This is being written on the weekend between the fourth and fifth episodes of ‘Secret Invasion’. To that end, there are ways this series could finish in a satisfactory way. I am not entirely sure how, but in the sense that all things are technically possible, there is a way to land that plane.
What I will say is this is the sixth MCU television show that has a 6-episode run. ‘Loki’ was an unqualified success, but then there’s ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’, ‘Hawkeye’, ‘Moon Knight’, and ‘Ms. Marvel’. There are good aspects to each of those series, but each series also saw expansive stories that struggled to wrap up in a satisfactory way. Whether it’s the Flag Smashers (remember them?), a shoe-horned Kingpin, the non-appearance of Kang in a very obvious series to have him appear, or the abandonment of a street-level story for a (functionally) time-traveling one, there was just too much packed in too little time with new characters that didn’t get the proper exposition. Series like Hawkeye and Ms. Marvel were still fun at times, but the stories suffered because of their enormity.
That brings us to Secret Invasion. There are two episodes left and, off the top of my head in no particular order, they have to:
- Setup Harrison Ford’s ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross as the President of the United States, or otherwise introduce the Thunderbolts team components in some manner.
- Make any part of G’iah’s story compelling.
- Let us know what Sonya Falsworth has to do with any of this.
- Inform the audience as to when Rhodes became a Skrull and all the emotional baggage that may include, as well as the next step for that character if (when?) Skrull Rhodes dies.
- Have a Fury vs. Gravik face-off.
- Deal with the machine/technology that creates Super Skrulls.
- Expand (or resolve) the brewing intra-Skrull conflict.
- Find a way to handle the one million Skrulls on Earth.
That makes eight important stories or expositions that are needed. There is more, and then we have to include the set pieces or any cameos. Let’s say that, conservatively, they have 10 aspects of Secret Invasion to conclude, and they have the MCU set pieces and cameos to include along the way. With two episodes, they might have 90-100 minutes left to do all this, plus setting up whatever else they want to for the future. It is a lot.
Perusing an article from The Ringer brought me to an interesting note:
For anyone not wanting to do math, that is about $35M an episode. For those not keeping track, there were 187 minutes of runtime in the first four episodes, but that also includes roughly 22:45 in opening and closing credits. Overall, it’s roughly $140M in budget for 2 hours and 45 minutes of screen time, which would qualify as a blockbuster movie if it were released in theatres. It isn’t at the MCU movie budget level, but it’s not entirely off the mark.
Does it feel like it? Not to me. Let’s expand on that point.
I hate to be an In The Comics Guy but, in the comics, Secret Invasion is one of the biggest cross-over storylines that Marvel has in the last 20 years. It follows the Civil War arc – seems familiar! – and includes almost anyone of note. There are your Avengers, the New Avengers, the Young Avengers, the Thunderbolts, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Skrull versions of a lot of the heroes in those groups, the Super Skrull versions that have the both the appearance and powers of some of the heroes, and a slew of the standard Marvel bad guys. There are dozens of notable characters which, in movie terms, would classify it as something like ‘Endgame’ rather than ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’. It could have been a story to turn into a cross-over movie that would take in a billion dollars at the box office.
Disney decided against this – it may be the path for the ‘Secret Wars’ movie coming in 2027 but sowing the seeds for your biggest movie in eight years with a 6-episode television show is ballsy – and decided for a television show instead. On top of that, a 6-episode season whose first four episodes average 41 minutes of screen time. It would be a lot to ask if they remained faithful to the comics in any meaningful way.
For that reason, they had to go smaller. There are sure to be cameos, but we’re not getting 40 heroes coming through a portal. That functionally changes the story from the comics and forces the screen writers to scale it down.
Here’s the problem: they still decided to do an actual invasion. As in, we found out there are one fucking million Skrulls already on Earth. This is a group of aliens that can mimic any person on the planet, there are one million of them, and this is all left up to Fury and Talos. There are characters that may or may not be helping them, but an invasion of aliens that can make themselves look like any politician, hero, or business/religious leader is left up to Fury, who is a senior citizen and has been off-world, and Talos. It kind of strains credibility, right? ‘Captain America: Civil War’ was a cross-over event based off foreign/domestic policy decisions. Most of the heroes that are in the MCU at that time, and are on Earth in the story, are in the movie. Though it’s a philosophical battle, the civil war boils down to policy, but it brings everyone together on screen (and, importantly, in the same room).
It is really hard to square how policy decisions can bring most of the Avengers team together, but an invasion of one million aliens who can shape-shift into any human in seconds is left up to one of said aliens and a guy who probably eats supper at 4 PM.
On top of all this, we find out they have the technology to create Super Skrulls. Gravik has already shown advanced Extremis abilities and his Groot-style abilities. G’iah is also now an Extremis Skrull. These invading aliens that can shape-shift into any living human are now acquiring superhero abilities. They’ve threatened to blow up a United Nations airplane, they’ve murdered Russian civilians in a bombing, and they’ve tried to assassinate the President. It’s still left up to Talos and Fury. What in the absolute fuck is going on here.
This is where Disney tried to have its cake and eat it, too. They didn’t want to have a full-scale crossover event, but they didn’t want to do a smart, small spy thriller, either. They wanted to have returning faces, but introduce more characters for the future. They’re also addicted to their set pieces. They tried to compromise by including some crossovers, some set pieces, and some thriller elements, and none of it is successful. There are good scenes with Talos and Fury, or Talos and Gravik, and even Fury and Skrull Rhodes, but that’s maybe one scene in each episode. It isn’t enough to salvage the rest.
It is frustrating to see those good dialogue scenes. If Disney had decided to make six episodes of the backroom machinations between Falsworth and Fury, or Fury and the US government, of other national governments, of the brewing Skrull civil war, and so on, it could have been very successful. Instead, they try to turn Fury into a superhero himself without realizing that the prior stories involving Fury had the action carried out, almost exclusively, by The Avengers. There is a very good reason Fury doesn’t come bursting through a portal next to Captain America in the final Endgame battle sequence. The fuck is that guy going to do in a gun battle against an alien race that can blow Avengers compound off the face of the planet in seconds?
Had Disney decided to turn this into a truly small-scale spy thriller, revolving around Fury and which of his friends/partners he can/cannot trust, there could have been something special. Spending the sizable majority of an episode developing Fury’s marriage history, so it actually carries weight in the show, would have helped. It would have helped to show us G’iah’s conflicted upbringing as she becomes disillusioned with Fury, or the Skrull resistance, or both, so people actually care when she’s shot. Showing the Skrulls slowly trickling to Earth, (there are one fucking million of them!) and how that has been disrupting the global balance of power, would have helped set the true stakes of the show. None of this was done, so the story they do present lands with as much grace as a penguin being thrown from a ninth-story window.
Or they could have gone the other direction. They could have saved this for the theatres and made it a huge cross-over movie. It wouldn’t have been hard to make the TV show a small-scale spy thriller, have Gravik (or someone similar) escape with the Super Skrull technology, and then have that bleed into future movies. Assuming Secret Wars isn’t borne from this show, we have been robbed of the potential for an Avengers vs. Skrull Avengers battle. Don Cheadle has said in interviews that he had a lot of fun playing Rhodes with a different slant (the drinking asshole presented on the show). Now, imagine that, but with a dozen Avengers?
Or we could have one alien use superhero powers in front of the US military, shape shift into his true form, stab another alien who also just shape-shifted, and have the soldiers just 5-10 feet away not even blink:
Groans, indeed.
By trying to split the difference, Disney gave us a TV show that is neither an interesting spy thriller nor a high-octane blockbuster. The myriad stories don’t have time to flesh out, because we have to include soldiers just absolutely no-selling aliens shapeshifting into soldiers, and everything suffers. The new characters aren’t interesting (Gravik is being saved by Kingsley Ben-Adir’s performance, mercifully), the stories are paper-thin, and the action sequences look like they were made in the Volume one actor at a time. A few scenes aside, it collapses on itself because the foundation is made of straw.
All due respect to the characters of Talos and Fury, but they are incomprehensibly in over their heads in the show. Not in a “how will Captain America save those soldiers from the prison” kind of way, either. It’s more in the “we had the Avengers team get together to argue policy, but we can’t ask some of them to help with the one million shapeshifting, potentially super-powered aliens that have already invaded Earth” kind of way. It really is an unbelievable premise in every sense of the word.
Had this been a small-scale TV thriller, it would have given them all the time they needed to introduce and progress their new characters. Had this been a large-scale cross-over movie, it could have made a billion dollars. Instead, they tried to Frankenstein the two of them together and instead of being greater than the sum of its parts, the disparate parts are just cannibalizing each other. Of all the opportunities Disney has squandered to do something interesting with the MCU post-Endgame, this is at the top of the list with a bullet that has just gone through Gravik’s face, which heals instantly and is not noticed by the professionally trained soldiers standing a hockey stick’s length away.
Cliffy's hell-hole 