secret invasion (season 1)

Is Marvel officially in trouble? “Trouble” might be an aggressive wording, but there’s little question they’ve found their post-Endgame footing uncommonly slippery. From attempting to launch lesser-loved properties such as Eternals to the ongoing glut of Disney Plus offerings that often makes staying on top of the MCU feel like an untenable workload (if not a full-time job), the Marvel brand may not be stagnant, but it is starting to feel a bit like a hamster wheel. People will still turn out in droves for characters they feel genuinely invested in - as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 readily proved - but the days of every Marvel project being eagerly embraced as a vital piece of a larger whole, or enjoying preferential box office status (remember when Captain Marvel generated over a billion dollars?) feel largely behind us.   

On paper, the new Disney Plus series Secret Invasion sounds terrific. It builds on the events of the aforementioned Captain Marvel, as Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) promises the Skrull refugees that he’ll help them secure a new planet… in exchange for doing much of SHIELD’s dirty work (which, given the Skrull’s shape-shifting capabilities, mostly involves espionage and assassination). But Fury whiffs on his pledge, then the Blip happens, and then the un-blipped Fury (the fire mostly gone from his belly) takes a post-Endgame gig in outer space as a form of self-exile. Former Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) remains loyal, but many other Skrulls - including his own daughter G’iah (Emilia Clarke) - are left disillusioned and flock to a rebel splinter group led by the dangerously driven Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir who, amusingly, can currently be seen as one of the Kens in Barbie). Fury and Talos discover that Skrulls have infiltrated the highest levels of government across the globe and that Gravik is plotting to engineer a war between the United States and Russia in order to seize control of the planet. 

The series promises a densely-layered conspiracy thriller - much in the same way that The Winter Soldier drew creative inspiration from the paranoia and political thrillers of the 1970s - and the setup initially compels… particularly once Fury attempts to sound the alarm bell but finds himself cut off at the knees by his longtime friend and ally James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) - which stokes the flames of Samuel L. Jackson’s inner-Samuel L. as if he were a dormant forge. Many, however, have expressed increasing frustration with Disney Plus’s preferred six-episode format, and with good reason… it’s a tricky creative nebula; more bloated and meandering than if the premise had simply served as the foundation of, say, Captain Marvel 2… but not long enough to spool out the plot threads in sufficient detail, or allow the characters to amply marinate. The end result has an oddly lurching rhythm - plodding, yet rushed. So much of the MCU’s creative energy is now expended trying to explain how a mess of conflicting plot points coalesce across multiple properties (or don’t… as many are fond of pointing out, no one’s seen fit to comment on the fact that the colossal Ocean Celestial from Eternals remains in a state of partial emergence, its head and hand just jutting from the Earth for all to see). For the first time, Marvel’s shared universe feels like it’s handicapping creativity, rather than vivifying it. ​

Secret Invasion assembled an impressive cast and it should come as no surprise that Oscar-winner Olivia Colman is the obvious standout as MI6 operative Sonya Falsworth, whose chipper demeanor masks a heart of cold, British stone (her honey-dipped delivery during a surprisingly brutal interrogation of a Skrull prisoner is probably the highlight of the entire series). If only everyone else fared quite so well. Gravik seeks the Harvest - basically the Barbasol canister in Jurassic Park, only with superhero DNA instead of dino embryos - which sets the stage for a climactic “Super Skrull” smackdown… but Kingsley Ben-Adir and Emilia Clarke are stranded in a sludgy CGI slugfest (cycling between powers like a Marvel video game’s “character select” screen) that feels largely bereft of emotional stakes or narrative logic. The constant shape-shifting reveals and fake-outs also begin to feel like a storytelling crutch, not unlike the masks in Mission: Impossible (the second one in particular). There’s a lot of ripe moral murkiness at play - Gravik essentially being a sin Fury must atone for - but the tragic dimensions of their conflict never fully take root. It’s all rather shapeless… not unlike the abstract style of the much-maligned AI-generated opening credits that arguably set this entire series off on the wrong foot in the first place.