plant, and Fury is coughing and choking down pills to stave off the radiation poisoning. There are also a ton of Skrull corpses littered about, the results of Gravik putting down a mutiny. We do, finally, get Gravik’s motivations and they make some sense. The face Gravik has taken on is that of the first human he killed at Fury’s direction, and Gravik is pissed that Fury turned him into a killer while never actually finding him and his people a homeworld.
Then Fury admits that he’s tired and sick of it all. He says his first thought when he was blipped in the after-credits scene in Avengers: Infinity War was relief that he didn’t have to fight anymore.
But then, after Gravik sticks the Harvest in the microwave and gives himself the powers of all those people, we find out that “Fury” is actually G’iah. So all those revelations about Fury didn’t come from Fury at all. Now, it’s possible that Fury coached G’iah on what to say, but we don’t know. It’s maddening.
(It’s also not at all clear why Fury and Carol Danvers couldn’t actually find a homeworld for the Skrulls. The galaxy is littered with TONS of planets. Surely one of them would work. Then again, the MCU’s absolute weak point has been its total lack of understanding of how space and the galaxy and the universe all work.)
Fury himself is instead working with Falsworth to expose Rhodey as a Skrull, a scene that makes absolutely no sense in execution. It starts out fine, with Falsworth calling Rhodey to tell him that Fury is on the way and to move the president, which causes enough chaos for Fury and Falsworth to take out Ritson’s security detail and put a gun to Rhodey’s head.
And then the characters all just stand there with their thumbs in their ears. We established last episode—when Falsworth shot Tony Curran’s character—that wounding Skrulls can expose their alien nature. So why not shoot Rhodey in the leg? Instead, they stand around trying to verbally convince Ritson that Rhodey’s a Skrull. Then Rhodey himself takes Falsworth’s gun (which he could’ve easily done minutes earlier) and Fury shoots him in the head. So why didn’t anyone shoot him sooner?
Okay, one other promise is fulfilled, though it’s a minor one: Fury and Priscilla—or, rather, Varra—kiss when the latter is in her Skrull form. Fury never answered Varra’s question as to whether or not he’d still love her if she wasn’t in the form of a human woman, and this finally gives us the answer, and it’s very touching. Charlayne Woodard has been phenomenal in the skillfully retconned role of Fury’s wife, and I hope we see more of her.
Though that scene also comes with its own frustrations. Fury is on his way back to S.A.B.E.R. to negotiate with the Kree, who have agreed to possibly give the Skrulls a home. And this happens off-camera. The Kree-Skrull conflict has been a recurring theme in Marvel Comics since the late 1960s, and it formed the spine of Captain Marvel. The lack of any Kree is one of the many disappointments in this show.
Meantime, Ritson has declared war on the millions of Skrulls still living incognito on Earth, and we see commando raids on various Skrulls—as well as vigilantes taking people out who they think are Skrulls. And Falsworth recruits the now-super-powered G’iah to help her keep the planet safe and fight back against Ritson’s war on Skrulls. That’s a show I’m very interested in watching. I particularly like Falsworth’s response to G’iah pointing out that her father accepted a similar offer thirty years earlier and it ended badly: she says that they’ll keep love and friendship out of it. “I will use you and you will use me.”
If nothing else, Secret Invasion has given us Olivia Colman’s magnificent Falsworth, and I really hope this is the first of many appearances she makes in the MCU.
I also hope Fury’s snide comment to Ritson about how his response to the Skrull threat is the sort of thing that makes you a one-term president come true. Dermot Mulroney has been precisely nowhere in the role, and Ritson has evinced no personality or interest whatsoever. William Sadler was much better casting as President Ellis back in Iron Man 3 (a role he returned to in three episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), but that was a decade ago, so there needed to be a new president.
With a proper movie budget, this could have been a taut two-hour spy thriller. Instead, it’s a drawn-out mess that gets rid of two fine characters to no good end. What should’ve been a long-overdue spotlight for one of the MCU’s best presences in Samuel L. Jackson’s Fury winds up reducing the character, establishing that his previous badassitude was due to having an army of Skrulls at his beck and call.
One thing that this show could have done with the extra storytelling space is deal with the theme of Fury coming back to himself after the Blip messed with his head. Alas, it’s never properly developed. Another promise unfulfilled.
This and That
- Martin Freeman shows up for several seconds as the real Everett K. Ross, freed along with the other folks the Skrulls replaced. If nothing else, this reassures us that the real Ross is still around.
- In addition, the real Jim Rhodes is freed. In a nice touch, he needs help to get out of the base after he’s freed because his legs don’t entirely work right after his injuries in Captain America: Civil War. By the way, yet another unfulfilled promise of this show is having Don Cheadle in it and never once having him suit up as War Machine.
- There is no post-credits scene. I was hoping for, at the very least, something that would tease Fury’s next appearance in The Marvels, especially since the post-credits scene in the final episode of WandaVision had a Skrull bringing Monica Rambeau to Fury. Sigh.
- In case it wasn’t obvious, the titles I used for these six reviews were all movies (and, in many cases, also either books or TV shows) that have the word “spy” in the title replaced with the word “Skrull.” I’m very pleased with myself for finding myself able to use ones that actually fit the episode in question, all the way up to this one that has a big fight between two Skrull kids who grew up angry…
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be in Booth 243 of the exhibit hall at GalaxyCon Raleigh this coming weekend in North Carolina, where he’ll be selling and signing his books and comics, as well as some hand-made stuffies created by his wife Wrenn Simms. Come by and say hi!
