Ep. 2 of Secret Invasion takes Nick Fury to task.
And, as a result, the cast has more room to flex.
The Short Take:
I’m beginning to feel the undertow of this series as it ups the intrigue and doubles down on a darker tone. Much sharper writing than the premiere, which made more than one scene an acting showcase. (Also, as a PSA, grownups may want to know more about the content of this episode before showing it to children.)
Image Credit: Looper
[SPOILER ALERT: No secrets here. Spoilers are everywhere from here on out.]
The Long Take:
Even when Marvel’s out, they’re still in.
I know my mind always wanders to meta commentary, but when Nick Fury gets in Rhoadey’s face and says his version of this line, I couldn’t help but hear Marvel telling critics and fans not to count them out. That even though they’re in the middle of what many call a “slump,” they are still the juggernaut franchise that will always get butts in the seats, unlike their competitors. (Exhibit A: how poorly DC’s The Flash is doing at the box office.)
In the second episode of Secret Invasion, Nick Fury similarly must confront his limitations. At the height of the Infinity Saga, like the MCU itself, he was at the top of his game, but now he has run out of friends and must acknowledge his failure to keep the episode’s titular promises. The late Maria Hill’s mother blasts Fury as she escorts her daughter’s body home, saying that Maria had faith in Fury and would have followed him anywhere. Earlier in the episode, a flashback to 1997, two years after the events of Captain Marvel, reveals that Skrull refugees put all their faith in Nick Fury to find them a home. Nearly 30 years later, he has not held up his end of the bargain. So now, just as Kevin Feige and co. must find their footing in the midst of harsh critics, suspected “superhero fatigue,” and the criminal charges facing the actor at the center of the next saga, Nick Fury must defy current perceptions and prove that he’s still got it.
This concept of broken promises and good will running dry created a center of gravity in this episode that resonated with me a lot more than the previous. Last week, I noted that repeatedly telling us that Nick Fury was too old to still be in the game was not sufficient storytelling, and I am relieved to say that I feel like this episode course-corrected some of that by showing us why Fury’s clock has run out — not because of his age, but because he has failed to deliver on these promises. I’m still not okay with fridge-ing Maria Hill, but the pairing of her unconditional faith in Fury (dooming her in the end) with Fury running away to S.A.B.E.R. instead of rewarding the Skrulls for their service did soften the blow a bit because it created a broader theme.
Image Credit: Vanity Fair
This thematic glue would not have stuck, however, without sharp writing in key scenes. In particular, the tense conversation between Talos and Fury on the train from Moscow to Warsaw immediately elevated the series for me. More than the montage summarizing the entirety of Captain Marvel, this one scene did the most to explain the central conflict of the story: that Talos, feeling abandoned by Fury after The Snap, sent out a call to all Skrull who wished to use Earth as a safe haven. And now the number of Skrulls in hiding has increased from the dozens in Captain Marvel to the millions in Secret Invasion. I think a modified version of this scene could have been even more effective in the first episode because it’s unclear why exactly Fury only thinks to accuse Talos about his complicity in the Skrull rebellion now as opposed to last week, and considering what we already knew from the first episode, this is really only half a revelation — a more refined and character-driven repetition of what we learned before.
On the other hand, it’s this kind of character work that will keep me tuned in. When Fury accuses Talos of keeping this “invasion” a secret from him, Talos snaps back with a harsh truth, that Fury used the Skrull to fight his own war and then failed to compensate them for their service. The dialogue here — especially with the slow burn at the beginning as Fury ramps up to his accusation by introducing the “tell me something I don’t know game” that his mother played with him as a child to catch him in a lie — allows Ben Mendelsohn and Samuel L. Jackson to show off their acting chops. Jackson’s presence filled the entire screen and had me hanging on his every word, and Mendelsohn perfectly conveyed pain, anger, and guilt as he tells his close friend what he doesn’t want to hear.
Fury has run out of allies, yet somehow this does not deter him. He says to Rhoadey (in spite of being called mediocre — what a burn!) that he’s going to keep going anyway. This, of course is a classic trope in the spy thriller genre: a rogue agent who goes against orders and has to fight the system or network from which he has defected in addition to the bad guys. James Bond quits his majesty’s secret service and goes rogue multiple times. In Die Another Day, MI6 disavows Pierce Brosnan’s 007 and he has to escape North Korea alone. Daniel Craig’s Bond seems to spend more time out of MI6 than in, but most notably so in Skyfall and Spectre, as
reminded me. In Spy Game, Robert Redford’s character uses his last day at the CIA before he retires to run an illicit mission to save Brad Pitt’s character. I’m sure there are oodles more examples I’m not thinking of right now. also reminded me that Alias, the J.J. Abrams series with Jennifer Garner, does this multiple times. And Mission Impossible 1 and 5 do as well. It’s everywhere.Image Credit: Reddit
This is rugged individualism at its most glorified, with these heroes striking out on their own. They are able to see that institutions can be ineffectual and corrupt and have the courage to rebel once they realize it. At the same time, it dangerously egotistical; in order to go rogue the hero must believe that the rules don’t apply to them. And, ultimately, this kind of story validates that “I know better than everyone else” attitude. It’s Western civilization at its best and worst. And I think Nick Fury, as an omnipresent, shadowy, powerful, game-setting figure in the MCU, comfortably holds that double-edged sword (no pun intended). In a way, he has always been rogue. In his heyday, as head of S.H.I.E.L.D., he operated on his own, outside of the U.S. Government with impunity.
This series poses an interesting question in this episode: is it okay for Nick Fury to go rogue and insist that he knows better if he’s wrong? When he doesn’t get the job done? When he falls short of his promises?
Regardless, I’m excited to see what Fury’s twist on this trope will be — that is, how exactly he will find ways to stop Gravik when he has no resources, no support, and literally no one working with him.
Unless Olivia Coleman’s Sonya Falsworth somehow teams up with him. We’ve seen in this episode just how formidable she is, and I’d be interested in an uneasy alliance between her and Fury somewhere down the line. Fury obviously has a deep personal attachment to the Skrull (more on that in a minute…) while Falsworth is utterly ruthless with them. I know I had high praise for Coleman last week, but this week established her character — not just her acting skills — as compelling. With her dapper peacoat and Mary Poppins-esque handbag, she seems so unassuming in a way that allows her adversaries to woefully underestimate her. The exchange she has with the butcher shop frontman had me in stitches: he says the door was locked, and her response is, “Well, what does that tell you about me and doors?” That one line tells us so much about this character and her methods. No door can stop her because she is as unrelenting as she is cunning. During the interrogation itself, I giggled at her use of politeness and niceties; it made what she was doing that much more disturbing. And in what other context would we see Olivia Coleman sneaking out a duct?
Image Credit: The Guardian
What most viewers will take away from Olivia Coleman’s big scene in this episode is that she CUTS OFF A GUY’S FINGER (sorry, a Skrull guy’s). The bombing at the end of the premiere obviously established that this series wouldn’t shy away from violence, but the slicing of a finger, even if it turns into a green one, is a level of graphic violence that I never would have expected from a Marvel series on Disney+. I’m not even sure Andor, as dark as it was, had anything as “cover your eyes” gruesome as this. I had to step back and consider whether or not this was gimmicky (purely for shock value) or if it served the story. I think it does a lot to establish Falsworth as a character (whose name, by the way, is literally false + worth, so I’m a little worried that means a double cross of some kind is in our future), and it is one of the better ways to test/reveal Skrulls in hiding. I didn’t, as a counterexample, understand why all the Skrulls who voted to install Gravik as an Uber-general had to revert to Skrull form in order to cast their vote. The practical utility and/or significance of that was not at all clear.
What I assume was deliberately unclear was the reveal at the end of the episode that Nick Fury has a wife who is a Skrull. I have so many questions about this scene and what it implies. Does Talos know about them? How secret is this secret wife? She may not have been that much of a secret to MCU fans because Fury does reference a wife in Captain America: Winter Soldier when he tells Steve Rogers that his wife kicked him out. That seemed like a joke at the time, but it’s possible it was a knowing wink.
Fury’s wife is the same Skrull we see in the 1997 flashbacks: Varra, who initially brings a young Gravik to Fury. It’s unclear in that scene what kind of relationship the two of them have at that point, though their interaction doesn’t scream “in a relationship.” I assume that since this is the same Skrull from Fury’s past, that he knows that she is a Skrull. I’ve seen people online freaking out that maybe he’s married to a Skrull and doesn’t even know it, but that doesn’t make sense. Varra would have had to disguise herself in a human form that Fury had never seen AND convince him that she was someone he didn’t know. That’s possible, but it doesn’t make sense to me, and seems too convoluted for a Marvel series.
If Fury does know (and I think he does) that his wife is a Skrull, that’s a big problem because it seems as though she needs to change into human form when she sees him. The camera very specifically shows her as a Skrull making dinner, alone, but then when Fury walks through the door, she’s already shifted. The idea that she needs to be in human form to be with Fury is deeply anti-Skrull, whether it’s for Fury’s sake or for the audiences, as if we’ll only accept Fury having a Skrull wife if she looks human when she’s with him? That seems a little narrow-minded, and undermines the outrage at humans’ lack of tolerance that Fury expresses to Talos on the train. Fury having a secret Skrull wife during a secret invasion also complicates his broken promise to Talos and the other Skrulls. That is, why is Varra, who was in that room when they all pledged to Fury in 1997, okay with the Skrull refugee situation? Why is she not also mad that he’s been avoiding his problems in outer space? I’m going to reserve judgment because future episodes will probably explain more, but right now I’m very skeptical.
Barring this eyebrow-raising cliffhanger, I feel a lot more confident in this series as a whole after this episode. The writing seems markedly more sophisticated than last week’s and the all-star cast has more of an opportunity to flex. Kingsley Ben-Adir as Gravik, who I haven’t had a chance to mention yet, stood out a lot more to me as a compelling villain in this episode. Not necessarily because of the flashbacks revealing that he was a protege of Fury’s as an orphaned child, but because of the way he talks about his cause with others. For a brief moment, I caught myself forgetting that he had killed over 2,000 civilians in a bombing and sympathizing with his point of view. Ben-Adir gave an amazing performance in the Oscar-nominated One Night in Miami, so if you like him here I would encourage you to check out that film as well. There are clearly shades of his portrayal of Malcolm X from that film in his radical revolutionary Gravik.
Image Credit: TVLine
And that persona certainly persuades others in the series as well. I liked that we got more political intrigue in this episode, showing how Skrulls have infiltrated the highest seats of government all around the world. The dramatic irony of Rhoadey verbally sparring with Skrulls without any idea of who they really are was especially thrilling, and I’m interested to see what kind of geopolitical impact the Skrull council will have, especially now that most of them are united under Gravik’s leadership.
I shouldn’t get my hopes up, though, because this situation seems a lot like one in Moon Knight, with avatars of the Egyptian gods secretly becoming high profile political figures. That premise didn’t amount to anything. It barely had any consequence for the plot of the series. I won’t mind that kind of an outcome, though, as long as we keep our focus on Nick Fury and how he might now make good on his promises.