Sigh. G’iah, we hardly knew ya. (Seriously, thanks to an utter lack of character development and a narrative that has been so concerned with showing us various plots to get humans to kill off each other that are so thinly developed that we only hear about them moments before their execution so we’re half in the dark as an audience and can’t make heads or tails of just who everyone on the game board is, the writers simply never bothered to give us enough time to deduced if G’iah was in fact a double agent or if she was still working alongside Gravik.) We’re halfway into Secret Invasion and yet another female character has been killed off in an attempt to force one of our central male characters to get his head in the game and work to stop the Skrull infiltration – not quite a fridging situation a la Maria Hill, but pretty close. Add to that the new twist that Gravik has decided the answer to everything that ails him and his fellow Skrulls is the creation of Super Skrulls, and well, we once again have too much plot and too little time in an MCU TV show where the writers have sacrificed character development for the sake of trying to make a series seem larger than life when it’s really just a mess of narrative threads.
On paper, Secret Invasion isn’t necessarily a simple story to tell, but it’s a rather straight forward one. It should be a barn burner of a spy epic. Alien race, disaffected with how it’s been treated by a representative from a key planetary power player, decides they have had enough and will be taking Earth for themselves in lieu of the promised new homeworld that was never found. Alien race has the ability to shapeshift and take on the appearance and voice of anyone and opts to use that power to infiltrate key world positions of power in government, celebrity, and media, coordinating to force the humans to believe that they are attacking one another, sparking a world war that will leave the planet decimated, but inhabitable for the alien race. A key group of humans know of the threat and work to stop it before it grows too large. Only, we don’t have that key group of humans, because this is a television series, which means Marvel is too apathetic – or too cheap? – to let its best characters out of the box to fight the threat. So, we get Nick Fury and . . . that’s literally it in terms of humans. (Sonia Falsworth – kudos to Olivia Colman for continuing to be the only actor on this series having fun with the story, btw – is presumably also a human, but since she’s still more or less on the bench when it comes to the fight itself, I’m not slotting her into the human defense team at the moment, although I’m hopeful she’s going to get to crack some more skulls and Skrulls before the finale). Because Rhodey, as of that final phone call to Priscilla, Fury’s Skrull wife, is now confirmed to be a Skrull (or at least a human working with Gravik, but come on, we know Gravik would never trust a human to be part of his ranks).
So, instead of a sprawling epic where the audience isn’t sure who they can trust, where characters we’ve loved for years might turn out to be Skrulls, where the tension is high and we’re on the edge of our seat waiting for the next reveal, we’ve gotten Gravik murdering Maria Hill to inspire Fury to act, Gravik murdering G’iah after she botched her role as double agent in order to get Talos to act, and a reveal that Rhodey is a Skrull (something that pretty much every MCU content creator called the moment it was revealed Rhodey would be in the series). I just, I expected something more complex, more explosive, more tension-filled. So far, the biggest twist we’ve gotten was that Fury has a wife, she’s a Skrull, he knows, and she’s either working with Gravik or is working with Gravik because he made some sort of threat or called in some sort of favor. What should be an event, a story, that throws so much of what we know about this world into confusion – that changes the way we see characters and makes us nervous for just what is to come in the next section of the MCU’s storyline – has felt like a cheap network drama. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that everyone who follows the MCU knows that Fury is going to be a crucial part of the upcoming The Marvels film, so it’s not like he’s going to die before the end of the series – and if he does, which would be a shock – Talos will almost certainly step in to replace him for the immediate future, because we need a “good” Fury for the upcoming film*. So, the stakes aren’t even as high as one might hope them to be.
*I’ve mentioned before that there’s a chance The Marvels takes place earlier in the MCU timeline than Secret Invasion – since the release date was moved around. However, the last thing the MCU needs right now is to start muddying the timeline of the overall story it’s trying to tell, especially considering the other issues they are having with disappointing installments and an increasing lack of interest from fans.
I think most of us can generally see where things are heading in this particular arc. Rather than turn into the international threat that we all assumed the series would be, we’re going to get perhaps one more major international incident that Talos and Fury will need to try and quell. We’ll get the reveal that Rhodey is a Skrull. We’ll learn how long this infiltration has been underway. We will get Gravik becoming a Super Skrull, only something won’t go right or he’ll get out of control and perhaps the Skrulls will need to step in to neutralize him. We might get one last shocker – like Talos was really the man behind the curtain or Falsworth has something to do with the Skrulls – and there will be some sort of partial conclusion. Maybe the Skrulls reach a tentative peace and allow the humans who were replaced their lives back. Maybe we learn at the last second there’s someone else pulling the strings who is even more powerful than anyone we’ve seen yet. Maybe an Avenger or two show up to stop Gravik the Super Skrull? While I can’t predict the exact conclusion, it’s disappointing that the run-up to this story’s climax has felt so incredibly stilted and lacking in any real sense of tension.
And that brings me back to my massive complaint with the series thus far – the point I brought up in the introductory paragraph to this review: The writers aren’t concerned with creating characters, just with trying to inject as much plot as possible to the story. This is a cool concept – a great spy story to tell. But it doesn’t work if we don’t know who we’re dealing with. We need to understand our characters, we need to care about them and want them to succeed. To understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. And in that respect, Secret Invasion is an utter failure. Did Maria Hill’s death sting? Absolutely, because we’ve spent years with her – albeit still with not enough character development to make her a complete character, but at least we’ve gotten a bit here and there – even though the death itself still feels incredibly cheap as a plot device. But G’iah was almost a completely blank slate and the writers did absolutely nothing to color her in before killing her off. What made her switch sides? Was it the news that Gravik’s people killed her mother (which, naturally happened off-screen and we’ve never seen any evidence as to what precisely happened, which could mean it’s a lie Talos told her but if not, is pretty shoddy writing in that it tells us about a momentous event for our characters but refuses to show us so we can’t get the full emotional impact it had on Talos)? The series made it ambiguous as to whether or not she was helping Talos when her intel didn’t pan out in the bombing. But then she offered key intel this week, which led to her death, so she was playing double agent the whole time? Or did the quick realization that Gravik is messing with Super Skrulls change her mind last week? In order for G’iah’s work within the series to make sense, for it to register emotionally, for us to understand the depth of her choices and what it means for someone who was a true believer to change sides, we needed some moment, some beat, where G’iah makes a choice. Instead, we got muddled attempts at giving away key intel, we had a relatively blank performance from Emilia Clarke where she had to emote silently while typing on a cell phone. And that was it? Clarke can be a great actress, but she’s an actress who needs a speech or dialogue to really get her emotional arc across. This wasn’t enough to really get at what G’iah was up to.
And that’s not just a problem with G’iah. Gravik’s actions appear to stem from his anger at Fury using the Skrulls to protect Earth while never making good on his promise of a new homeworld. Great. That’s a great motivation. But why now? Why launch this attack at this moment. At this time? Because post-blip people are distracted and on edge? Because intergalactic threats could come at any time and take this world from the Skrulls before than can get it for themselves? Why now? What’s the reasoning? And why are folks following Gravik? Show us more of him as a charismatic leader. Show us how he gets the disaffected to join his cause. What he promises. How he’s making contact with the other Skrulls to get them to join his cause. We want to see why he’s the chosen one. So far, he hasn’t appeared all that charismatic when we’ve seen him talking. I don’t get the appeal. But I want to. I want to understand who he is and what has turned him into the guy for those Skrulls looking for a way to overtake the planet. But we’ve got to be shown this, we can’t just be told this. And that’s the central issue with the series. There’s a great idea, a great story at the heart of the show. But until the writers let us care about the characters, let us understand them, the series lacks the heart to make the story actually matter.
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Acting
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