Character Highlight: Talos (The Avengers)

*Talos-related spoilers for Captain Marvel and Secret Invasion.*

I’m on record as not having been that impressed with Secret Invasion, but I have enjoyed Talos throughout his regrettably limited time in the MCU, including in the series in question. We’ll talk a little about that today, at least the good bits, but I can say that one positive about the show is that it reminded me I’ve never done a write-up on Talos.

In Captain Marvel, Talos is introduced as the baddie. We learn about the Kree’s war with the Skrulls, and the inherent tension and paranoia that comes with fighting against them due to their shapeshifting abilities. And when the Skrulls come to Earth, it at first seems no different. From our perspective, we see Talos infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D. by assuming the guise of Fury’s boss. As Fury helps Carol attempt to protect Earth from the Skrulls while also digging into her own shrouded past, we’re primed to view Talos as the shadowy bad guy.

Side note: casting Ben Mendelsohn in this role demonstrates topnotch deployment of genre savvy. We know that Mendelsohn is known for playing villains, so when we see him playing an apparent villain, we have no reason to question it.

Except! Later in the film, it’s revealed that Talos’s mission on Earth is actually to recover a number of Skrull refugees in hiding, including his own wife and daughter. Through him, we learn that much of what we, and Carol, know about Skrulls is the product of xenophobic Kree propaganda. Rather than being untrustworthy monsters who vibe on taking over other people’s identities, the Skrulls have had to flee their home planet due to the relentless attacks by a race that’s determined to wipe them out. For the third act, Carol and Talos team up so she can help him rescue his waylaid people.

Through Secret Invasion, we’re given glimpses at what happens to Talos and the Skrulls in the long interim between the ‘90s and the 2020s. Fury makes way for the Skrulls to find asylum, in secret, on Earth, and in exchange, Talos vouches for him when he looks to recruit some of them for extra-covert S.H.I.E.L.D. operations. As Talos points out during one of their tenser moments, Fury rose through the ranks at S.H.I.E.L.D. thanks in part to intel gained by his top-secret squad of Skrull spies. And after all that the Skrulls have given him, he doesn’t seem to have made any progress on working with Carol to find them a permanent home.

So, as Gravik leads a radicalized group of disillusioned Skrulls in attacks on humanity, Talos condemns his actions but understands the pain and anger behind it. This places him in an incredibly difficult position on the show. He trusts and respects Fury and wants to help him, and of course he wants to stop Gravik, but it breaks his heart to think of the Skrulls that will be hurt or killed to accomplish that. Even though they’re very much in the wrong, he wants to see them brought to justice, not annihilated.

This inner conflict brings him at times into a more outward one with Fury, who’s more than willing to shoot, torture, and kill any Skrull who’s working with Gravik. Talos’s help is invaluable to Fury, as his shapeshifting allows them to infiltrate the scene of key extremist plots, but Fury thinks Talos is too soft, while Talos thinks Fury is too cavalier with Skrull lives. Essentially, everything Talos has been holding together for the last 30 years is on the brink of collapsing, and he sometimes feels like the only one who’s invested in preserving peace.

One small but significant moment that I love comes in the first episode, when Fury and Talos expose one of Gravik’s collaborators and pump him for info. The extremist attacks Talos, and a fight ensues. But when Fury kills the collaborator, Talos looks positively bereft as he simply, firmly states, “I said no.” He may have regrets about his choices over the years, and he may be naïve in his hope that everything will work out if the Skrulls can just demonstrate to world leaders that they’re good and useful, but I don’t envy the hard position he’s in here.

The Book of Rannells: Duncanville: Season 3, Episode 3 – “(Work) Marriage Story” (2022)

Okay, before I get started, can I just say: Our Flag Means Death trailer out today!!! I have been hyperfixating hard ever since the first look images came out, and I’ve really been waiting for this. New season October 5!

I’m holding off on Marvelous Wednesdays until tomorrow, since I already had this post in the can and I’ve had too long a day to write something new. I’d never heard of this animated family sitcom before seeing it on Andrew Rannells’ filmography, but apparently it ran for three seasons on Fox, and as recently as last year! Shows what I know.

Since I’m dropping into this episode with zero knowledge of the series, here’s what’s going on in this episode. In the central family, dad Jack has just learned about mom Annie’s “work husband” and is freaking out about it, while daughters Kimberly and Jing watch the ensuing trainwreck. Son Duncan thinks he and his friends have it made when their favorite chill teacher is promoted to vice principal.

For a show I’d never heard of, I caught a lot of familiar voices in the cast. Ty Burrell voices Jack, while Amy Poehler plays both Annie and Duncan (she’s also a co-creator of the series.) Rikki Lindhome voices Kimberly, and Duncan’s friend group includes Rashida Jones, Yassir Lester from Black Monday, and Zach Cherry from Severance. Plus, this episode features Bowen Yang as Annie’s work husband Garrett.

We’ll start with the school story, since Rannells isn’t in that one. Some good bits with the teacher’s excitement at the increased salary and perks that come with being vice principal. “Dang!” he exclaims. “With that kind of money, I wouldn’t have to run out of class to deliver Postmates.” And there’s an amusing sight gag involving the administrators’ parking spots being valeted by deer (it makes sense in context.)

The setup for the “work husband” story is that of a million tired family sitcom plots, with Jack reacting entirely out of proportion to the innocent “scandal” of Annie’s closeness with Garrett. The main wrinkle here is that Garrett is gay. Even though Jack is quick to understand that, never worrying that they’d have an affair, he still feels threatened by their emotional intimacy and throws himself into, say, proving he can give backrubs as well as Garrett or flips out over the discovery that they’re “raising a fern together” at the office.

Rannells plays Garrett’s husband Bryce, who Jack tries to rope into a mutual freakout over their spouses’ relationship, but Bryce isn’t having it. “Who wants a needy, suffocating husband who gets all his validation from his spouse?” he remarks to Jack (with maximum irony, of course.) However, rather than purely being a bland side-character husband or an obliging rational voice to Jack’s unreasonable flailing, he gets in on the action in an entertaining way.

I liked that this is a gay character who plays against Rannells’ usual type. Bryce likes wrestling and Guns N’ Roses, and he has a very adamant story about that time he saw a UFO. Even better, none of these things are presented as implausible interests for him to have. On the whole, Rannells is a fun addition to the episode.

He appears one more time on Duncanville, but here are my quick first impressions:

Recommend?

In General – A cautious maybe. It didn’t quite grab me, since a lot of the plot beats are pretty tropey, but there are some good one-liners here.

Andrew Rannells – I probably would. This role isn’t really anything special, but Rannells does well with it and blends nicely into the overall vibe of the show.

Warnings

Drug use, a little gross-out humor, language, and suggestive content.

Other Doctor Lives: Good Omens: Season 2, Episode 4 – “The Hitchhiker featuring the minisode Nazi Zombie Flesheaters” (2023)

Still entertaining, but it’s not my favorite episode of the season. There’s hardly any of the main plot at all, and this time around, the extended flashback feels extra padded. However, even in a just-all-right episode, David Tennant and Michael Sheen still make it worth watching.

As Aziraphale heads back from his investigative trip to Edinburgh from the last episode, he’s accosted by the demon Shax, who tries to ferret out information about where Gabriel is hiding. An offhand comment leads into an extended flashback—a continuation of Crowley and Aziraphale’s 1941 encounter during the London Blitz. After Crowley saves Aziraphale with a well-timed German bomb, Aziraphale looks to return the favor. By a rather circuitous turn of events, this involves filling in for an absent magician in a West End revue, which Aziraphale is ecstatically excited about, but he needs Crowley’s help to pull it off. Little do they know, a demon has dispatched three recently-deceased Nazis back to Earth as zombies to snoop on the two of them for evidence of fraternization.

As I said, the main storyline is practically nothing here. A few present-day scenes bookend the episode to nudge the plot forward a bit, and that’s all. The rest of the screentime is devoted to the uninterrupted flashback, which has a somewhat flimsy jumping-off point from the present-day story. Instead of following organically from the story around it, this makes it feel rather dropped in.

I love the Job and Edinburgh flashbacks of episodes 2 and 3, but this one is just okay to me. Aziraphale’s adoration for human magic tricks is a fun quirk in season 1, but doing an extended bit about it here belabors the joke a little and leans too far into cringe humor for my taste. Additionally, while I like the angle of Hell spying on Crowley and Aziraphale, and it leads to a good complication for them later in the episode, the zombie shtick goes on too long for me. Between this and the shortchanged present-day scenes, the whole episode feels like it’s playing for time, like a few amusing bits were stretched into an entire episode. If the season were five episodes long instead of six, I suspect that whatever’s necessary here could’ve been neatly slipped in somewhere else without much trouble.

But despite my complaints, I did still have a good time. I love Aziraphale’s exasperated and perplexed dismay when Shax tells him he’s revealed everything to her, and his enthusiasm for magic is very cute, even if I don’t think we needed a whole episode of it. I also like the theme that’s brought out of Aziraphale and Crowley’s trust in each other. Even though the dilemma they get into here is mostly one of Aziraphale’s own making, he has faith that Crowley can help him get out it—faith that Crowley doesn’t necessarily have in himself.

While Crowley is very much present throughout this storyline, he largely takes a backseat to Aziraphale. But that’s okay, because Tennant’s reaction-shot game is topnotch. I enjoy watching him observe the train wreck as Aziraphale wrestles with a set of linking rings while he remarks on his “gift for prop work” and “natural dexterity.” And when the notion of Aziraphale doing the magic show is first brought up, Crowley is alternately cautioning and reassuring. He’s pretty gentle in his intimations that Aziraphale might not be quite ready for such a big performance, but when Aziraphale starts to doubt his credentials, Crowley is all encouragement: “You, my Nefertiti-fooling fellow, are about to perform on the West End stage! If that doesn’t make you a professional conjurer, I don’t know what does.”

The only reason Crowley cares about any of this is because Aziraphale is so thrilled about it. So, regardless of his misgivings and overall disinterest, he steps up to help, scrambling to salvage things when their zombie/demon-induced complication crops up. Tennant does a nice job navigating that angle of This is dumb, but you love it, so I’ll make an effort to care for your sake. And while we only get a bit of Crowley in the present-day scenes, I love Tennant’s delivery when the demon reunites with his Bentley and speaks to it in a lovey doggie voice, cooing, “Did you miss me? I bet you did!”