You may have noticed a distinct lack of episode-by-episode coverage of Secret Invasion on Marvel Mondays. Part of that is I’m pretty exhausted (more on that later in the year), and the other part is it quite frankly didn’t deserve it. This is unequivocally the worst show in the MCU to date.
We’re going to keep this simpler than normal (see above point about exhaustion); not as many sections, no individual episode rankings, and no ‘The Future’ segment because quite frankly the future of the MCU looks pretty dire.
It Isn’t Bad For The Reasons You Might Think
Yes, the show looks like shit. The highway shootout in episode 4 is one of the worst action sequences ever filmed. The CGI on the Gravik vs ‘Fury’ fight in the final episode is atrocious. How it looks is not why it is bad.
Yes, there have been too many MCU properties in the last few years. Since Disney Plus launched, there have been 9 shows (10 if you count I Am Groot), 9 movies and 2 ‘Specials’, as well as a deluge of announcements for future projects and rumours of more beyond those. That’s simply Too Much Stuff. It being the latest contributor to superhero fatigue is not why it is bad.
Yes, Nick Fury probably shouldn’t have gotten his own solo project, especially if the other returning characters were James ‘War Machine’ Rhodes, Everett Ross, Maria Hill and Talos. While they’ve had huge success with lesser-known characters before, it’s difficult to deny that part of there being Too Much Stuff is the belief every single character needs their own show or movie. They don’t. Being about Nick Fury is not why it is bad.
Yes, it is somehow yet another story about the fate of the whole planet, despite the lead being an old spy with no powers who is low on allies and resources. They KEEP doing end of the world stories despite the diminishing returns and people pleading for them to use the D+ platform to tell more intimate tales. I spend more time than I’d like pleading with Feige et al to lower the stakes and just have some fun. Play with genre. Get weird. But despite centring a story around imposters infiltrating political powers while “THE Spy” tries to stop them, this is not a slick suspenseful spycraft series. The lack of true espionage is not why it is bad.
It doesn’t look notably worse than any of the other movies and shows with their rushed VFX. It’s the first MCU show since She-Hulk nearly a year ago. Samuel L. Jackson has more than earned a chance to take the lead. Some of their exhausting apocalyptic yarns have been good. None of those are why it’s such a bad show.
Sometimes It Flirts with Being Actually Good
A few months before release Ben and I started to question… What If Secret Invasion Is Good? They announced some interesting names for the cast. Jackson, Cheadle, Freeman, Smulders and Mendelsohn are all good actors who have had to work with some dreck. Olivia Colman is everything. Emilia Clarke deserves a win. Kingsley Ben-Adir, Richard Dormer, Dermot Mulroney and Christopher McDonald sounds like an interesting supporting cast. They were keeping quiet and casting good actors. Bob Iger was even talking about a desire to return to a simpler time with fewer MCU releases. I like spies! There were reasons to be become Secret Invasion-pilled ahead of its debut.
I immediately learned my lesson the hard way, but I do want to highlight a few things I sincerely enjoyed about the show.
The acting, for the most part, is solid. Sometimes even pretty good. Jackson is a god damn trooper for showing up for 15 years and rarely looking as openly bored as he must actually be by it all. He has some pretty nice little sit-downs with various characters that made me pay attention, and some even added to the Nick Fury character in interesting ways. Colman can be charming in her sleep, and her ‘I’m smart, you’re stupid, and this is all very silly to me’ schtick works every time. When Ben-Adir is fully engaged, he has a hard, authoritative presence that is compelling enough to justify casting him as the antagonist. For brief moments, Mendelsohn and Clarke are decent too. Charlayne Woodard might be the best of the bunch as Fury’s secret wife secret SKRULL wife.
Episode 3 was, to me, a window into what they were thinking when they greenlit this project. Either as a lower budget movie or a series, there was SOMETHING here. It was an episode that was centred around private conversations. Gravik and Talos. Fury and Priscilla. Fury and Talos. The philosophical differences between two Skrulls debating the future of their species, decades of tension from a strained, secret-ridden marriage, and a couple of stubborn old friends waiting on apologies from each other are good ideas to explore! Even G’iah attempting to maintain her deception in the face of the stern Gravik, unsure how much he knows, wasn’t bad. The reveal in the cafe that ‘They’re Everywhere!’ worked.
I wish they had kept the focus on these key threads, as well as recontextualising our perception of Fury’s historical standing in the global intelligence community. That was ostensibly what Colman’s character existed to do, and the few times they actually went in that direction, I was into it. Talos giving him the straight facts on how Fury rode a wave of Skrull secret intelligence to the top was the kind of thing I was excited to delve into when Mendelsohn was announced to be returning.
If I were ranking episodes, it would be Ep. 3 at the top, and all the rest tied for last. I didn’t think the finale was any worse than the other 4, despite all the buzz about it having the lowest rating ever.
But Make No Mistake, The Show Is Bad
It’s an impressive thing to simultaneously have too much going on and to not have enough meat on the bone. It’s even more impressive for both of those to be true while also being detestably dull.
It’s fitting the show was embroiled in a controversy around AI, because it feels like the cacophony of plot elements were spat out by an algorithm. Slop dumped out onto the table, that even a skilled chef couldn’t turn into a satisfying meal. Kyle Bradstreet has pedigree. Ali Selim has a deeper portfolio than most of the creatives entrusted with directing duties lately. That doesn’t mean a lot when you quietly replace the lead writer with someone with minimal experience and get them to rewrite most of the show and oversee reshoots on a tight timeframe.
So much of what’s going on here is under-baked and gets in the way of those handful of stronger elements highlighted above. The biggest of these problematic plot points is that the show simply never had room for Emilia Clarke, arguably its second biggest star. Life in the Skrull colony was never interesting, and she seemed to exist purely to use against Talos, who had plenty of skin in the game already. The actors had a decent chemistry, and reportedly worked together to “fill in a lot of the gaps” in their backstory. That’s the kind of thing that sounds quaint, but the gaps are a bad thing. Actors shouldn’t be doing the writers’ jobs for them.
Two characters cycling through a ‘Greatest Hits’ of MCU superpowers as a big sexy final action setpiece should mean something. But by pinning the scene on Gravik and G’iah, it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s just an ugly mess. One wins. One loses. Who could possibly care? Kevin Feige, apparently, as he insisted on the scene. If it were Kamala Khan borrowing the abilities of her heroes, culminating in her idol, Carol Danvers, that would be cute! This is nothing.
Talos’ return seemed like a good thing, but aside from episode 3, his scenes are a snooze, and then he’s killed off before the end. Priscilla/Varra and Fury’s tension borders on fascinating, especially her refusal to kill the man she was embedded with, but they just head off into the sunset together despite acknowledging it’ll never last. The Super Skrulls subplot with ‘The Machine’ was just noise until the finale, and then led to the aforementioned awful fight. Pockets of promise with Gravik never amount to an actualised villain.
Don Cheadle was caught liking a tweet about how a few years ago people would have lost their minds over the reveal Rhodey was a Skrull. I respectfully disagree, because nobody has EVER cared about War Machine. We’ve never been given a reason to care about him. Same goes for Maria Hill, killed in the first episode to convince us the show wasn’t playing around. Both characters have been physically present a lot over the years, but often with fewer than five minutes of screen time, standing next to more important characters. The strongest outing for both is likely their respective debuts in Iron Man 2 and The Avengers and since then they’ve been stuck in place. A steady series of paydays for their actors, but never anything meaningful to do. Instead of taking the opportunity to change that and finally letting them have their flowers, the show does nothing to justify most of the returning characters and does not take them in interesting new directions. I questioned the need for Martin Freeman in Wakanda Forever, and it turns out he had no reason to be here either. He’s revealed as a Skrull in the first episode, and the real him is freed in the last episode. Nothing in between. Who could tell if most of these characters were behaving unusually when they barely have personalities to begin with?
A huge component of the comic version of Secret Invasion, was that characters we know and love had been replaced with Skrulls at unknown points in time, with the biggest gut punch being their leader hiding in plain sight as an Avenger. By shifting this to lesser Skrulls impersonating the likes of Rhodey and Ross, it turns it into a depressing ‘We Have Secret Invasion At Home’ meme.
All of this is a product of laziness, a trait shared by most of the post-Endgame fare. They lazily assumed the audience would lose their shit over every little reference and revelation. They lazily threw the plot together. They lazily chose not to thread it all together organically. Gravik just calls Nick Fury at one point. Just has his phone number. The latest in a LONG line of characters just going places and doing things for ‘reasons, don’t worry about’ over the last 2 years. The President of the United States of America declares on television they’re going to hunt and kill every single undercover Skrull. He says the word kill. That is a wildly bad piece of writing, even if they think they’re playing into rising xenophobia in the American political landscape.
The MCU has basically been written by Kevin Feige for years now. They rarely hire people with a true voice, preferring inexperienced creatives who will obediently hit deadlines. None of them have actually led a series before, because the Showrunner position is on the verge of extinction in the age of streaming. Nothing shoots on location, and they use inordinate amounts of green screen so that they can remake the entire film in post-production. Even the props are stand-ins! Stunt-casted cameos with no attachment to concrete future projects have taken the place of mid-credit scenes that actually informed the shape of the next 6-12 months. Harry Styles appeared at the end of The Eternals almost two years ago. No Eternals 2 has been announced as of this writing. They continue to spend $200million per project despite none of that money being on the screen. THESE are the reasons people are becoming tired of the MCU, not just because there is no room for more superhero stories. This is studio mismanagement. This is laziness.
Secret Invasion sucks.
Plugs
My MCU podcast with Ben Phillips, Ben & Matt’s Marvellous Journey, will return at the end of the year.
In the mean time, check out our current podcast, More (And Less!) Than Meets The Eye, a Transformers podcast that alternates betwene the critically panned live action films and the critically acclaimed comics by James Roberts.
The Reel World 