‘Secret Invasion’ Ended Where It Should Have Started

Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Secret Invasion.

Oddly enough, a series centered around a shape-shifting alien species could have been the MCU’s most human entry in a long while. Secret Invasion missed a great deal of potential, and that became overwhelmingly evident in its final episode. A series that set itself up to be about trusting no one and suspecting a Skrull at every corner turned out to be less about an invasion of impostors, but rather a story about the betrayal Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) feels toward Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) for his failure to deliver on a promise. Now, Fury cannot trust the Skrulls he once saw (and used) as allies.

The thing is, we’ve always known Fury to be a mistrustful fellow. “Last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye,” as he confessed in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This isn’t new character development, and discovering that he’s actually had a wife, Varra (Charlayne Woodard), whom he’s trusted all along, is not a character arc. Ben-Adir delivers a powerful monologue in the show’s finale, justifying Gravik’s motivations in a passionate rage, but that’s where the Secret Invasion should have started. The fallout caused by his actions following his rebellion would’ve spread throughout the entire world like fast-acting venom, which caught a glimpse of in a montage at the tail end of the finale.

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The ‘Secret Invasion’ Finale’s Ending Montage Was the Best Sequence of the Entire Series

When Fury is on the phone with President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney) scolding him for his negligent, fearmongering speech following a Skrull attack that nearly cost him his life and sparked a worldwide war, we’re given a painfully brief montage of the subsequent effect that Ritson’s words have had on the public. Skrulls in high-profile positions are uncovered and assassinated, including the execution of political pundit Chris Stearns (Christopher McDonald) on live television. Innocent figures are mistakenly identified as Skrulls and brutally murdered in broad daylight, while some Skrull survivors are readily willing and waiting to defend themselves.

This montage should have been the meat of the series. “Putting things back together was never going to be easy,” Fury warns President Ritson. “You took a bad situation and made it worse.” Now, the world will be rife with paranoia and amidst a geopolitical landscape constantly teetering on the edge of war. That’s exactly what Secret Invasion should have been about — a cold and sometimes violent society torn by xenophobia and suspicion toward the invisible “other.”

‘WandaVision’ and ‘Hawkeye’s Best Sequences Had Nothing to Do With Their Titular Heroes

In WandaVision‘s fourth episode, there’s a flashback sequence that follows Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) from the moment that Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) snapped half of the universe back into existence in Avengers: Endgame. We see that five years prior, when Thanos (Josh Brolin) eliminated half of all living creatures, Monica was seated at her mother’s bedside in a hospital room, awaiting her discharge after surgery. Now, after The Blip, Monica awakens in the same chair with her mother, Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), nowhere to be found.

What follows is a scene of absolute chaos, with an entire hospital full of people running around (half of them unaware that they disappeared for five years), scrambling to figure out what’s occurred. When Monica eventually runs into Dr. Highland (Lana Young), she’s informed that her mother passed away three years ago, which, to her utter disbelief, was two years after Monica disappeared. In her mind, no time has passed. Maybe she accidentally fell asleep for a few moments, but she cannot fathom the reality of what’s actually happened. That goes for everyone else, too. The halls of the hospital are filled with individuals rematerializing and swimming through a sea of panic, searching for their loved ones.

The Hawkeye series briefly touched on this element as well, with a flashback sequence following Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) blipping out and back into existence in what makes for a gorgeous visual and visceral interpretation of the experience from a first-person perspective. Imagine the potential of a series focused on moments like this — so many stories could be told within the period before the “five years later” title card in Avengers: Endgame. Placing out-of-this-world stakes into a grounded, human experience makes for an opportunity too often squandered in the MCU.

The MCU’s Disney+ Shows Do Lots of Telling and Not Enough Showing

It’s time for the studio to recognize its own shortcomings and, rather than doubling down without taking a breather, slow down on the content and invest further into the areas it succeeds. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier should have served as an excellent learning opportunity with the heavy weight of its shortcomings. Like Gravik’s rebel Skrulls, we had a group of villains with motivations that were simply not given the necessary fuel to make us invested. The series told a superior tale of Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and his internal struggle, grappling with what it means to carry and deserve the Captain America moniker, but it was dragged down by the burden of his two-dimensional foes.

The Flag Smashers, as they called themselves, were a group of pseudo-anarchistic rebels seeking to return society to the state it was in during the five years following Thanos’ snap. It was a time when resources were plentiful and nations were unified as if the borders of the world had disintegrated. The thing is, that’s what we’re told, not what we’re shown. We need to see the effect the Blip had on the lives of these people from the ground level. “Every time something gets better for one group, it gets worse for another,” as Sam astutely pointed out. We’re left to take him at his word, though, rather than witnessing that reality ourselves.

Secret Invasion was the ideal vehicle to right old wrongs and take its time investigating humanity’s probable response to a perceived threat like a Skrull invasion. Introduce the Super Skrulls, if you must, but how refreshing it would have been if we got the obligatory CGI-fest over with at the beginning, and then seized the opportunity to scale things back to an intimate, human level for the duration of the series.

All episodes of Secret Invasion are available to stream on Disney+.