Isn’t his left eye supposed to be white here
While I wasn’t overly hyped about Secret Invasion ahead of time, given that it wasn’t any new characters we hadn’t seen before, and just the return of Nick Fury, I was interested to see how the MCU would handle what was being sold as a gritty spy drama.
Now, after episode 5 with one more to go, I have to say that this is just…an extremely bad show. There’s no getting around it. It didn’t start out amazingly, but its quality has slid downhill to a point where what I’m seeing on screen makes little to no sense.
I’m certainly not alone here. Secret Invasion is indeed the worst critically reviewed MCU series in the Disney Plus era, and in the overall MCU, only above Iron Fist and Inhumans. Its 69% audience score is below every other Disney Plus MCU show except She-Hulk, which had the living hell review bombed out of it by a…certain type of viewer.
But Secret Invasion just not good. There’s no getting around it. It’s a spy drama where the spies are aliens and that’s supposed to be the main hook, but it doesn’t really work any differently than a spy drama where double agents are…humans. And it’s less interesting than the actual good spy series we’ve seen on TV the last few years, whether that’s The Americans, Slow Horses or many others.
This week was full of just truly baffling moments. In just 33 minutes or so, we had:
- Rhodey saying the only way he could be outed as a Skrull was to kill him, promptly followed by a scene where a Skrull is outed by being shot in the hand and not killed.
- Fury lightly hitting Rhodey on the head with his pistol in the weirdest way possible.
- After watching Gravik heal from a literal bullet wound to the face, his fellow soldiers try to kill him with a sledgehammer, a plastic bag and their own fists in the worst calculated coup ever.
Secret Invasion
- I could have sworn last week the show was telegraphing that Fury never knew his wife was a Skrull, hence her betrayal, but this week it was made clear he did know that but not that she was a double-agent working for Gravik. Weirdly convoluted.
- Fury has been asked multiple times why he doesn’t call any of the Avengers for help, he says it’s “personal” and the attempted assassination of the president and the beginning of a potential nuclear war with Russia is apparently something he needs to singlehandedly stop out of…pride? The rationale makes no sense, and there’s a reason the comic Secret Invasion was enormous and brought in dozens of actual superheroes to deal with the threat. Carol Danvers could fly in here, grab Gravik and imprision him on the moon or something in like ten minutes.
- Fury reveals Mission Impossible-like face/voice-masking tech to get him through an airport which is close to identical what the Skrulls are doing to infiltrate society. And humans can also do this? This seems like a big deal??
- I simply cannot understand how this show had a $212 million budget, as further evidenced by this week. Its action scenes are a bit of choreography in single rooms. The entire thing is mostly a couple people having conversations while slowly walking around. Where on earth is this money going?
Anything good about the show, or this episode? Yes! Olivia Colman is amazing in every scene she’s in as the cheerful, sociopathic, murderous head of SIS. She’s a delight, and the Oscar-winner is far above the caliber of this series.
I do not understand what happened with this project, but this feels like a “Solo” moment for Marvel as even Bob Iger suggests things are going to scale back on the Disney Plus MCU front from here. Maybe they should.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
