‘Secret Invasion’ Is Marvel’s Weak Tribute to the Avengers’ Daddy

Back when Marvel was first dipping its toes into the waters of television with shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., then-Marvel TV boss Jeph Loeb liked to use the phrase “It’s all connected” as a selling point. The idea was not just that the various Marvel series — whether Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter on ABC, or, say, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage on Netflix — would clearly take place in the same fictional world as one another, but they would also be linked to the wildly popular Marvel Cinematic Universe on the big screen.

The problem was that the Marvel film people did not get along with the Marvel TV people, and thus the relationship was a one-way street. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had to throw out its entire premise and format to accommodate the plot of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but Avengers: Age of Ultron couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge that Agent Coulson was responsible for finding the helicarrier that saved the day when Sokovia needed to be evacuated. Not coincidentally, the best S.H.I.E.L.D. creative stretches tended to have nothing to do with the films, and at a certain point, the series gave up trying to follow the events of the movies at all. (There was no Snap or Blip in the show’s world.) 

Though these ever-expanding universes of comic-book movie and TV shows originally presented their interconnected nature as a feature, of late it’s felt more like a bug. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania wasn’t so much a movie as it was a ponderously long teaser for another phase of MCU movies where Jonathan Majors’ Kang would be the big bad(*); it’s considered one of the franchise’s bigger creative and commercial disappointments. The Flash opened poorly (relative to other DC Comics-inspired films) over the weekend, and among the potential reasons for that is that mass movie audiences were less excited about all the cameos from past DC projects than the hardcore fans were. And/or because they knew that Flash was one of the final projects from a version of DC movies that’s about to be entirely rebooted by new execs James Gunn and Peter Safran. It’s a double-edged sword. Make viewers believe they have to see everything, and eventually they begin to feel like this is homework that they don’t want to do. But at the same time, convince them that all of it is important to a larger story, and they will avoid the ones that clearly have nothing to do with where that story is going.

(*) And now it’s something of a pointless teaser, since Marvel will almost certainly have to recast the role due to the criminal charges against Majors. 

All of which brings us to Secret Invasion, the latest Disney+ Marvel series, now run by Kevin Feige and the movie team, rather than Loeb. The limited series is based on a massive Marvel Comics crossover event in 2008, in which the Avengers and company discovered that the shape-shifting Skrull alien race had abducted and replaced many superheroes, including Hank Pym, Spider-Woman, Black Bolt, and Elektra. It spilled out into the pages of nearly every Marvel title at the time, touching the lives of every well-known character. It’s far from the best big event from that era of comics, but the idea of heroes having been replaced — some of them for years — was irresistible.

On the one hand, it’s a relief that the TV version of Secret Invasion is a much smaller-scale project. It’s not crossing over with any other current series or movie, though advance knowledge of how the Skrulls and Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury first met in Captain Marvel is very helpful. In the two episodes given to critics, it doesn’t really feature superheroes at all; Don Cheadle plays a supporting role, but his War Machine armor is nowhere to be seen, as Rhodey is for the moment working as a security adviser to the U.S. president. These Skrulls are also trying to take over Earth by infiltrating the halls of power, but through impersonating politicians and military leaders, rather than members of the cape-and-tights set.

But if Secret Invasion doesn’t feel like mandatory viewing, it also doesn’t provide many compelling reasons to watch on its own. Strip away the superhero angle of this story, and what you have left is warmed-over John Le Carré or Graham Greene, with various Cold War clichés (including a secret Russian base) tweaked just a little to allow the bad guys, and a few of the good ones, to alter their appearances. Even with Jackson getting by far his biggest spotlight as Fury, and even with a strong supporting cast that includes Cheadle, Ben Mendelsohn, Olivia Colman, Martin Freeman, Kingsley Ben-Adir, and Emilia Clarke, it feels like those bland early episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., when that show had no reason to exist except as an extension of a popular brand.

As our story picks up, Fury has spent the years since Endgame hiding out on a space station, much to the consternation of old allies like Cobie Smulders’ Maria Hill. When Hill discovers that there are now two different Skrull factions on Earth — a big one looking to conquer the planet, led by Ben-Adir’s bitter Gravik, and a smaller benign one, led by Mendelsohn’s Talos — Fury finally returns to solid ground in hopes of saving humanity. But the bad Skrulls’ ability to impersonate anyone, anywhere, only fans the flames between America, Russia, Great Britain, and every other major power, so it’s unclear who can be trusted.

None of it really works. The tone is too dour, especially since there’s precious little tension or suspense to any of it. Mendelsohn’s dry humor as Talos was one of the most appealing parts of Captain Marvel. Here, he’s deadly serious much of the time, as he tries to not only rescue his adopted homeworld, but also reconnect with his daughter G’iah (Clarke), who has gone over to Gravik’s side. This version of Fury, meanwhile, is still finding his footing after so much time away. So it’s not until late in the second episode — in an excellent scene where Fury and Rhodey argue about the challenges of being exceptional Black men working in systems that reward white mediocrity — that Jackson reminds you why he’s been such a vivid part of the MCU even as a relatively minor player within it. G’iah and Gravik are dull, Maria Hill is barely in the show, and the only one really enjoying herself is, unsurprisingly, Olivia Colman.

The idea of Marvel doing stories in different genres, and telling stories that don’t require a master’s degree in MCU continuity, is good in theory. But it only works in practice if these deviations are entertaining. Secret Invasion is playing in a bigger sandbox than Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. once did, with more famous actors. But I don’t imagine that a version of this story for ABC in the Jeph Loeb era would be significantly less interesting than what Disney+ has launched today.

The first episode of Secret Invasion is streaming now on Disney+, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first two.

From Rolling Stone US.