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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The Archive Undying
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!
Oh, I see now, with the titles. I was thrown off by “I, Skrull” because I Spy doesn’t have a comma (since it’s a verb there) and was thinking it was a reference to I, Robot or I, Claudius or something, which I couldn’t understand.
And One Spy Too Many is a deep cut. That was the European theatrical version of The Man from UNCLE‘s second-season 2-parter “Alexander the Greater Affair,” with new footage shot to make it racier and more violent. https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/the-man-from-uncle-season-2-affair-one-spy-too-many-and-overview-spoilers/
Anyway, this was a mediocre finale to what was easily the weakest of the Disney+ MCU series. It took some really weird swerves. So now there’s a single Super-Skrull on Earth with the powers of all the Avengers and several of their enemies combined? Doesn’t that make the Avengers redundant? That’s just too much power to give to one character, one who seems unlikely to play a major role going forward. And the resolution to the Skrull conflict is just to make things worse? That’s a deeply unsatisfying ending.
There were some good character moments over the series, some really strong dialogue exchanges between strong actors, but the characters ultimately weren’t well-served. As for Sonya Falsworth, I agree Colman was entertaining in the role, but I didn’t care for the way she was written, which just came off as trying too hard to make her a quirky, cheerfully ruthless spymaster and ended up being somewhat caricatured.
Also, Skrull Rhodey was written as such a blatantly bloodthirsty and cruel person (like the “stupid pills” crack at an accomplished female admiral) that I was expecting Ritson to realize James Rhodes was a better man than that and that Fury and Falsworth were telling the truth. Instead they just made Ritson an idiot for the sake of a bizarrely grim ending.
Also, doesn’t it feel badly timed right now to release a series whose message is “No, we shouldn’t see Russia as a military aggressor?” It’s not the first thing in this series that feels like an echo of right-wing propaganda.
@00 / KRAD:
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.
Well, we know from the pre-release material for Thunderbolts and Cap 4 that Thunderbolt Ross will be POTUS by late Phase 5. So, Fury’s comments are obviously setting that up.
I still disagree that Fury having a network of Skrull spies at his disposal somehow reduces the character, regardless of Talos’ efforts to talk up their no doubt significant achievements in his service. Fury’s always had an entire agency of human spies at his disposal, after all. The Skrulls were just one more tool in his toolbox. He’s still a badass.
I agree with the rest of the review though. This would definitely have been better as a film, since it cost as much as one anyway ($212 million, reportedly). At least two episodes felt pretty extraneous, and the action never felt as big as it was trying to be. This show rarely if ever felt as cinematic as previous Disney MCU shows. Going all in on a film might have helped.
I will say that at least Kingsley Ben-Adir, who has done nothing for me all season, at least ended up getting one good scene, though it was slightly diminished by the fact that it wasn’t actually Fury that Gravik was having it out with. I wasn’t bowled over by the super-Skrull punch-up that followed, but at least it had one or two clever beats. Of course this means that G’iah is now one of the most powerful superheroes on the planet, so it will be interesting to see how that works going forward.
I do hope we get more info on how long Rhodey was a prisoner. Since his legs are still injured, has he been a Skrull since after Civil War? That would be an enormous revelation if true.
This show has just been incoherent from beginning to end. It’s a show about avoiding war with Russia and how they’re not warmongers right after they invaded a sovereign nation and everything they’ve been up to since. It’s a show that has the gall to end on humanity engaging in genocide (which could be a horrible downer ending) but only after the refugees tried to commit genocide first. Gravik’s insane ramblings going from Point A of Fury using them as wetworks people to Point B of genocide have no connective tissue. Plus, Giah apparently has all the powers of Carol Danvers, who is already their Superman.
But most of all, what was the point?
@3/David Pirtle: “I will say that at least Kingsley Ben-Adir, who has done nothing for me all season, at least ended up getting one good scene, though it was slightly diminished by the fact that it wasn’t actually Fury that Gravik was having it out with.”
Hmm. I actually found Ben-Adir less satisfying to watch there than in previous episodes, since all he was doing was yelling, without much room for nuance or subtlety.
I’d like to be as positive about this finale as Krad but I think it was a pretty limp ending to a pretty limp series, again logic goes completely out of the window in this episode I am glad the nonsense about not wounding fake Rohdey is brought up in the main review as I was practically screaming the same thing at the screen for either Fury or Falsworth to shoot him in the leg, also the final boss fight between G’iah and Gravik as super Skrulls might be fun as they go though various Avenger powers but actually all either of them really needed to do was to immediately switch to Captain Marvel’s powers as those are clearly much more powerful than any others we saw.
Gravik failed completely in the show to emerge as a compelling villain at any point and might actually be one of the weakest villains in the whole franchise and that’s really saying something when you think about some of the forgettable villains in phase 1. Another annoyance We never got a resolution as to how long Rhodes and Agent Ross have been replaced, was it before or after their last appearances in the MCU?
The two moments of interest were towards the end, The President’s dog whistle racism call to eliminate aliens was sadly very believable and I think is clearly setting up the change of President for The Thunderbolts movie. Also as stated in the main review the teaming up of G’iah and Falsworth is intriguing (however I suspect this show failing might mean we never get to see that on screen)
So that’s Secret Invasion done and we are now three projects into Phase 5 of the MCU and Marvel have had one big hit with Guardians 3 and two big misses with Quantumania and Secret Invasion. They really need Loki season 2 and / or The Marvels to hit the bullseye as with the Hollywood strikes those are likely to be the last Marvel projects we see for 12 months or more.
This really feels like a project that the Russo Brothers would have knocked out of the park, either as a series or a movie. Marvel needs to do what they can to get them back into the fold.
Far and away my least favorite of the Disney shows. The fridging of Maria Hill and Talos is pointless, the set up made no sense, and they didn’t do anything interesting with the premise. I mean, I get that actors and effects cost money, but the whole point of the comic was that a bunch of superheroes were really skrulls so it would have been nice to see something like that, especially for characters that were a bit off in their last movies (hello Thor Love & Thunder)
Speaking of Thor, one of his primary power seems to be the ability to take insane amounts of damage- extended direct blast from a neutron star, getting repeatedly punched in the face by a berserk Hulk. I don’t buy that you can just have a hole blasted through you if you are rocking Thor powers.
In any case, I thought this was going to be the MCU taking another crack at a spy thriller, instead we just got a whole lot of meh
I wonder if someone can fan-edit the show into the taut, 2 hour spy movie that Keith mentioned…
@1 ChristopherLBennett I found the whole original comics series it is based on to be right-wing propaganda trash – they turned the Skrulls into jihadi space Muslims, it played into “great replacement” nonsense, and Fury’s big mic drop moment in it was a litteral Neo-Nazi meme “My God has a hammer”.
Maybe Marvel got worse afterwards (I stopped reading comics for a good part of the decade after SI and OMD) but I think of it as the low point of their post 2001 right-wing Perlmutter lurch.
I was hopeful that this series would be better than this, and maybe fix some of the unpleasant aspects of the comic, and I enjoyed a lot of it, especially the chemistry between Jackson and Mendelsohn, but it was a real mess beyond anything some good performances could fix, and “refugees are terrorists and invaders” is a plain terrible central message for the series to send. I also found the reshoots/ restructuring was even more obvious than FATWS – a bit of wired editing and ADR to make the Flag Smashers “villains” sticks out less to me than forgetting that the bombs your main character fails to stop exploding in Moscow (which appears to be on the Calder rather than the Moskva in the MCU) are supposed to be “dirty” bombs all in the just the first episode.
The whole series seemed to not know it’s purpose other than to fill time between movies, and the ongoing “yes, but both sides have a good point” centrism of Marvel felt particularly distasteful in this case.
It all just felt sloppy and rushed to me, while the big plot points like killing Maria Hill, killing Talos, “killing” Gi’ah, the Priscilla /Vara reveal, the threat of nuclear war, the Harvest, the Super-Skrulls, the Extra-Super-Skrulls, Fury “suits up”, and the President turning into a more genocidal version of Bush 2 at the end, all seemed like throwing everything at the wall in the hopes that something would stick at become a cultural “water cooler” moment that people would talk about, à la “what is love?” from WandaVision, but none of it landed.
The near total absence of advertising for the show also hasn’t helped it – the Marvel Unlimited app seemed to be the only Disney related media platform that even acknowledged it existed – though before it started I read somewhere that the lack of promotion was mainly due to so much of the series relating to Russia even after reshoots that Disney decided to go for a “low key” advertising strategy (again, apparently, a whole subplot involving Ukraine was removed, so I was surprised “Russia is massing troops on the Ukrainian boarder” made it into the last episode).
And even it being a lead into The Marvel’s seems odd now – a reference to “Kree peace talks” when we already know the Kree are the villains again in the next film is weird, and seems there just as a way of getting rid of the Skrulls off screen in a “Poochie died on the way back to his home planet” way, and so have fewer people in green makeup on S.A.B.E.R. than we saw in Far From Home – which also seems odd and out place now, along with “Kree Infiltration Teams” that seemed to be setting up this series, which I can’t understand why they didn’t use as it wouldn’t have required trying to retcon the Skrulls when you already have a human looking Imperialist Expansionist Evil Empire (not almost extinct refugees escaping from that empire), would have made a lot more sense on a TV series budget as wouldn’t need shape shifting super-powers, and crucially would have prevented the massive plot hole of “we can’t possibly tell who’s a Skrull, despite the fact a simple The Thing style blood test will reveal it, or in a emergency shooting someone in the leg will do” – something that’s not only a plot point in the comics, but is demonstrated in the show (as Krad pointed out in the review, but it’s been bothering me all season!)
I find the ending to be one of the most perplexing things. From the way his foreign policy is presented and behavior, the President is probably a Democrat and there’s no way in hell that President Thunderbolt Ross is anything other than a Republican.
So…the alien genocide is done by a Democrat and it results in the election of a Republican President due to backlash against killing aliens. Which fine, neither party endorses alien genocide in real life, but still fits with the weird politics of the show.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe they don’t have our parties in the MCU. I overthought what party US Agent was by the fact that he went to a historically 99% Democratic school.
Still.
The end of the series was supposed to lead to CA4 and Armor Wars, but I don’t see it. What I do see are hints if MI:13 and Black Air, and of G’iah being a stand in for the Sentry, so perhaps this gets continued in Thunderbolts.
The MCU is supposed to get into the Kree-Skrull war, supposedly in Armor War.
Falsworth was supposed to be a LeCarré kind of character, but she’s straight out of Mick Herron.
I think this is the series where we can finally say that the MCU has jumped the skrull . . . er. . . shark.
@12/Steven: “The MCU is supposed to get into the Kree-Skrull war, supposedly in AC.”
What’s AC? It can’t be Agent Carter, and the only upcoming thing that remotely fits is Agatha: Coven of Chaos.
@13/mwschmeer: One bad series doesn’t necessarily reflect on the wider franchise. There have been duds before, notably Iron Fist season 1 and Inhumans (both from the same showrunner). So there’s still a good chance this is an exception.
@10 / vegandanimal:
I found the whole original comics series it is based on to be right-wing propaganda trash – they turned the Skrulls into jihadi space Muslims, it played into “great replacement” nonsense, and Fury’s big mic drop moment in it was a litteral Neo-Nazi meme “My God has a hammer”.
Maybe Marvel got worse afterwards (I stopped reading comics for a good part of the decade after SI and OMD) but I think of it as the low point of their post 2001 right-wing Perlmutter lurch.
I mean, to play devil’s advocate, I’m not sure how much of that aspect of SI was Perlmutter.
The Skrulls were born out of the Sixties and the Cold War; they were alien, ‘the Other’ hidden among us as us, planning our destruction, etc Bendis was arguably just updating that foundation for the new millennium (much in the same way Warren Ellis updated Tony’s origin to Afghanistan from Vietnam).
IIRC, Bendis also cited the then-ongoing Battlestar Galactica reboot as another influence on Veranke and her faction.
But anyway, SI was the point where I also checked out from Marvel for a while. The buildup was more fun than the actual event and I soured on Bendis for a long time.
The series got better as it went along, but didn’t ever get good, just less mediocre. Fury started in space with no solution for a skrull homeland, and ended up the same way. Although he did show he loved his wife even with her makeup off.
The show gets a solid ‘meh’ from me, unfortunately.
@16/Alan: I wouldn’t say it got better as it went; if anything, I think it got worse. The last episode was probably the weakest and most pointless.
But really, the whole thing’s been incoherent, ever since the first episode where they said the Skrulls were building dirty bombs, and then they just turned out to be big conventional bombs without any radiation hazard involved. Then they set up this whole council of Skrull infiltrators in important positions and then don’t do anything with them after they appoint Gravik their leader.
I wonder if this is a consequence of the studios trying to kill writers’ rooms. This story arc needed a lot more breaking than it evidently got (in the weirdly oxymoronic vernacular of screenwriting where you need to break a story in order to assemble it).
@17 / CLB:
I wonder if this is a consequence of the studios trying to kill writers’ rooms. This story arc needed a lot more breaking than it evidently got (in the weirdly oxymoronic vernacular of screenwriting where you need to break a story in order to assemble it).
Yeah, given how MS creative talent has been stretched thin with all their projects in the pipeline, it feels like this is the one that ended up suffering.
Whether SI is remembered as the big bomb of Phase 5…well, don’t forget Echo is still coming up — and everything I’m hearing through the grapevine is that the advance screenings were enough of a disaster that MS was seriously considering axing the series as a tax write-off (at least before the Strike.)
If I’m being charitable, I’ll say this show fell victim to circumstances more than most.Radical script changes where the invading Skrulls are originally a warrior sect before becoming disgruntled refugees; The pandemic dictating the style of show in terms of filming logistics, being just two.
There are a lot of good ideas in the show, most of which are sadly under-developed. For example, an attempt to portray the effects of dying and being reborn five years later in a realistic traumatic way (Fury is obviously not the man he was post-snap, and rediscovers his purpose by re-establishing his relationship with his wife); The optimism of Talos in believing that humanity will accept alien immigrants in opposition to the cynical and xenophobic attitudes of seemingly everyone else, his death leading to Talos becoming an example of peace and sacrifice to the Skrulls and humanity, instead of the Skrulls just turning on Gravik out of self-preservation, and humans turning genocidal due to fear and revenge.
The strength of the show lay in the character scenes, obviously, leading to my feeling that a 4 episode Secret Invasion dealing in depth with the aftermath of alien encounters (The battle of New York, and the five years of the blip) would have worked better in terms of the series being a prelude to later shows and movies.
In closing, the show is, unfortunately, a missed opportunity to do something different than the usual Marvel movie formula, an attempt to create something serious for an adult audience transformed into a disjointed mess of real-life politics and lacklustre action sequences.
Killed Maria Hill and Talos for no reason, but don’t forget Soren. Talos & Soren appeared at the end of SM:NWH looking like they would be a great pair of supporting characters, and then I was sure that was Soren recruiting Monica Rambeau at the end of Wandavision. But, oh well, she died offscreen of some unknown cause.
Evil overlords should not randomly kill their minions, and screenwriters should not randomly destroy characters without having a damn good story reason.
I’m glad I saw Kingsley Ben-Adir acting goofy in Barbie, so I won’t hate the actor as much as I hated this dumb villain. His actions made no sense, he was a mess of toxic masculine attitude but had no other interesting traits, and he mumbled.
@14 Christopher
AC was my brain rendering down due to heat. Obviously I had air conditioning on the brain. I’ve corrected the post — I meant Armor Wars. Spelled it out this time.
I’ve been wandering around all day thinking about this thing and rewriting it in my head. Pointless, of course.
Yes a mediocre show. Mainly,I think, because the writers did not know how to do a spy show nor an angsty conspiracy show, which would be a fit for the premise. Instead they decided to go for a supervillain wirh all the super powers, so they cab have a fight with hinself (another person with the same powers). This undermined the structure of the show (and I agree the last ten ninutes would have been the better series).
I know thats not important overall, but i have to point out how incredible stupid it is having a genetic formula for superpowers? And are triggering them one by one? What will hapoen uf i activate my “peer-gene”? Also: if the computer can recognize all the genes in the harvent that means all the ibformation is in there already…
The main problem -apart from havibg veen a dissapointment- however are the implication of having a superavenger now and having the means of creating an unlimited supply of Carol Danvers. I dont think anyone at Marvel wants to really aknowledge the implucations of that….
The one thing I’ll give them is that the new character they introduced with world-shattering superpowers is probably not interested in dealing with standard superhero-movie problems, particularly if the victims are American. Otherwise, I have to reluctantly conclude that a paranoid thriller about shapeshifting aliens was done better by the third season of Star Trek: Picard.
I was going to complain about G’iah’s Drax arm having his red markings on it, because I always thought they were ritual scarring, not a genetic trait. But the MCU Wiki says they’re an innate Kylosian attribute. So at least I learned something from this mess.
I still think it looked silly for the Super-Skrulls to just transform their arms into other characters’ arms. It’s consistent with how Super-Skrulls are portrayed in the comics, but it looks awkward brought to “life.”
@Moderators
In paragraph seven, the sentence
should be
I have that same complaint and the red markings were just a part of it, Hulk and Captain Marvel both got their abilities by powerful mcguffins, with hulk being a one time influence and CM’s having a direct link to an infinity pool of power via an infinity stone (which from my understanding doesn’t even exist now).
@26/Adam Selvidge: I can buy that the Hulk’s abilities are a genetic mutation, especially given that his blood can turn other people into Hulks. But you have a point about Captain Marvel — if her power comes from the Infinity energy within her, there’s no reason it would be passed on genetically.
I agree, this season would’ve been better as a two hour movie.
#25 Yes Ebony Maw, but it doesnt really make sense, since he was portrait as a space wizard and wizardry is portrait as a akill,not a genetic trait.
#26/AdamSelvidge
I can stretch (hard) to handwave Captain Marvel’s powers as having been written into DNA because of her exposure to Kree genetics with a boost from the Tesseract. Scientifically it’s senseless, but, eh, these films are at least as big a fantasy as the comics, with science fiction riding in the rumble seat.
The more I think about it, the more annoyed I get. Not only should this have connected to CA4 and AW, it should have *clearly* set up the Sentry, MI:13, Black Air, Pete Wisdom, a version of Excalibur, and provided an on-ramp to Captain Britain…especially as we’re now All Multiverse, All The Time (you’re going to do the multiverse and not bring in Otherworld and the Captain Britain Corps?)
So many misses.
I’m happy Kingsley Ben-Adir was in Barbie because it meant he got to have a memorable performance in a well received project.
The MCU’s history of presidents is baffling. If we’re including pre Disney+ tv, Ellis was President in 2012 but Obama was elected in 2008. Which means Obama was either impeached, retired early, or died. That also means two of the first three people of color to be President/VP left office early (since the VP was a villain). Ellis was replaced by Trump who was President when the blip happened. Then we have some time where it’s not clear who was President and now have Ritson in 2025. How does Ross become President, especially if he was Secretary of State? The next election would be 2028, unless the Blip completely upended when elections are, which is something I’d want to know if fictional Presidents are going to be important recurring characters in political dramas covering a number of years. If the election stayed the same, does that mean Ritson was removed from office/died so that Ross would be president before 2028? And if he did leave office early, what happened to the VP that Ross would take over? (If we don’t include tv, just the Trump part is removed. Obama definitely ran and probably won since there is an Obama reference in Winter Soldier.)
And in other concerning thoughts, if Ritson is a one term president, who was President from 2021-2025? Was Trump re-elected in 2020?
@32 follow up
Also if Rhodey WAS replaced in 2016, does that mean Gravik has been planning this for nine+ years? I got the impression this was started because of Endgame, but I could have misunderstood something. Feels like if he had access to Rhodey for that long, he should have been even further along. Also, if skrull blood looks different than human blood, how did none of the numerous doctors the skrull would have seen figured it out? Did she never get a paper cut at the office? Now I want something like The Americans about how a skrull kept her identity secret for nine years as a high ranking government official.
Giah just chilling on Earth when she is now the most powerful being in the universe with no one caring outside of one person is frustrating. She has the powers of every Avenger, Guardian, and Thanos cultist and it’s treated as no big deal! We were supposed to be impressed by Capt Marvel almost beating Thanos on her own, but now there’s someone with the same powers who’s way stronger than her and even though this is a direct set up for the Captain Marvel movie she won’t impact it at all!
This show made me question if Fury is the villain. He created Gravik by having a kid become a murdering spy and then instead of saving the skrulls he used, he left the planet while the president declared war on all aliens leading to more vigilante attacks than Gravik ever could (side question: is the US going to launch an attack on Norway since that’s where New Asgard is?). He doesn’t do jack to stop it and instead goes, “well when re-election comes you’re going to lose.” What a disappointment of a “hero.” It feels like none of this is going to be followed up or matter and it’s so frustrating.
Anyone else not convinced Gravik is dead? He has so many powers including regeneration and we only see him for a second or two with the hole. Same with the mom: I kept expecting it to be revealed she was alive, maybe even as a twist was working with Gravik. Feels even more disappointing now that it seems like the writing was earnest that she died off screen (although I still don’t believe it because no body, no death).
Sorry to “one more thing,” but how are all the humans that were replaced still alive? If the radiation poisoning is as bad as Gravik made it out to be, they should all be dead. Even if the machines protected humans from radiation while they were in a coma, the time it would take to get far enough away from a deadly power plant without Magical Iodine Pills is too long!
(also: if Giah has Black Panther’s dna, can she enter the mystical afterlife realm from those movies? And how did a skrull using computers from the 80s succeed at copying every known superpower while Shuri with all of Wakanda’s resources struggled to replicate the plant?)
So conversations about whether DNA can give you support powers aside, I was also not buying how well they could immediately use those powers. After all, some of the superheroes themselves had to train quite a bit with them. Secondly, you’d have to be intimately familiar with what powers you had at your disposal. The Mantis thing was cool, but does G’iah even know who that is? She was on Earth to help in Endgame but did they stick around long enough for anyone to really know all the Guardians? Fury might have gathered the Intel to find out, but why share that all with G’iah, even if she helped get the DNA? Has G’iah ever seen Mantis put anyone to sleep? No. So how does she immediately think that’s a thing she even CAN do, let alone know how to do it? Maybe you could say Fury told her in the cemetery what she needed to do (because his sources told him all about her powers), but even so.
Medical nitpick: the writers have absolutely no clue about radiation and its effects on the human body.
1.) Potassium iodide pills are not an all-purpose anti-radiation drug. They block the binding of radioactive iodine in the thyroid gland and decrease the risk of future thyroid cancer. That’s it. No magical radiation shielding effect.
2.) The immediate effects of radiation poisoning are not tremors and a cough. Retching, vomiting, and possibly reddening of the skin from cutaneous radiation syndrome. Not nearly as fun to watch on TV, I admit. And don’t even get me started about “tremors at the level of the heart.”
@36/DrDredd: Yeah, the way the pills were portrayed is bizarre. You have to keep taking them on a continuing basis or their protection immediately wears off? That’s sheer nonsense. That’s not how any pill works. At first I was willing to give it a pass because it was just G’iah pretending to be sick, but Gravik believed it was really Fury and that was how it would really work, and he’s been living with radiation long enough that he should know better.
I do think this could’ve been a film but it also in either form would’ve benefitted from real set-up establishing Skrulls on Earth in multiple projects — without necessarily giving away the extent of their infiltration or backstory.
Funny (odd funny, not hilarious funny) how the least compelling MCU Disney+ series — I get the sense, anecdotally — have been similar in tone and most closely related to the films: Secret Invasion [you are here] and Falcon and the Winter Solider. Not that mining the spy / political thriller / covert-ops genre(s) is necessarily a bad move, and Hawkeye might kinda fit in there. Loki, WandaVision, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and even Moon Knight have all gone farther afield from big-screen MCU storytelling, though, and/or explored new avenues in character, style, or background.
I agree that there were a lot of dropped balls during the series and that it leaves us in a place that future projects may not be prepared to explore. You can’t just put these developments on hold and not reference them in series and films in the interim waiting for another season, if that even was ever in the cards — unless it’s made clear that said next season picks up directly from this one, never mind what’s released in the interim, which isn’t likely and will only confuse the casual viewers, although I don’t know how many of those will have watched this show and so… Maybe the ramifications of the show get largely skipped over? Ugh.
Even though her first name wasn’t Jacqueline, by the way, I was hoping we’d get a scene where Olivia Colman’s Sonya Falsworth — who, much as I love her, I agree is perhaps a bit too much of a caricature or trope — uses her whimsical cadence to reply when someone remarks on her attitude, “Yes, I’m a real spitfire.”
@38/Arben: Ooh, you’re right — ideally, Secret Invasion should’ve been an arc planted through multiple projects and paying off in a climactic movie or miniseries, instead of just being done as this basically standalone thing that clumsily retcons in Rhodey having been a Skrull since at least Falcon & Winter Soldier (or whenever he was first shown walking normally). This was so mishandled that they shouldn’t have bothered to do it at all. I wonder if it was a casualty of COVID forcing them to cut back on cast crossovers and dial back their original plans. Not to mention the reshoots I gather they did to downplay the Russia/Ukraine stuff.
Yeah, this just kind of fizzled out to me. I guess it says something we didn’t even watch it until Thursday night as we didn’t feel that compelled to watch it on Wednesday (we had some other plans that night)
A few miscellaneous thoughts (many of which have been echoed here):
1)I definitely was a little uncomfortable by the (intentional or not) general idea this whole show rests on which is basically about how refugees are ‘hiding’ among us and will quickly turn terrorist/murderous.
2)I personally found Gravik to be a completely unsympathetic villain. Well, I do have some sympathy for his general childhood but – even with Nick (and Captain Marvel’s) failure…it’s just such a jump. And it’s just rich for him to whine about having to be a killer when in the next breath he’s bemoaning how the Skrull have lost their warring culture/heritage. And then they did the whole thing with making him turn on all of his loyal followers anyway…I just find him totally boring and cliche and I don’t care about him.
3)There is something interesting there with Nick’s admission that he knew he couldn’t find him a home, but chose to use them anyway, in part because he knew Earth wouldn’t be able to accept them, it’s somewhat undercut by it not even being Fury in the first place saying these things.
4)I did like the parts with Nick and Varra. I also think there is something tragic about Talos’s sacrifice to save the President going totally unnoticed and him being proven totally wrong. I am not sure if that was intentional though.
5)I totally agree that the confrontation with Sonya/Rhodey made zero sense given what we know of the characters. Why is Sonya suddenly shy about shooting somebody’s finger off?
6)How does the radiation poisoning not hurt all the other people being held in pods? And what ever happened to the dirty bombs?
7)I actually hated the Gi’ah/Gravik fight. Honestly, the powers are the least interesting thing about these characters to me, so the whole ‘woo, look at all the cool powers they have!’ thing is just…I don’t know, it feels self indulgent. And yeah, I don’t even want to go into the whole ‘this isn’t how genetics and phenotypes’ work thing regarding powers. I can handwave a little of it in terms of things like mutagenic effects, but some of these things (wizardy, Mantis’s sleep powers, etc) also seem like things you have to LEARN. And now, similar to the super serum we have another way of creating these ridiculously powered beings (but to an even bigger extreme). Although it looked to me like maybe Gi’ah destroyed the machine? I couldn’t really tell.
8)When Sonya recruited Gi’ah, I actually thought Val was going to show up – because she definitely seems to be working from a similar playbook. I am genuinely curious what their agenda are each going to be.
I don’t know – I didn’t hate the show by any means. I really enjoyed a lot of the character moments. I agree that it ends on an interesting point but I guess I wish more of the show had really been exploring that concept (maybe even without a big overarching villain) – finding the Skrulls a home while dealing with the suspicion of shape shifters. Which, if there are a million people held hostage in underground pods, maybe that’s not a totally unreasonable suspicion! We know Varra got consent, but did they all?
I don’t know…I guess it will be interesting to see where they go with all of this in future shows/movies. But I just don’t feel super satisfied by this or like it really lived up to expectations. I’ve seen a lot of reactors I follow have also felt similarly underwhelmed, even the ones that are a little more ‘go with the flow’.
Oh – and also – I want to congratulate you on the Spy Kids reference, hahahaha. My younger sister was right in the target demo for that so I have a lot of fond memories of that movie, haha. (Never bothered much with the sequels but I still think the first is solid.)
About time they gave Gravik a motivation. It’s a half-decent one, if rather too late to have any meaningful impact. Of course he’d feel anger at Fury for abandoning him and for making him the killer that he turned out to be. For what it’s worth, the actor sells the hell out of that scene. But as I myself pointed out early in the season, it makes no sense that the plan to find the Skrulls a new planet would be a failure so quickly. As pointed out above, it makes little to no sense given just how many habitable planets are out there, as seen in most Thor and Guardians movies. Either Fury took an F in astronomy, or Danvers failed to fulfill her promise to find one.
Plus, we have the out of the blue revelation that the Kree are ready to negotiate with the Skrulls for peace. That, plus the rather poor excuse for not finding another world for the refugees, and well, let’s just say that Secret Invasion’s sloppy plotting just dumped a lot of questions and responsibility for the upcoming The Marvels. I’m going into this next film expecting clear and concise answers as to what exactly Danvers has been up to, what the Kree have been up to, and why in the world the Skrull refugee situation was treated so poorly. This has me upset enough that I’m beginning to understand why Gravik became such a sociopath.
And for a show about Skrulls infiltrating the high ranks of mankind, including doing away with Rhodey and Everett Ross, I have to ask: where in the world was Valentina Allegra de Fontaine? You’d think a story involving spy work, worldwide nuclear threats and her CIA ex-husband disappearing from the each of the Earth would have her involved in some fashion. I mean, if there’s someone who could have given the show extra spark, it was Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
The episode is thankfully not a total loss. Fury’s reconciliation with Priscilla/Varra is a welcome conclusion to the Fury arc. And I like Fury’s willingness to embrace and kiss her alien-self. It speaks volumes of Marvel’s willingness to embrace cross-species relationships (the next logical step after embracing all human forms of love, no matter the gender).
And lastly, I really, really enjoyed the consequences from the Skrull attack on President Ritson. Violence and extremism can only generate further hate and violence. And Fury is the first one to call Ritson on his warmongering, anti-immigration BS. But dramatically, it really ups the stakes for the MCU as a whole. Could we get into a situation where the Avengers are forced to go against the White House? I’m eager to see if we get more Ritson on future shows/movies. This has potential.
Hey folks, please avoid references to current politics and politicians, so we don’t derail the conversation. Thanks!
Well plenty of others have pointed out numerous problems with how radiation works (magical pills and immune hostages) but there is another massive one that seems to have been missed – object contamination. The Skrulls may be immune to deadly levels of radiation but that does not mean that all their clothes and equipment are, heck, just because it does not damage them does not mean that they are not absorbing it and releasing it as they move about. Forget about removing fingers or blood, a Geiger counter will tell you if they’ve been living/working in a nuclear wasteland. Forget explosive dirty bombs, these Skrulls and everything on them are dirty drones spreading fallout with every step.
@45 And speaking of Geiger counters, why was G’iah/Fury even carrying one? Nobody was watching her as Fury, and she shouldn’t have cared how much radiation she was exposed to.
When they tried to frame Bucky for the death of the Wakandan King with nothing more than one of those ghost masks, one might think that people might be skeptical of someone caught on camera doing something that they should realize he would NEVER do. Especially when those in charge know there are at least a few shape-shifters on the planet. Tagging Fury a fugitive for the murder of Maria Hill simply made no sense.