What Marvel’s Secret Invasion Owes to the British Spy Classics

Secret Invasion has some things in common with more recent spy shows. Both the BBC’s Spooks (2001-2011) and Netflix’s much more recent Treason, for example (not to mention the American 24), became notorious for the shocking deaths of major characters, and Secret Invasion made sure to squeeze that into its first episode. Themes around misinformation and the media show that it does exist in the world of the 2020s and is taking inspiration from 21^st century spy stories.

In general, though, Secret Invasion takes its cue far more from the more grounded, less action-centric British spy dramas of the Cold War. We can see that straight away from the filming style. The show is all dark streets and concrete flights of steps, taking place in locations that have not changed much since the Cold War, especially in Eastern Europe. Grim shots of the blood-stained walls of abattoirs and clandestine meetings taking place in dark corners, on trains, in vans and so on are all hallmarks of the more dark and gritty type of spy story, the stories with fewer glamourous girls and gadgets, and more torture, back-stabbing, and men in suits sitting around having very tense conversations in empty restaurants. 

One of the early examples of this sort of film was The Ipcress File (1965), based on a 1962 novel by Len Deighton which was also adapted into a television show by ITV in 2022. This was deliberately filmed in a completely different way to the James Bond films that had been released at that time (Dr No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger). It was intended to be more realistic and less focused on attractive stars and glamour (though putting a pair of glasses on Michael Caine as lead character Harry Palmer hardly made him less attractive). Secret Invasion similarly takes audiences away from the brightly colored world of other Marvel shows like She-Hulk: Attorney-at-Law or Hawkeye and focuses on a more down-to-earth approach. The Earth may be under threat, but it is under threat in a much less flashy way, from dirty bombs and terrorist attacks.

Most of all, Secret Invasion leans on the novels of British writer John le Carré and their adaptations, and his stories about British Cold War spy George Smiley. Unlike Fleming, who served in intelligence during the Second World War, and Deighton, who did his National Service with the RAF, le Carré had actually worked as a spy during the Cold War and knew what he was talking about when it came to Cold War espionage.

John le Carré was the pen name of David Cromwell, who during the Cold War worked for the Intelligence Corps of the British Army, then for MI5, then for MI6 (MI5 is the UK’s security service and is responsible for threats to national security at home, roughly similar to the American FBI. MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service, is responsible for international espionage and is equivalent to the American CIA. James Bond works for MI6). Cromwell/le Carré was outed and forced to retire from MI6 by the infamous British traitor Kim Philby, one of a ring of spies who passed on intelligence to the Soviet Union, who had been recruited at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s and became known as the “Cambridge Five”. All of them worked for the British government, and Philby worked for MI6.

The influence of le Carré’s stories on Secret Invasion is clear from the introduction of Olivia Colman’s character, MI6 spymaster Sonya Falsworth, when she refers to MI6 as “the Circus”. That nickname was created by le Carré when he first started writing spy novels with the first George Smiley story, Call for the Dead, in 1961. At that time, he was still working for MI6 himself, so he used “the Circus” as a sort of a code for the organisation, and “Control” for the Chief of the organisation, known as “C” in real life and “M” in the James Bond stories.