Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There’s a new Marvel Cinematic Universe release, and this one is something different for the venerable content factory. Though it follows up on a specific story line from the Marvel films, it’s something darker in tone, more adult in execution — something closer to ground-level in a universe that has grown to fantastical proportions, almost like a spy thriller that just happens to be set in a world of superheroes, aliens, and occasional time travel. Also, it’s like a six-hour movie.
It’s not really fair to blame Secret Invasion for the inevitable superhero-property hype cycle, of course. But it’s also hard to just watch the show without thinking of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (a great superhero movie that somehow got branded a “’70s conspiracy thrillerâ€), The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (a TV follow-up to a long-running story line), Andor (grounded corner of established fantasy universe), plus a variety of shows that try their hand at being supersize movies and fail. Some of these comparisons are not flattering to Secret Invasion; at least so far, it’s not quite Andor in terms of craft. But as far as global espionage and secretly cartoonish terrorist plots go, it’s already made an episode better than anything Falcon and the Winter Soldier offered.
So let’s get into it, something the first installment does with blessed economy. Agent Prescod (Richard Dormer) practically pitches the show’s concept to Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), the CIA handler who semi-inexplicably has a free white guy Wakanda Pass, in the opening scene: What if the people we trusted with our security, he posits, “weren’t who we thought they were?†Well, Agent Prescod, then you’d have the plot of multiple Captain America and/or Winter Soldier projects. But Prescod lays out a situation involving the Skrulls, alien shape-shifters who live on Earth in numbers far too tiny to pose a threat. What Prescod presupposes is: Maybe there are actually tons of Skrulls here, and we just don’t know it because of their abilities. Further, he tells a skeptical-seeming Ross, they’ve been mounting terrorist attacks and blaming them on other groups; now they have one that will “set the world on fire.â€
After giving Ross this information, which Ross promises to pass along to Nick Fury, Prescod attacks him. Everett kills Prescod in self-defense and requests an extract from one Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), Nick Fury’s former right-hand woman. Someone chases Ross through shadowy alleyways, stone streets, and rooftops — it’s the best-looking, moodiest-lit sequence of the episode — before Ross falls from a considerable height. Hill shows up, as does another shadowy figure … who turns out to be Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), an ally of Nick Fury. And Ross, it turns out, is a Skrull, too. That’s why he was rejecting Prescod’s intel: It’s real! The Skrulls are invading!
The Skrull attack from within may sound familiar yet different to comics fans, as Marvel story lines are wont to do when translated for the screen. In the comics, Secret Invasion was a major miniseries event, appended with many prologues, crossovers, and sidequels, involving the revelation that a bunch of long-standing Marvel heroes were actually Skrulls in disguise. Captain Marvel, the 2019 feature film that introduced Brie Larson’s ultrapowerful Carol Danvers, cannily sidestepped expectations by introducing the Skrulls, hinting at a Secret Invasion adaptation, only to reveal that they were, in fact, an alien race oppressed by the Kree, whom Captain Marvel had been fighting with — on the wrong side!
Secret Invasion is essentially a sequel to that Captain Marvel story line, set 30-something years later. Fury and Carol both promised the Skrulls they would help them find a new home planet, and that hasn’t exactly happened yet. Even more galling, Fury has been spending time in outer space but on some other project; we first see him rolling back into the earthly realm after an extended stay with S.A.B.E.R., an intergalactic S.H.I.E.L.D.-like organization. He’s met by Maria, and they rendezvous in Moscow with Talos, who is the first of multiple characters to inform Fury that he was different after the big population-halving “snap†performed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. After the Avengers restored everyone’s lives, Fury and Carol both left the Skrulls in the lurch. (Why they were especially in the lurch then, rather than in the preceding quarter-century, is not clear.)
Talos explains that a lot of Skrulls took this betrayal pretty hard, including his daughter G’iah (Emilia Clarke, who has confusingly also played a Star Wars character named Qi’ra) and, especially, Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir), who has gotten himself a seat on the Skrull council and has riled up the young, angry Skrulls in favor of the terror plan. Specifically, they’ve used a group called Americans Against Russia as a front for a Skrull attack that will take place in Moscow. Not all Skrulls (#NotAllSkrulls) are participating in this; some are simply living in a secret refugee camp. But those who join Gravik are afforded greater privileges, like leaving the camp. Of course, to effectively replace humans in the long term, they can’t simply imitate them; that would create a chaos of doubles. So the Skrulls capture humans, incapacitate them in some high-tech pod thingies, and steal their memories along with their faces to fake it more seamlessly.
This isn’t yet known to Fury & Co.; turns out ol’ Nick Fury isn’t always in the loop anymore. Which doesn’t mean others aren’t in the loop on him: President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney) gets briefed on Fury leaving S.A.B.E.R. and returning to Earth by none other than James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), also known as War Machine. MI6 also takes an interest in Fury, nabbing him off the streets and reuniting him with his old friend (or at least acquaintance) Sonya Falsworth (Olivia Colman in her MCU debut), who becomes the second person to offer some fake characterization in exposition form: “I think Thanos’s snap changed you.†She also wryly refers to the newly bearded and grizzled Nick as this “new Old Nick Fury,†and curtly declines his offer to work together on the Skrull issue.
She favors more extreme methods, which is why Fury uses the opportunity to bug her office and find out what she knows about the impending attack, hoping to handle the situation before she does. Fury and Talos head out to interrogate a secret Skrull about the whereabouts of a dirty bomb, and here Samuel L. Jackson really leans into the Old Fury bit by merrily performing the scene from a chair (a “comfortable-ass†Louis XIV chair, no less) — until Talos and the other Skrull come to blows, and Fury kills the enemy, against his friend’s wishes.
Meanwhile, Maria Hill follows G’iah, and after they have a cursory physical fight, Talos intercepts his daughter, informing her that the Skrull radicals are to blame for her mother’s death, which G’iah is only hearing about for the first time. Shaken, she agrees to feed them intel about the attack. But even though Talos, Fury, and Hill are all on the scene, tracking possible bombs, the Skrulls use a network of decoys, and the bombs go off anyway, presumably killing many Russians. In the chaos, Gravik, cruelly disguised as Fury, shoots and kills Maria Hill. Real Fury arrives as she takes her final breath, and he is pulled away from her body as the camera watches from above, and the episode ends. Yikes.
It’s an information-packed and incident-heavy premiere, not likely to be chased with the And that’s it?! reaction that has greeted some of the shorter, less substantial MCU-TV kickoffs. Director Ali Selim and writers Kyle Bradstreet and Brian Tucker keep things moving at a clip. But right now, the cloak-and-dagger stuff is coasting on novelty: new information! New character interactions! New overqualified actors in the MCU! Let’s see if examining the non-superhero part of this alternate world actually does expose a new side to the world’s biggest franchise, or this show will wind up as assimilated as a Skrull in hiding.
Secrets, No Lies:
• Hi, I’m Jesse and I’ll be recapping Secret Invasion for the next six weeks! My comics knowledge runs a little more Batman than Avengers, but I’ve dutifully purchased the main Secret Invasion trade, which I understand bears little to no resemblance to this story line but is written by one of my favorite comics guys, Brian Michael Bendis.
• In a quiet, fraught moment with Maria, Nick Fury tells her that he returned to Earth because he thought he owed it to Talos. Maria asks, “You sure you’re not talking about someone else?†Now, I’ve seen every MCU movie and TV show except Moon Knight, which I did not finish, but I’m still not exactly sure who Maria is talking about here. (So she must mean Moon Knight, right? Nick Fury owes it to Moon Knight?) Explain it to me like I’m stupid: Nick Fury really thought he owed it to … the late Tony Stark? Agent Coulson? Himself?
• So how long was Everett Ross really a Skrull? Presumably this will be clarified at some point, and it’s easy enough to assume it’s sometime after the events of Wakanda Forever. But it’s in the nature of comic-book storytelling to say that he was actually a Skrull since, like, five movies ago, sort of like how the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home revealed that Peter Parker hadn’t been dealing with the real Nick Fury throughout the film but Talos in disguise.
• Fury Fashion Watch: Nick Fury is sporting a whole new look in general here: scruffy beard, wounded eye fully exposed without a patch, glasses (and he doesn’t revert to the classic clean-shaven-with-eyepatch in the next episode). He also accessorizes with a skullcap beanie (as does Everett Ross, weirdly; must be Marvel’s way of shorthanding that skulking is afoot!) and, at one point, a very comfy-looking red sweater.