Each of the first two episodes of Secret Invasion had a surprise ending, first the bad surprise that ended “Resurrection,” then the intriguing surprise that ended “Promises.” This week, “Betrayed” doesn’t so much end as stop, and it’s an extremely jarring end to an episode that, like last week, does a good job with conversations if not necessarily plot, and which, like two weeks ago, continues a tired trope.
First off, let me correct a mistake I made last week. When the Skrull Brogan was interrogated—first by FSB, then by Sonya Falsworth—and then was freed, he told Gravik that he lied, but their safe house was blown anyhow. I must confess to totally missing that G’iah was the one who called in the location of the safe house, figuring that Gravik would blame Brogan for breaking under interrogation.
On the one hand, I like this, because it shows that torture doesn’t actually work as an interrogation tool. Any information you get is suspect, because the person in great pain will say anything to stop the pain. And someone who will say anything is probably saying nothing of consequence. The lie that torture works to get information is one that popular culture has perpetuating forever, especially over the last 22 years or so, and yes, I keep calling it out when I see it, and I will continue to do so until it, y’know, stops being perpetuated.
On the other hand, Gravik confronts G’iah by pointing out to her that Brogan couldn’t possibly have known where the safe house was. Which raises the question of why he killed Brogan in the first place. Gravik isn’t supposed to be that short-sighted or impulsive.
Indeed, he isn’t later in the episode, as he enacts a particularly nasty operation to cause the British Navy to fire on a UN target that almost works. Fury and Talos stop it with help from G’iah—which Gravik thought might be the case. And so Gravik intercepts G’iah before she can escape and shoots her dead.
While it’s an effective surprise to kill the character played by a famous person who has a prominent place in the opening credits halfway through the season, it isn’t a particularly pleasant one given that this is the third female character fridged in this series alone (after Soren off-camera before the series started and Maria Hill at the end of “Resurrection”). It’s a plot well the MCU has dipped into constantly of late, and it’s gone from tiresome into despicably offensive.
This series has been pretty nowhere when it comes to action sequences, and getting more nowhere as it goes along—wondering whether or not Talos, Fury, and G’iah would succeed in keeping the Royal Navy from firing didn’t exactly put the “art” in “artificial suspense”—but it does succeed in entertaining conversations, three in particular this week.
The first is the meeting between Talos and Gravik that the former requested last week, which is held in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The two meet in front of the Statesmen of World War I painting by John Guthrie, and then decamp to the museum café. This provides one of the best visuals of the series so far when Talos physically threatens Gravik, and then everyone in the café stands up and changes shape into Gravik’s form. Ben Mendelsohn beautifully plays Talos’ surprise that he’s surrounded by hostiles.
The second conversation is even better, as it’s between Talos and Fury as they’re on their way to waylay the Skrull posing as the commanding admiral of the Royal Navy. (The admiral’s name is Robert Fairbanks, and I don’t know why, but Fury and Talos constantly referring to him as “Bob” cracked me the hell up. It isn’t even that funny, but it just worked for some stupid reason.)
What’s compelling about this particular talk is the fact that any time you put two greats like Mendelsohn and Samuel L. Jackson together, it’s bound to be golden. The banter between the two is fantastic. And it also makes explicit what the series has implied for the past two episodes. Yes, Fury is a badass, but one of the reasons why he was able to rise to the position of Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. after being a middling field agent in 1995 is because he had a score of Skrulls secretly helping him out.
This raises more than a few questions, of course. For starters, if Talos, Soren, and the others were such hot shit, how did they totally miss that Hydra had so thoroughly infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. (as revealed in Captain America: The Winter Soldier)? Plus, it reduces Fury as a character. Instead of being the brilliant strategist who singlehandedly formed the Avengers by sheer force of will, he’s a Black guy who cheated his way to the top with the help of a character who presents as White.
And yes, I know, Talos isn’t really White, but it’s the optics that are bad here. We’ve already got the “good” Skrull presenting as a middle-aged White dude while the “bad” Skrull presents as a person of color. That same “White” guy is shown to be the real power behind a Black character we all saw as badass for fifteen years. (Talos even forces Fury to say the words, “Help me, Talos, because I am useless without you,” which makes for a good laugh line, but borders on character assassination in context.) All this on top of the women dropping like flies.
Although the woman we met for the first time last week proves fascinating, and provides our third good conversation. It turns out that in 1998, Fury and one of his Skrull agents, who presents as a Black woman named Priscilla, started a relationship. Fury resisted at first, as he’s her boss, but since their little cabal of Skrull spies didn’t officially exist, there was nothing to stop them from becoming a couple.
Which they have. But first Fury was snapped by Thanos, and then he was returned by the Blip, at which point he buggered off into space. So he left her twice over, the second time voluntarily. She still loves him, but she’s pissed at him. And we find out at the end that she’s apparently also working for Gravik.
Charlayne Woodard does a superlative job as Priscilla, showing at once her anguish, her anger, her pain, and also her love and her skill.
Let’s hope she’s not killed, too…
This and That
- At one point, Gravik shows Rosa’s work to the members of the Skrull Council, which we find out the full story behind: she’s trying to create Skrulls that have super-powers beyond that of shapechanging, so that they can handle Earth’s superheroic population. Gravik calls them “Super-Skrulls.” This is a direct reference to the comics character Kl’rt, a.k.a. the Super-Skrull. Introduced in 1963’s Fantastic Four #18 by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby as a Skrull genetically engineered with the powers of all four members of the FF, Kl’rt has remained a major Marvel bad guy for all six decades since. Since the FF haven’t truly been introduced into the MCU yet, it’s obvious that they’re using the four computer records G’iah saw last week (Groot, the Extremis Project, the Frost Giants, and Cull Obsidian) as the template for the MCU’s version of the Super-Skrull. They’re not quite analogues for the FF, truly, but I guess they’ll do…
- When Talos contacts G’iah to get the code word Fairbanks would use to abort the missile strike, she goes into a room full of unconscious humans whose memories are being mined. We see several people whose Skrull counterparts are part of the Skrull Council (but not Everett Ross, because that would mean paying for another Martin Freeman appearance). So this means that the people the Skrulls have replaced are still alive, at least.
- The Skrull posing as Fairbanks captures Talos and tries to fool Fury into thinking that he’s Talos and has captured Fairbanks. But he refers to Fury as “Nick,” which clues Fury in to the fact that it’s a fake. This is a cute callback to Captain Marvel, where the fact that nobody calls him “Nick” was also a plot point. (Though people have referred to him as “Nick” here and there in other MCU productions that predate Captain Marvel; still, he’s mostly referred to as “Fury”…)
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author and musician guest at Shore Leave 43 this weekend at the Delta Hotel by Marriott in Hunt Valley, Maryland. He will be doing various bits of programming, and also playing a concert with his band, Boogie Knights. In addition, he’s launching two anthologies: Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups, which he co-edited and has a story in, and Sherlock Holmes: Cases by Candlelight Volume 2, which he also has a story in. There will be another cool reveal at the show as well. His entire schedule can be found here.
