Air Date: 21 June 2023 to 29 July 2023
Director: Ali Selim
Network: Disney+
Stars: Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Don Cheadle, Emilia Clarke, Olivia Colman, and Cobie Smulders

The Background:
January 1962 saw legendary duo Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduce the Skrulls to Marvel Comics readers. This race of warmongering shape-shifters have long hounded Marvel’s heroes but are perhaps best known not just for their long-standing conflict against the Kree but also the divisive Secret Invasion story arc (Bendis, et al, 2008 to 2009), an eight-issue story accompanied by multiple tie-ins and spin-offs that detailed a lengthy and aggressive infiltration of Earth’s mightiest heroes, Following their live-action debut in Captain Marvel (Boden, 2019), the Skrulls have appeared sporadically throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) but took centre stage in this series, which MCU head honcho Kevin Feige claimed would impact future MCU productions. The series was also produced as a means to explore the potential of Nick Fury (Jackson), a character mainly utilised in a supporting or administrative role, and evoke the atmosphere of classic Cold War/espionage thrillers (rather than load the narratives with superpowered imposters) by playing into the paranoia and distrust of the original storyline. Although Secret Invasion received heavy backlash for utilising AI for its opening title sequence, the series was praised for its darker, more mature direction; the tension and drama evoked through the narrative was equally praised, as was Jackson’s performance, though some found Secret Invasion to be a dull and tedious affair.

The Plot:
Nick Fury, former director of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.) returns to Earth to investigate and intercept a faction of shape-shifting Skrulls who have infiltrated all aspects of human life and society.

The Review [SPOILERS!]:
Secret Invasion is a six-part miniseries that takes its title from the action-packed Marvel event of the same name. In many ways, the plot of this series is what I originally envisioned would permeate the MCU when Captain Marvel’s first trailer dropped. Before the movie recast the Skrulls as sympathetic refugees, I imagined we’d see an extended plot concerning their infiltration of human society throughout Marvel’s movies, however that didn’t actually happen. On the one hand, I was glad of this as plots like that annoy me for how cliché they are but, on the other hand, it’s resulted in this miniseries that takes that basic concept and significantly downplays its scope to deliver what’s actually more of a character inspection of Nick Fury than a significant shake-up of the MCU status quo. At first, though, it seems like this isn’t the case; the opening sequence of the series sees recurring MCU side character Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) pursued and killed by Talos (Mendelsohn), revealing him to have been a Skrull in disguise, and this same episode ends with frequent Avenger ally Maria Hill (Smulders) dead and Fury himself publicly blamed for her murder thanks to the actions of Skrull revolutionary Gravik (Ben-Adir). However, although Colonel James “Rhodey” Rhodes/War Machine (Cheadle) co-stars, now working as an advisor to the United States President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney), he’s the only Avenger-level inclusion in Secret Invasion, which reframes the paranoia and subterfuge of the source material into less of a colourful classic of bombastic superheroes and more of a political thriller in the same vein as Captain America: The Winter Solder (Russo and Russo, 2014) and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Skogland, 2021). In fact, this last comparison is startlingly apt as much of Gravik’s plot to wipe out humanity and the motivations of his Skrull loyalists is reminiscent of Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman) and her Flag Smashers; the show even has a similar visual style and focus on grounded and practical explosions, again keeping things gritty and intriguing but perhaps at the cost of being a visually engaging, unique, or exciting narrative.

Fury returns to Earth after being absent for some time; he’s spent what’s said to be years out in deep space aboard the S.A.B.E.R. space station, working with Skrulls to establish an outer space defence network for the Earth. However, what he’s really been doing is hiding; ever since returning from the Blip, Fury is noted to have changed. His age is constantly brought up, and even he admits that the years he spent gone have caused him to lose more than a step or two; his appearance is dishevelled for most of the series, meaning it’s a thematic celebration when he visits one of his many gravesites and retrieves his iconic eye patch and coat, and much of the series focuses on exploring Fury in a way we’ve never seen before. Far from the influential spy of spies, Fury is recontextualised as a simple agent who got lucky; Talos tears into Fury, telling him that he owes his entire career to the information and assistance offered to him by the many Skrulls who agreed to act as his eyes and ears in return for a safe haven and we get to see a far more nuanced and vulnerable side to Fury. Specifically, flashbacks and de-aging effects show him in his younger days, forging an alliance with Talos and the Skrulls and even falling in love with the Skrull Varra (Charlayne Woodard), who takes the form and life of Priscilla and eventually marries him. Feeling a deep sense of obligation and respect towards the Skrulls, Fury promised to find them a new home in return for acting as his personal spy network, but was unable to deliver on this promise, infuriating Gravik and many of his followers, and therefore Fury has a personal stake in outing the Skrull infiltration since he’s largely responsible for their antagonism towards humans. Fury and Talos were united in their belief that the Skrulls would be accepted by humanity if they were willing to compromise; if they defended the Earth and kept their true selves hidden, they would be safe and able to thrive, but many came to resent having to hide themselves and joined Gravik in scheming to wipe out humankind. While Fury’s main concern is safeguarding the world, he maintains the belief that Skrulls and humans can co-exist throughout the series and constantly pleads with Gravik to end his vendetta despite how personal he makes their conflict. Ultimately, it’s a much deeper characterisation of Fury; we see him more relaxed, less authoritative, incredibly vulnerable, and relying on a handful of trusted allies to curb Gravik’s threat before it’s too late, while exploring how utterly broken he was following the Blip and his inability to prevent such a disaster.

One of the best aspects of Secret Invasion is the relationship between Talos and Fury; since their first adventure, the two became close friends and were united in their love of humanity and the belief that the Skrulls need to work together with humans to be accepted and safe. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of resentment between them in Fury’s absence; Talos is frustrated that Fury refuses to open up to him about his near-death experience and feels slighted that Fury would use his people to his own ends, but they maintain a begrudging mutual respect since they both know they need each other to oppose Gravik. Talos is grieving the loss of his wife, Soren (Sharon Blynn), at Gravik’s hands, his ousting from the Skrull council in favour of Gravik’s more fanatical ways, and the fracturing of his relationship with his daughter, G’iah (Clarke), who’s signed up to Gravik’s cause both to spite her father and because she resents having to hide away. Talos’s motivations in stopping Gravik are thus as multifaceted as Fury’s; his personal vendetta against Gravik sees him explode in a violent and uncharacteristic rage on more than one occasion and he’s left heartbroken and frustrated when G’iah continues to give him the cold shoulder even after she learns the truth about Gravik and his plan and decides to work against him from the inside. Talos is convinced that the Skrulls will be accepted by humanity if they prove themselves through heroic deeds, so much so that he teams up with Fury to defend President Ritson from Gravik’s attack and ends up fatally wounded as a result. Although the series initially makes it a bit unclear, this sees Talos killed before he can reconcile with G’iah and leaves Fury devastated; on the plus side, G’iah connects with Priscilla, who performs a traditional (if sadly intimate) funeral for her father and his death is enough to push G’iah into fully standing against Gravik, if only to get revenge. Spirited and forthright, G’iah is also young, brash, and quite bratty; she joins with Gravik mainly out of spite and continues to subscribe to the belief that the Skrulls deserve their own home rather than to hide amongst people who hate and fear them. However, the sheer magnitude of Gravik’s plot is enough to shake her faith in his deals, especially as he becomes more unstable; to that end, she’s forced to expose herself to Gravik’s “Super-Skrull” machine to grant herself additional superpowers to both survive his reprisals and confront him in the final.

Though also young and headstrong, Gravik is equally passionate and violent in his beliefs; recruited into Fury and Talos’s cause from a young age, Gravik initially carried out his orders without hesitation, killing in the name of Fury and his people in the firm belief that Fury would find them a home. However, as the years passed, the guilt and the blood on his hands mounted up, and Fury became increasingly absent, meaning bitterness and resentment took root in Gravik and turned him against all humans, but especially Fury, whom he sees as the embodiment of humankind and against whom much of his aggression is targeted. Gravik goes to great lengths to mess with Fury, having his followers impersonate people close to Fury and even assuming his form to frame him for Hill’s murder, all to show the world that this legendary figure is a fallible, untrustworthy, broken-down old man. As much as he desires power, granted to him by both the Skrull Council and Doctor Rosa Dalton’s (Katie Finneran) work in constructing his Super-Skrull machine, Gravik wishes to break Fury’s spirit, have him witness both his greatest failure and the death of his people, and then kill him for going back on his word. To facilitate this, Gravik has placed his followers in key roles within the world’s superpowers and is stoking the flames of conflict between the United States and Russia from a glorified refugee camp dubbed “New Skrullos” and sitting in a deeply irradiated area of Russia, where his people are safe from reprisals and live simple lives as farmers or take more active roles as soldiers. However, Gravik’s desire for revenge sees him place the settlement right in the line of fire and willing to sacrifice (or out-right execute) his own people to achieve victory, something many of his followers are unable to speak out against thanks to his ruthlessness and being imbued with various superpowers from his experiments. Undeniably, Gravik’s chief agent in encouraging President Ritson to strike back against Russia is Rhodey, who’s revealed to be a Skrull in disguise; an arrogant, pompous sellout, Rhodey continually dismisses Fury’s claims of a Skrull invasion and takes great pleasure in both firing him and labelling him a criminal and constantly gets in Ritson’s ear about the Russian/Skrull threat against the United States, bringing the world on the brink of annihilation simply through choice words and evidence supplied by Gravik himself. Naturally, this doesn’t end well for Rhodes; like many of the rebellious Skrulls loyal to Gravik’s cause, he’s ultimately killed to prevent this catastrophe, but Gravik’s followers are more than willing to give up their lives if it means dying as their true selves rather than pretending to be something they’re not.

The Summary [SPOILERS!]:
Oddly, Secret Invasion’s episodes get shorter as the series progresses, starting at around an hour and going as short as just over half an hour, indicating to me that there wasn’t as much story as other Marvel shows. Episode two was the longest at nearly an hour, while most episodes (including the finale) were less than forty minutes. Indeed, I wonder if this could’ve been a two-hour streaming film or cut down to four episodes if some of the padding, like Priscilla, was omitted. Priscilla definitely adds new layers to Fury’s character; there was never a hint that he was married or had much of a personal life before, but here we get to see his secluded home, his loving and equal relationship with Priscilla, and see him as more of a man, all masks cast aside. Naturally, their relationship isn’t perfect; Priscilla also notes a change in Fury and has even been somewhat swayed to Gravik’s cause in her husband’s absence, ultimately causing their relationship to fall apart until they reconcile in the finale. Again, this allows for a looser, less uptight characterisation for Fury but it somewhat bogs down the series; I wonder if expanding on his relationship with Hill might’ve been a better option, or perhaps spending more time developing his past with MI6 agent Sonia Falsworth (Coleman), an unnervingly polite and yet surprisingly devious ally of his who is happy to blatantly torture and murder Skrulls to get information on Gravik’s plot. Even saying that makes me wonder what the point of Falsworth really was when the show could’ve easily slotted Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) into this role to explore her vaguely defined relationship with Fury and offer to help G’iah in the finale for her own unscrupulous ends.

Still, I did enjoy Fury’s characterisation here; his interactions with Talos, in particular, Priscilla, G’iah, and even Gravik show a man who’s been worn down by secrets, conflict, and bigotry and is striving to find a way for humanity to co-exist with extraterrestrial beings in a mutually beneficial way, even if it means compromises on both sides. He openly plays the race card when talking with Rhodey in an attempt to convince him to believe him, reinstate him, and take the Skrull threat seriously only to be met with hostility, and likens the Skrull’s displacement to the same persecution his people went through in the past (and even today). This adds an extra layer onto his motivations for helping the Skrulls as he feels a kinship to them, but he couldn’t help but use their unique shape-shifting powers to his benefit to ensure global security. As Talos mentions, this makes Fury quite the hypocrite since he had no problem exploiting the Skrulls for a “good” reason, making him thematically similar to Gravik, who exploits them for a “bad” reason. Rather than have the Skrull campaign against the Earth be religiously motivated and their people impersonate key superhero figures, Gravik and his followers are entrenched within the world’s governments and want to destroy humanity to claim the Earth for themselves. With a million displaced Skrulls hiding on Earth, many have every right to fear for their lives and to resent having to hide themselves, which sees those loyal to Gravik branding Talos as weak and a traitor, sentiments largely echoed by G’iah until she reluctantly comes to see how extreme Gravik’s plot has become. While Secret Invasion is built around the fundamental question of trust, there are very few Skrull reveals that surprised me or made me care; I think everyone assumed Rhodey would be a Skrull, though I wasn’t expecting Ross to be one until he showed up in the first episode, and everyone else who’s shown to be a Skrull is a new character for the show to avoid messing up the status quo, which is predictably restored in the finale when the real Rhodey and Ross are rescued by G’iah since the Skrulls conveniently need to keep their hosts alive to better maintain their façade and leech off their memories, experiences, and personalities.

On the one hand, I do like that Secret Invasion opted for a more grounded, gritty thriller story; it would be unrealistic to expect some of the MCU’s biggest names to appear and be revealed as Skrulls and the intimate nature of the narrative helps to make things more personal and raw. Car chases, explosions, and fire fights feel more visceral and real as, mostly, the series has two feet firmly on the ground if you ignore the sparing use of shape-shifting aliens. When the Skrulls do utilise their powers, or more fantastical elements like Extremis or that holographic-mask technology are employed, it’s treated as a big deal since, for the most part, we’re just following two old blokes trying to coerce or beat information out of people. However, a lot of this is done away with in the last episode; by then, G’iah has already gained additional powers from Gravik’s machine and Gravik himself uses the “Harvest” to gain the powers of all the Avengers and multiple of superpowered and alien entities to become a Super-Skrull. This means the ending comes down to a big ol’ fist fight between G’iah and Gravik and Fury and Falsworth exposing Rhodey’s true nature to the baffled and horrified President Ritson. One is an overly elaborate CGI punch-up that ends in anti-climactic fashion and the other is tense showdown that ends with the Rhodey-Skull dead because of his own hubris and President Ritson so rattled by the Skrull invasion that he openly declares war against all Skrulls, leading to a brief montage of trigger-happy bigots gunning down suspected Skrulls whether they’re innocent or not. This leads Fury and Priscilla (who reassumes her Skrull name and form) to return to S.A.B.E.R. to negotiate a peace treaty with the Kree and Falsworth offering G’iah the resources to fight back against Ritson’s campaign, essentially ending the series where it started with Fury off-world, Skrulls in hiding, and tensions high within the world’s governments. Sadly though, as much as I liked the peek into Fury’s private life and seeing him take centre stage, Secret Invasion felt like a mixed bag to me. Although Gravik’s plot is to kickstart World War Three, the stakes never felt very high and it was difficult to care when characters died as they were either expendable, had outlived their usefulness (Hill), were revealed to still be alive (Ross and Rhodey), or their deaths were strangely rushed to the point where I’m sure they’ll be revealed to be fake later (Talos). The relationship and banter between Fury and Talos was great, I enjoyed Gravik’s impassioned speeches and maniacal bent, and it’ll be interesting to see where Super-Skrull G’iah factors into the MCU going forward but this felt like a series you could easily skip over without missing anything and I’ll be surprised if it actually has any lasting impact on the MCU since it goes to such lengths to restore the status quo by the end.

My Rating:

Could Be Better

What did you think to Secret Invasion? How do you think it compares to the source material and Marvel’s other Disney+ shows? What did you think to the deeper dive into Nick Fury’s characterisation and personal life? Did you enjoy his relationship with Talos and kinship with the Skrulls? What did you think to Talos and G’iah’s resentment towards him? Were you impressed with Gravik and his plan or did you find it a bit too derivative? What did you think to what few Skrull reveals we got, and would you have preferred to see this narrative stretched out throughout the MCU rather than rushed in a miniseries? Whatever you think about Secret Invasion, feel free to drop a comment below or share your thoughts on my social media pages and don’t forget to check out my other MCU reviews across the site!