Secret Invasion – Resurrection Review

I have very high hopes for Secret Invasion, the latest entry in the now sprawling MCU – a series that has had far more misses than hits in the last couple of years. Billed as an espionage series and starring a murderer’s row of incredible actors – Samuel L. Jackson reprising his role as Nick Fury, Ben Mendelsohn reprising his role as Talos, Olivia Colman taking on the role of MI6 agent Sonia Falsworth, Don Cheadle reprising his role as Rhodey, Emilia Clarke joining the MCU as Talos’s daughter G’iah, Cobie Smulders coming back as Maria Hill – the hope was that Secret Invasion would be more in the vein of a Captain America: The Winter Solider and less Falcon and the Winter Soldier. And after that series premiere, I’m very worried this one is trending towards the latter.

I’m a firm believer that the most important aspect of superhero stories is the humans that surround those heroes. After all, the audience for these stories is normal, everyday, non-powered humans. We need the heroes as people we could dream ourselves to be – the aspirational characters we would pretend to be on the playground as kids. But we need the human characters even more because those are the ones we can truly see ourselves in. So, a series like Secret Invasion is crucial to the wider MCU because it allows us the chance to watch the humans of that world take on a threat without the aid of the major heroes in that universe. While I certainly could end up wrong, I can’t imagine a Captain Marvel or a Thor is coming to save the day when Nick Fury inevitably ends up in the clutches of Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir, another member of this absolutely stacked cast). Sure, War Machine is probably going to factor into things in some way – you have to have some hero, right? – but even Rhodey is just a guy in a suit, not someone with super powers. So, I was excited to see what the MCU could put together when asked to tell a story about a series of human spies trying to ferret out just how far this terrorist cell of Skrulls has infiltrated the world’s governments and agencies.

But what we’ve gotten so far – with the caveat that this is only the first episode, albeit an episode that has pretty clearly laid out a disappointingly simple story to be told – is quite the disappointing beginning. Fury is back in action, called to Earth by Talos and Hill, but definitely not ready for the big time at this stage of the game. You see, the Blip changed Fury, made him lose that spark that pushed him to help Carol Danvers thirty years ago and found the Avengers after that*. Talos can see it. Hill and Falsworth call him out on it. He’s not ready to face what he’s going to have to face in this war with the Skrulls. But they need him. They need the old Fury. So he suits up for the opp with Talos and Hill and ends up not being able to take the shot when he needs to, which leads to the death of Maria Hill by Gravik wearing Fury’s face.

*Now, we don’t know just what Fury is working through up there on SABER. And we don’t know what has been the mental stumbling block for him in recovering from the loss of five years to the Blip. Is it that Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff had to sacrifice themselves to save him and the rest of those who were lost? Is it that he didn’t call Captain Marvel fast enough? Is it just survivor’s guilt? I suspect we’ll get the answer in some speech later this season. Also of note: Fury – or a Skrull posing as Fury – is on SABER during the events of the forthcoming The Marvels film, based on the trailers. So, does Fury run back to space after the events of this series, or is this series happening after The Marvels? MCU continuity is always such a complex thing.

Now, let’s talk about the death of Maria Hill. Considering Smulders wasn’t in the opening credits (neither was Martin Freeman, who reprised his role as Everett Ross being impersonated by a Skrull in the opening of the episode), I suspected the series was going to kill Hill before the end of the episode and what do you know, I was right. Setting aside the fact that Hill was a fun addition to the super-powered world of the MCU in that she was capable, commanded the respect of the Avengers, and could keep Fury in check, I was pretty darn mad at how the series opted to kill off her character. There’s a term in film and television called “fridging,” which is where a female character is killed in order for a male character to gain the forward narrative motion to get past whatever is holding them back and save the day. And that’s precisely what happened to Maria Hill in the premiere of Secret Invasion. Remember how the series made a huge deal over Fury not being ready for what he’s about to face? Remember how Fury was limping, slow, indecisive? Well, who wants to bet that the anger sparked by Gravik killing Hill is going to be the impetus for allowing Fury to find that internal spark once more? And I’ll even go one step further. I’m willing to bet that when Fury is facing down Gravik at a key moment in time, Gravik will take on Hill’s face to try and mess with Fury and throw him off his game. That’s not to say that the series can’t kill off characters – it can and, frankly, it should. But it shouldn’t kill off one of its few female characters solely to be the reason Fury gets his groove back*.

*As someone who has written a ton about the perils of plot armor with popular IP – see Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, among others – I’m all for series not being afraid to kill their darlings. But writers need to be aware of harmful tropes like fridging and bury your gays when it comes to choosing how and why they kill a character. Take, for example, the death of Natasha Romanoff in Endgame. It didn’t fall into a fridging trope because she didn’t die to make Hawkeye have something to fight for. Rather, her death was a crucial linchpin of the overall story and worked within a wider narrative. Hill’s death doesn’t do any of that. And yes, sometimes good people get killed whilst fighting the bad. Senseless deaths happen and I am all for that. But killing Hill was so that Fury would have a reason to fight. That’s not good writing. And that is textbook fridging.

Here’s a twist I would have been intrigued by: Have Gravik kill Thalos. Let G’iah see. Then we’d have a reason for G’iah to really doubt her freedom fighting brethren and potentially turn to join Fury in his fight. As it stands, she doesn’t seem all that impressed with her father’s insistence that Gravik’s people killed her mother. And, sure, I suspect that Thalos is going to die at Gravik’s hand at some point in this series, sparking G’iah to switch sides, but making that the play from the beginning would be particularly interesting. It would give the story some real stakes – if Gravik is fine with killing fellow Skrulls, he really doesn’t give a damn about humans – and it would make the moral quandary for G’iah more pressing. I’d rather see her wrestling with what to do early than having her team up with Gravik for a couple episodes before making the switch.

Now, despite my ranting about the death of Maria Hill, there were still some interesting elements within the episode. I’m intrigued with the concept of the Skrull faction trying to start a world war to take the remains of the planet for their own (awful lucky that radiation doesn’t impact them). I’m also interested in why the president is so worried that Fury and Hill aren’t responding to Rhodey’s communications – and why it’s so important that Fury stay on SABER to ready the station. If you’ve been following the MCU scuttlebutt, you likely know that in the next Captain America film, Harrison Ford will be taking on the role of Thunderbolt Ross, who is President of the United States at that point – meaning something is likely going to happen to Dermot Mulroney’s President Ritson in this series. But we need more information on the political side of this international intrigue to get the full picture of just what the government knows and how much they are cooperating with Gravik’s faction. But so much of the spy side of this story already feels tired and rote. We’ve seen this story play out in other forms often enough that you can see the tracks leading us to the potential conclusions already. If Secret Invasion wants to be the next great spy MCU story, it will need to give us some new and interesting plays. Otherwise, it’s just an exercise in futility.