It’s no secret that Marvel’s Disney+ shows haven’t been hitting the mark. You could probably draw the whole of the MCU’s Phase 4 shows like a playground slide, with WandaVision and Loki at the top followed by a long descent down to the bottom, with maybe a few small bumps along the way for Ms Marvel. Phase 4 went so poorly that it feels like Disney just shuffled it along and tried to move us straight into Phase 5, foregoing the traditional “Avengers level threat” that capped off every other Phase and just taking us straight into a new year… with Ant-man 3 which no one liked either. Secret Invasion is the first show of Phase 5 and unfortunately it seems this change of Phases hasn’t shaken off the Phase 4 cobwebs, because Secret Invasion deserves to be right at the end of the slide.
What makes a piece of story-based media bad? There’s a lot of content out there that tells stories (books, video games, TV, etc.) but most criticisms about their stories can generally be tied back to a few key categories: inconsistency in plot or character motivations, pacing and tone, failure to live up to the premise, and how it ends. I wouldn’t be writing a TV rant review if the show in question didn’t fail in every single one of these categories, and for the sake of structure here I’m going to try to present Secret Invasions flaws in the framework of these criticisms. I will try to keep my spoilers vague this time because people might actually want to or feel the need to watch this terrible show to keep up with the MCU, but I’m hoping this will convince them not to waste their time.
Failure of Premise
Secret Invasion was a big moment in Marvel Comics, with revelations of cornerstone heroes having been Skrulls for years and a huge paradigm shift in the post-Civil War era. Obviously the Disney+ Secret Invasion couldn’t be that, as one of the many failures of the live action formula means the show couldn’t afford having all of the Avengers around, but the name Secret Invasion and the premise of Skrulls hidden on Earth could still keep the same tone of distrust and surprise as the comics. Hell, Marvel did something similar with Agents of SHIELD‘s first season after the big Hydra reveal in Winter Soldier and it was great.
But here they dropped the ball. For a show whose very premise is “aliens are hiding among us and anyone could be one,” there is absolutely zero tension built around this concept because you always know who is a Skrull at all times beforehand. There’s always a little “here’s what the villains are doing” that shows you exactly which friendly soldiers are secretly Skrulls, there’s always a pre-mission briefing going “this guy is a Skrull, let’s go get him.” Fury is never shown to question the identity or loyalty of anyone under his command (though due to the small cast most of the time he’s doing all the work with just one other person anyway), and the only “surprise they’re a Skrull” moment comes in the third episode where, once again, we’re just straight up shown this person is a Skrull without any real change of story direction and Fury DOESN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. But more on that later.
Without the hidden identities angle to add any flavor to Secret Invasion it just feels like a poorly done season of whatever “fight the terrorists” show you might immediately think of. The Amazon Jack Ryan series, 24, whatever you want. Bad guys want to start World War Three to fuel their own world influence agenda, they have spies in all branches of government (but fortunately we know who most of them are already and everything important is happening in Europe), and now we’re going to go stop them. The only thing Fury is missing is a person in his ear, which also feels lacking considering Fury has his SABER space station that he could call on for help, but that never comes into play either.
Pacing and Tone
I’d almost be inclined to believe that SABER does get involved at some point though, considering all the miraculous things that happen offscreen without explanation, such as horrifically reduced travel time or characters knowing/understanding things that are never shown they would know. The big one here is travel time, as Secret Invasion joins the later seasons of Game of Thrones and The Witcher to completely ignore the distance between locations for the sake of rushing their story along. Characters repeatedly travel between London and Russia and back in close to the blink of an eye, but beyond even that the show hand waves HOW they get to these locations, as our spy thriller wouldn’t be complete without our heroes being Wanted Men on several occasions.
Offscreen escapes aren’t necessarily unique to these sorts of stories, with the likes of James Bond and Jason Bourne dodging their initial pursuit and then just yadda yaddaing the rest of the process by turning a corner and then a scene transition, but at least those movies actually show the initial stages of an escape. Secret Invasion never shows how our heroes get away when they’re being pursued, instead they simply say “oh man our characters are being hunted” and then the next scene they’re somewhere else without comment on getting away. This is especially egregious in the second episode where Nick Fury has to get out of Russia and another character comments how easy it would be to spot a tall, old black man with a dead eye in Russia. Fury is then left to fend for himself but he not only gets out of Russia offscreen but he seemingly gets out and travels to London within ten minutes because then a whole episode and a half of events happens before he tells someone he was in Russia “yesterday.” Then a few episodes later a character is on the run and shown to be on-foot with no friends in the world, but in the very next scene they’re riding in a VIP-grade SUV with a driver who takes them to a private plane! The show does try to make a late game excuse for all of this by reminding us that SHIELD had those hologram masks from Winter Soldier, but if we’re supposed to believe that Fury and friends have always had these masks then why are we shown scenes of them on the run without wearing them?
The ending of the show is rushed to hell too, and doesn’t actually seem to know how to handle the tone or logical progression of these characters. The final fight has the show’s main theme playing in the background, but the main theme is a suspenseful orchestral swell that has no business being on top of an action scene’s big moment, making the scene feel worrying or sad rather than any other emotion you should be feeling at that time. Characters say they have important work that needs to be done but we’ve never been told anything about what they actually do, while other characters make aggressively rash decisions that seem completely out of left field and unrealistic given the information they had available to them at the time. Does this feel like it’s the show suffering from only being six episodes so there’s no time to actually flesh out its characters? Yes, no question. However this is also one of the first Marvel projects in a while where I felt like the end of the plot had to be warped to fit the status quo Marvel wants in their projects going forward, similar to Age of Ultron where Thor was forced to go on a random vision quest just so the Avengers would know about the Infinity Stones. Kevin Feige saying “okay your project can be about whatever you want but it needs to end with this” isn’t exactly new in the MCU, but this is an especially painful example of it just straight up not working given the limited canvas the writers were working with.
Character assassination: Nick Fury
I have never been impressed with the MCU Nick Fury. He’s never seemed to do anything clever in the movies, outside of ruining Coulson’s trading cards in Avengers and having a retinal scanner for his dead eye in Winter Soldier, and most of his scenes after the fall of SHIELD are just exposition dumps. Secret Invasion takes this to a whole other level by just straight-up undermining everything about Nick Fury as a character, through both his actions and his past. For starters, “super cool agent in the know about everything” Nick Fury turns out to only be that way because he’s had Skrulls working for him this whole time, essentially having the ultra cheat code in the spy business by not only having agents who can look like anyone but also read people’s minds with their technology. Obviously having a good spy network was a given for Fury, but the fact that he used these Skrulls for everything (and I do mean everything) seems to really take away from any implied tactical sense or risk that Fury might have taken during his career, which in my opinion really hurts the character. It does also make him a little more of a jerk, since he used the Skrulls for years with empty promises of finding them a new home, but that part of it isn’t really a stretch to imagine.
What is a stretch to imagine is why Fury does half the things that he does in the show. As I said earlier we (and Fury by extension) are shown who the big Skrull infiltrator is relatively early on in the show, but Fury just straight up doesn’t do anything about it. The show tries to sell you on the idea that Fury is doing the old “using a known spy to catch your enemies” trope but all the information they gain from this tactic is just things that Fury could have learned on his own with one phone call to anyone that’s still loyal to him. On top of that there’s a scene later where Fury abandons someone to the Skrulls to save his own skin, despite having every reason to suspect the Skrulls are going to kill that person who he just spent so much time to protect AND where he could have easily solved the problem by just shooting the Skrull he already had at gunpoint. This is not the “whatever it takes to do the job” Nick Fury we’ve been told about, this is a character being plot contrived out of confrontations just to move the story along. The lack of any other super heroes being involved in this show is also a contrivance because they keep changing the reasons for why the Avengers aren’t being called into help. At first there’s a reasonable suggestion from Fury that they can’t risk the Avengers or other heroes being involved because then the Skrulls could impersonate them too, but at the end of the show Fury gives some bullshit line about how he “wants to prove regular people can handle problems on their own.” Fury has never been a stranger to believing in the self-determination of humanity and in theory this could even be a fine excuse for Fury’s doubt in his own merits as a person/super spy. Given how he’s just had the Skrulls holding his hand for the last forty years he might see this as a chance to personally prove himself… BUUUTTTTTTTT I have to ask what the definition of “regular people” is here. I assume he just means humans and not superhumans, since despite not having the same backstory as the comics Nick Fury this version of Fury still has super spy training and the like, but that would mean that every Black Widow, Hawkeye, Iron Man, and Captain America/Falcon would qualify too. Not to mention they’re on the cusp of World War Three here, maybe now’s not the best time for pride. The man who we’re led to believe Fury is would understand that, but the man they’re showing Fury is in Secret Invasion doesn’t.
Character “assassination”: G’iah
G’iah is one of the primary Skrulls in Secret Invasion, daughter of Talos (the main Skrull from Captain Marvel) and a character that suffers the most from Secret Invasion’s rushed, offscreen storyline. I put assassination in quotes because it’s not really the death of an existing character’s traits here but more that her characterization seems to live and die from scene to scene as her motives appears to constantly change. We’re introduced to G’iah as the right-hand of Gravik, the primary antagonist of Secret Invasion, and as such she is the nice juicy “oh the bad guys actually have some reasonable complaints” hook that leads to our heroes not being as lethal as they could be in the beginning of the show. However G’iah is a thorn in my side from a narrative standpoint because she keeps shifting loyalties, and not in that cutesy “need to maintain my cover” way and more in a “half the dialogue around me was cut so all that’s left is a guessing game about which mask I’m wearing today” way. Right out of the gate she has a meeting with Talos where it seems like she’s willing to help our characters stop a terrorist attack, but then it turns out she tricked them with false information so the terror attack happens anyway. The characters never address how G’iah gave them false information, and G’iah never goes to Gravik or the others to demand to know why she wasn’t kept in the loop, so all we as the audience have to go off of is that our protagonists were set up and they’re fine with it because….? G’iah then spends the rest of the show acting as an informant for Fury and Talos (and again they trust her despite her earlier false information) until a later episode where she acts disgusted with her father’s ideology and seems to commit herself more to an aggressive stance against humans… until she doesn’t and instead goes back to helping Fury with no scene suggesting when or why she suddenly flips sides again. So yes, most likely due to the shorter nature of the show G’iah lost what I would hope to be many, many scenes about her questioning her allegiances beyond the initial suggestion that she thinks her terrorist friends might be going about things the wrong way, but at least we can give the show the benefit of the doubt on that. What can’t be so easily ignored is her boss.
Character “assassination”: Gravik
Our main villain Gravik doesn’t suffer from offscreen character shifts so much as he just succumbs to the same disease as every MCU villain not named Loki, Killmonger, or Vulture and just falls apart as a character during the second half of his story. Gravik’s initial character motivation is perfectly reasonable for an alien bent on conquering the Earth, as he was a child soldier used by Fury to help humans while Fury did nothing to help the Skrulls. Perfect motivation bundled with even a “fallen hero” complex as he seemed to idolize Fury until he finally couldn’t stand the lies any more and decided to take the “search” for a new home into his own hands. More could have been spent on that and less on other characters, but the framework is solid as far as a villain’s driving force is concerned given our limited number of scenes. Unfortunately we had the wrap this shit up so Gravik suddenly turns heel and starts murdering his own people, first for failure and then for perceived failure, all to justify every other Skrull abandoning him so the final fight can be small scale at the end of the story and without any gray morality about who we’re fighting and why. This of course then begs the question why any Skrulls are still in hiding or considered a threat at all by the end of the show if the driving force of their revolution has gone nuts, but this isn’t a story about logical action. The final nail for Gravik is a speech at the end about how every time he killed for Fury he lost a bit of his “heart,” which is a fine message for a Saturday cartoon but this is the final villain speech. This is where a villain goes into his motivations in-depth to a weakened hero, but Gravik doesn’t really talk at all about the betrayal or his people, he just gives a rather poorly acted rant about being sad it is that he had to kill humans when he was younger. This of course is to show that Gravik didn’t actually have the best intentions of his people at heart and he just wanted revenge against Fury for making him a child soldier, but my question is why couldn’t we have both? In a world where the MCU has Killmonger and the comics have had Magneto for over fifty years, I don’t see why we can’t have another “villain for the right reasons” character. Other than bad writing, obviously.
I have no idea where the MCU is going right now. Every product that they’ve shipped to try to establish their new story ideas (Skrulls hidden on Earth, Kang, the multiverse, Eternals) has either flopped, been mocked, or just been absolutely terrible. Secret Invasion’s limited episode run (and rewrites, the plot was originally supposed to have a war between Russia and Ukraine but then reality happened) definitely undermined the plot and characters it was trying to portray, but at the same time the basic story completely ignoring everything that makes Skrulls interesting while doing things with Nick Fury no one asked for makes me think that this script was doomed from the start. A movie would have an even shorter run time but I think an Avengers-style film was the only way this would work, with several films or TV shows dripping the Skrull threat into the story until we had Avengers: Secret Invasion with Nick Fury still as a main character, but now with more characters to play around with and naturally more allies and enemies to eventually be revealed as Skrulls. But instead we have this, a show that can be thrown onto the forgotten pile with almost all the other MCU properties post-Endgame, only unlike so many of the others I can’t see how anything in this appeals to anyone.
