It’s hard for a company to produce nine shows over three years and mess up every single one of them, and not only mess them up, but make the same mistakes every single time. This company would be Disney, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, TV shows have a new member to the club of terrible endings. Every single MCU show has a rushed ending. It’s because the writers clearly don’t know what they want to be the end of their story, and because they don’t know the answers to the questions they create in their shows. Before going over the entire show, let’s see what happened in the finale.
The Finale
Clocking in at 32 minutes, which is criminal for a show marketed as one hour episodes, the finale is split up into two sections. One is with Giah and Gravik and the other with Fury and the president. Not much happens in the finale besides Giah killing Gravik in the most boring way possible, a giant and poorly rendered CGI fight, and Fury showing that Rhodey was a skrull, which causes the president to go scorched Earth, deciding to go to war against all “off-world creatures.” It makes no sense to why he would say this, as Thor and the Asgardians live on Earth, but why should a show which costs $216 million check the facts before writing a script. Obviously, writing is very hard and putting in effort is even harder. The show ends with Fury and his wife going back up to S.A.B.E.R for the events of The Marvels.
So that’s it, that’s “Secret Invasion.” What a terrible show. It's insulting to not only not answer the questions of what happened to Everett Ross and Rhodey, two people who were revealed to be skrulls in the show, and not explain when they became skrulls or when they were captured. The show actually lampshades this question, which is even worse. For those uninformed, lampshading is by definition: “The writers' trick of dealing with any element of the story that threatens the audience's Willing Suspension of Disbelief, whether a very implausible plot development or a particularly blatant use of a trope, by calling attention to it and simply moving on.” This happens when Ross asks Rhodey, “How long have you been captured?,” and then the scene literally ends. We don’t get the answer because the writers don’t know the answer to it.
On top of that, this show begins and ends the same exact way, with Fury arriving and leaving in the same exact place to go to the same exact location. The only thing this show actually accomplished was destroying his character, which will be discussed later, and also killing Talos and Maria Hill. Besides that, nothing of importance happened, which means this show was a complete waste of time.
Characters
Nick Fury was a bad-ass spy, a man who became the director of SHIELD to save the world from threats he could not comprehend and without powers. Only when he physically could not save the world, when he was blipped by Thanos, was Fury stopped and was mad he couldn’t fight. Notice the past tense, as Fury now has become a bitter man who lied about his accomplishments because they weren’t his. It was actually him taking the credit of his friends. Also, he is an old and washed up man. What a character assassination to a beloved character. But it’s not just Fury. Every character in “Secret Invasion” either has no character, or is just an archetype of a character and nothing more. Gi’ah doesn’t have a character arc; she’s just Talos’ daughter. There is no characterization beyond that. Gravik is just a random bad guy of the week; he wants revenge for a nonsense reason. Rhodey is just evil; that’s his character. The show is so surface level yet is four hours long. “Oppenheimer” is three hours long and is packed full of characters with arcs and storylines. Not only is it one hour shorter, but it costs half as much, yet looks 20 times as good. It’s insulting to the fanbase of these shows when Marvel and Disney just spit in their faces and tell them to be excited about what they got.
Directing and Music
The directing and cinematography of “Secret Invasion” are the only bright spots of the show. Many of the establishing shots in this show look beautiful, as well as many random shots throughout the show. Ali Selim did a great job working on this show. If only this show had a better script. The music in this show is completely generic, much like the A.I intro. There’s nothing special about it. It doesn’t enhance the show at all very much, and is barely around.
The Future
The future of the MCU is incredibly bleak, with Disney losing billions monthly with flop after flop, and with ongoing Hollywood strikes, the MCU will most likely die along with Disney in the next few years. It’s incredibly disheartening to see a franchise you grew up with turn into this, but it’s the reality we live in. “Loki” season two, “Echo” and “The Marvels” will most likely become flops as well for Disney. For all intents and purposes, the MCU is dead.
Rating: 1/5
