Secret Invasion’s Underwhelming Finale Has Us Questioning If It Was Really Worth It

If a six-episode miniseries gets made with a budget of $212 million, it should have at least one redeeming quality. Maybe the writing is rough but the set design is mindblowing, the wigs look awful but the fight choreography is out of this world, or maybe everything is horrible but the CGI will still look good a decade from now. 

By the end of the finale of Secret Invasion, it’s clear that the series possesses nothing that makes its price tag worth it. At best, the actors don’t do an abhorrent job, but with an all-star cast spearheaded by Samuel L. Jackson, it isn’t surprising that they are the most polished aspect of Marvel’s latest excursion to the small screen. Like every other Disney+ addition to the MCU, Secret Invasion suffers from the consistent pacing issues its predecessors have, and it is also hindered by the many layers of aimlessness it’s wrapped in. Everything feels half-baked by the conclusion of the show, even the (potential?) setups for new storylines in other parts of the franchise, and it is honestly baffling as to how such a weak-plotted series was able to make it out of pre-production.

It was never going to be easy to live up to Captain Marvel—the jumping-off point for Nick Fury’s interactions with the Skrulls—but Secret Invasion is easily one of the blandest MCU properties out there. Maybe a part of that is because it’s set on Earth. Less than 25% of the franchise makes significant journeys off our home planet, and even fewer actually stretch their creative wings across the stars. Instead of using the Skrulls’ search for a new home as a jumping-off point for an alien-centered series, they’re tied to the same place we always see for the sake of a poorly executed story about the plight and exploitation of refugees with nowhere to return in the face of a brutal genocide. Also, Nick Fury is there. The entire thing feels like an elevator pitch that was never expanded upon, and it’s not hard to imagine why nothing truly complex was ever able to come out of the initial idea.

The idea that Nick Fury has spent almost three decades letting an entire group of marginalized people down while also using them for free international intelligence labor has the potential to be really interesting, but instead of the stakes being personal to him, they’re at a global level. What does the rest of humanity have to do with him using the Skrulls as his own personal army? Kingsley Ben-Adir does a lot of good work with what he’s given as Gravik, but why start World War III just to get back at one guy who you could just assassinate with no issue? In the end, it doesn’t really matter because Gravik never gets to have a final confrontation with Fury anyway, instead being thrown into a classic Marvel CGI-laden fight scene against Emilia Clarke’s G’iah that, much like all the other fight scenes like it, looks like the color of cement sludge (seriously, when will these people stop beating each other up in low-contrast environments?). It’s common knowledge that Marvel Studios doesn’t give their VFX artists the time or resources that they need to do the best work possible, and that is never more obvious than when we see a comically small and poorly scaled rendition of Drax’s arm appear on G’iah’s body.

The introduction of the Super Skrull is yet another element of Secret Invasion that feels empty. Gravik’s rendition of the villain is as far removed from his comic book origin as possible. Instead of having the classic powerset that is derived from the Fantastic Four, the final form of Gravik and G’iah’s genetic modification grants them the abilities of every single powered human or alien species that has ever landed on Earth. Gravik doesn’t make it out of the final battle alive, but G’iah walks away intact, leaving a character with the combined powers of Captain Marvel, The Hulk, Thor, and almost everyone else who was in the final fight scene in Avengers: Endgame—with no established weaknesses. The entire situation is more than ridiculous, and while G’iah is given some setup for a follow-up story with Olivia Coleman’s severely underutilized Sonya, it’s more likely than not that she ends up thrown to the wayside much like Clarke’s Star Wars character Qi’ra from Solo. 

Looking at Nick Fury’s overarching story, it doesn’t feel like anything substantial actually happened. He showed up, learned about the consequences of his actions but never really grew from them, realized that maybe he should have learned to love his wife in her true Skrull form instead of only when she was masquerading as a human, and then went right back to space where he came from. The most baffling part of the finale is when he says that the Kree are ready to have peace talks with the Skrulls, as it’s never mentioned before then that he was even working on that as a solution. It’s a magical resolution that appears out of thin air after he doesn’t really do anything substantial to correct the pain that he caused, and it doesn’t do anything to fix the fact that the President of the United States has set off a chain reaction with his declaration that all aliens are now fugitives in the US.

The implications of this—in the MCU and the real world—are less than great. In-universe, we see a montage of Skrull and non-Skrull world leaders and public figures being attacked because of the carelessness of the President pushing an agenda that is so similar to real-world anti-semitic conspiracy theories. In the MCU, there are lizard-like aliens who are secretly trying to rule the world, and Secret Invasion has enforced the idea that they are evil and working against the best interests of humanity. The series undermines everything that was established in Captain Marvel, a movie that takes said anti-semitic lizard person trope and spins it on its head when the audience realizes that the Skrulls are the true victims of the situation instead of an antagonistic force trying to take over the planet. Despite being directly derived from the film, Secret Invasion completely undermines the messages and themes in Captain Marvel, and in doing so, undermines the story it tries and fails to tell. 

No media exists in a vacuum. Secret Invasion’s poor execution is not only irritating from a television watcher’s perspective, it is yet another perpetrator of anti-semitism in the media, even if its aim was to be progressive. Topped off with a horrible AI-generated title sequence, it just isn’t worth the watch, and it certainly wasn’t worth the nine-figure price tag that Marvel Studios forked up to make it. This show may genuinely be something you can skip and not miss anything when the next set of Marvel Movies rolls around, and if it isn’t even worth watching for some piece of context that will be vaguely referenced sometime in the next decade, then it really doesn’t serve a purpose.

Kathryn Porter is a freelance writer who will talk endlessly about anything entertainment given the chance. You can find her @kaechops on Twitter.

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