“Secret Invasion,” starring Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury and Ben Mendelsohn as Talos has not improved since the first episode, if anything it has gotten significantly worse. Four episodes in and we barely know any of the new characters besides their name and their archetype, and what could have been a big set-piece is ultimately underutilized and wasted.
Episode four titled “Beloved” is the shortest of the episodes so far, clocking in at just around 37 minutes, which is absurd for any type of show, let alone a limited series. Besides that, the episode begins in Paris in 2012, just after the events of the first “The Avengers” movie. We get a scene of Fury and his wife Priscilla, nothing really happens besides reading the poem the episode is named after, and setting up the “themes” of the episode. We then go to a church where it’s revealed that the skrull from the last episode on the phone was Rhodey, which when the show is over will only end badly, something which was explained last week. We find out that Fury is listening in as they repeatedly say that Fury is washed up, useless and old, something which is awesome to hear about our main character and legacy hero of this entire franchise.
It’s revealed that Priscilla does not want to kill Fury, which means that the cliffhanger ending from last week was pointless as everyone already knew Rhodey was a skrull and this could have been something interesting for Fury’s wife to do. Instead, we resolve that situation right after between Fury and his wife where he gets destroyed as a character, getting beaten down by his wife for being old, weak and powerless.
The rest of the episode is pretty pointless. Gi’ah, who was “killed” for a cliffhanger, comes back immediately and talks to Talos, and Fury confronts skrull Rhodey and gets blackmailed by Rhodey, which should make no sense because if Rhodey did not want Fury to be snooping around at all, he would’ve gotten Fury arrested during the UN scene in episode two. It retroactively calls into question why Rhodey would protect Fury and Hill, and raises more questions than it answers. Fury then tracks Rhodey through “liquid-tracking,” which leads to what may be one of the most confusing action scenes with the new post-“Avengers: Endgame” content. Somehow, Gravik comes in with two helicopters over the U.S. president’s motorcade while he is about to attend a meeting in London, and begins to fire missiles at the motorcade, incapacitating the president.
Since Disney and Hollywood don't understand violence or guns, let me tell you that it is impossible to have a helicopter, just not a Russian one like in the show, to be in the airspace around a presidential motorcade, especially if said motorcade is in a foreign country like Britain in the show. So there goes the element of the helicopter, but the guns that Fury and Talos use are nonsensical. While both the Skrulls and Secret Service are using an assault rifle as the battle is medium range, Fury and Talos use a handgun and a shotgun. For world class spies you’d think they would have an assault rifle, but instead they have a grenade launcher. It makes no sense, but the writers obviously don’t care about how it makes sense.
What makes this fight scene even worse is that the CGI on the helicopters looks horrendous. “Iron Man 3,” which had a similar scene of three random helicopters firing at Tony Stark’s house, looked leagues better than this, and “Iron Man 3” came out in 2013, 10 years ago. On top of that, this scene of Gravik attacking the president and trying to start World War III should have been either the first thing that happens in this show, or the last thing that happens.
If this was the first thing to happen in the show, you could make it so Fury is a secret agent working with the president. While it gets attacked, he finds out that it’s a skrull who’s trying to start World War III. You could then have Fury try and solve the case, and you could have the same twists but make it more “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
You could’ve also made it so this is the last battle in the show. You could’ve had five episodes of Fury and Talos slowly learning about the attack, then finding out once presenting the facts that Rhodey and other Governments are skrulls and are in on it.
You could’ve done either of those things, but instead it’s just the fight scene from this episode. Last episode it was ‘Let’s stop World World III by stopping this random submarine’ and this episode it was ‘Let’s stop World War III by saving the president of the United States.’ It’s frankly so absurd and insulting whenever the showrunner claims that this is supposed to be a dark, street-level type of show.
Going back to the plot, Fury and Talos save the president, but Talos dies during the battle. It’s obvious that Talos is dead from the trailers and is the only way to have any motivation for his daughter Gi’ah to come back to the main plot. It makes no sense why Fury and Talos were not shot on sight because they weren’t with the U.S., but somehow the soldiers and Secret Service know who the both of them are and actually have Fury command them. Fury ends up putting the president in his own car, which means that Fury kidnapped him, but we’ll have to wait and see.
It was recently revealed that the cost of this entire show was $212 million dollars excluding marketing costs, which comes out to about $38 million dollars per episode. For a show that’s being watched on average a million people, it shows how much the brand has fallen, and how little interest there still is.
The future of the MCU does not look bright either, with the next projects coming up being “Echo,” a show about a character no one knows and who’s show almost got canceled, but is being released all at once so they can recoup whatever they can from producing it. “Loki” season two is coming out soon, the show which said that free will in the MCU does not exist, making every single film pointless and the characters meaningless. If that doesn’t sound appealing, then “The Marvels” is coming out at the end of the year, which will make about as much money as “The Flash.”
While the show continues to go in a downward dive towards the absurd and badly written, it shows how much Marvel as a brand has fallen off the same cliff. With writers that can’t write, “Secret Invasion” will follow the nine other Marvel Disney+ shows in forgetful mediocrity.
Rating: 1/5
