Spoilery Thoughts on Secret Invasion

*Spoilers.*

I’m getting into the weeds on Secret Invasion today. As I said in my review, this show didn’t really work for me, which was a disappointment. While I mentioned some of my issues with the series in that earlier post, I’m heading into more detail on that here.

First and foremost, we have to look at the episode-ending cliffhangers. Three separate episodes end, not just with a major character being killed, but a major character being specifically shot by Gravik. Yes, G’iah’s “death” at the end of episode 3 is revealed to have been a ruse at the start of the next episode, but still. Fully half of the episodes in this series end with the exact same “twist.” What’s more, the actual deaths, those of Maria Hill and Talos, aren’t remotely worth it. I’d call them fridgings, but their deaths don’t even really motivate Fury throughout his arc. He gets one sad scene with Hill’s mother against the backdrop of Hill’s flag-draped coffin being unloaded from a plane, and that’s basically it for her. Unless you count Cobie Smulders’s name in the credits of every single episode because the show gave her regular status to avoid revealing that she dies in the very first episode, which ugh. And by the time Talos is killed, the ball is rolling so heavily that Fury doesn’t really have time to slow down and react much at all. We do get Priscilla helping G’iah lay him to rest, but we barely see G’iah interact with her dad on the show. Talos’s relationship with Fury is much more prominent, and yet after he’s gone, Fury seems to pay him little mind.

Next, the way numerous characters repeat the same refrains over and over gets on my nerves. “Fury’s gotten old—he can’t stop us.” “Fury hasn’t been the same since the Blip.” “Why didn’t Fury find us a home like he promised?” “After the Blip, Fury abandoned Earth and went off to space with S.A.B.R.E.” Again and again, hammering the same points home, with hardly any progression on any of them. Why hasn’t Fury and/or Carol Danvers found a planet where the Skrulls can live freely, or at the bare minimum made plans to introduce them as refugees on Earth now that New Asgard is so firmly established? What has Fury been dealing with mentally and emotionally since the Blip, and how is he handling it? But instead of diving into these issues, we just keep going around the same carousel of remarks/questions. And returning to the show’s love of “twists,” the one time Fury appears to talk honestly with Gravik about how he couldn’t find a home for the Skrulls, it’s revealed that it’s actually G’iah pretending to be Fury. So are the reasons she gives actually true? Did Fury tell her that? Or is she just pulling it out of her ass? Who cares, right?

Finally, sticking with the “twist” theme, let’s talk about major MCU characters who are revealed to have been impersonated by Skrulls. After all the “anyone could be a Skrull!!!!” hype, we see exactly two: Everett Ross, who’s revealed at the start of the series, and Rhodey, who’s teased in episode 3 and revealed in episode 4, with a mention in the finale that he was switched “a long time” ago. The show never says how long—here’s hoping Armor Wars can shed a lot more light on Rhodey—but there are details to suggest it’s been as far back as Civil War. Which, frankly, sucks. It would mean his talk in Endgame with Nebula about their disabilities wasn’t our Rhodey. It would mean Rhodey missed Tony’s wedding and his funeral, and he’s never met Tony’s daughter. So even though the much-hyped major shakeups to the MCU turned out to only be a couple of second-tier characters, it managed to potentially wreck a lot of important stuff for Rhodey’s story. As I said in my review, it’s both too little and too much at once.

There are plenty of other little things, confounding plot developments and Idiot Ball moments and an overreliance on torture as a plot device, but those are the biggest things that stood out to me. Again, it’s a shame, because Samuel L. Jackson has delivered throughout his many years in the MCU, and he deserved something a lot better for a spotlight series on Fury.