Ep. 5 of Secret Invasion lets Nick Fury be a spy.
Does that do enough to course correct the series?
The Short Take:
Finally, some noticeable spycraft! While the climactic moment of this episode didn’t hit as hard as it would have had the show been paced more to my liking, I still enjoyed some key character team-ups.
[SPOILER WARNING: With one episode to go, it’s nearly impossible to discuss this episode without spoilers. So make sure you’re caught up before you continue.]
Image Credit: Den of Geek
The Long Take:
Apparently, all I needed was a disguise and some secret compartments. Because that made me feel like Secret Invasion was finally letting Nick Fury be a spy. Perhaps I’m still riding the high of binging the entire Mission: Impossible series, in which characters pull high-tech masks off their faces about as often as my kids ask for snacks. But when an old, bearded white man I’ve never seen before presented his passport at an airline’s check-in and something felt “off,” I gleefully pointed at my screen and said, “Is that him?” I knew it was him, and yet it was still fun to see Fury deactivate what looked to be a holographic beauty mask and exchange banter with Sonya Falsworth from the passenger seat of her car.
The two of them had great chemistry in this moment. When Falsworth cranks up “Audacity” by British rapper Stormzy (feat Headie One), Fury asks, “are we really doing this?” She simply replies, “Yes, we’re really doing this.” For the first time, I got the sense that they had been on missions together when they were younger. Sonya’s character keeps getting more and more fun every time she appears. Her choice of music here is another way in which she plays against stereotype for humor, but also to keep us on our toes. Just as her brutal interrogation tactics created cognitive dissonance with her seemingly pleasant and polite persona in Episode 2, we see that we can’t just assume what we would inevitably assume about a white, middle-aged British woman who wears pea coats and carries handbags on her forearm. The idea that she listens to underground rap in her car immediately makes me want to get to know her more. As I’ve said before, I hope she pops up in future MCU stories. I doubt Olivia Colman would sign on to a long-term Marvel deal because she has way too much else going or her, but if she decided to shoot a quick Sonya bit for a couple post-credits scenes down the line, I’d be pretty happy.
Image Credit: GameSpot
Spy tricks aren’t merely gimmicks to make me happy, though; they form the core of Nick Fury’s character. No matter which Marvel movie he has popped up in, he has always been a chess master to me — the only one able to see the entire board and plan his next move. Without him we wouldn’t have the Avengers. That’s because he recruited them all, of course, but, more importantly, he advocated for the Avengers Initiative even when few believed in the idea. In the first Avengers film, Fury says he thinks that even though “These people may be isolated” and “unbalanced,” he believes that “with the right push they can be exactly what we need.” He knows exactly what the world needs even if those working around him don’t fully understand how they fit into his grander plan.
That foresight and deep understanding of psychological profiles — in this case, to know how to assemble and motivate a team of “isolated” and “unbalanced” individuals — is directly tied to his spy skill set. In order to be a successful spy, at least according to film and television, you have to be able to a.) have contingencies for your contingencies and b.) to be three steps ahead of your adversaries. You can only do that if you can correctly predict what they’ll do based on why they’ll do it.
The prime example of this from Fury’s past is when he bloodies some superhero trading cards that belonged to Agent Coulson in Avengers. He throws them down on the table in front of Cap and Iron Man, and says, “Guess he never did get you to sign them.” He claims that Coulson had them in his pocket when he died, but we learn later that he actually dug them out of his locker and smeared blood on them to be able to tell this story about Coulson right before pitching the Avengers Initiative. That is, he massages the truth to Iron Man and Captain America to ensure that Coulson’s death will be “the right push.” The death of an agent who believed in them will make them want to save everyone else who may look up to them. Fury is only able to do this because he can correctly anticipate how Cap and Iron Man will feel when they not only learn of Coulson’s death but learn of how much faith he had in heroes like them. Fury ends his speech with “Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea” -- of the Avengers as heroes. Tony Stark runs out of the room because they’ve clearly hit a nerve. Pathos is powerful when used with precision.
All this is to say that it was not just fun but meaningful to see Fury complete a retinal scan in front of a gravestone with his name on it so that it can pop open to reveal one of the world’s best kept secrets — samples of the Avengers’ DNA, conveniently taken during The Battle of Earth (in Avengers: Endgame). Again, this speaks to Fury’s ability to account for all scenarios. He even tells Sonya that he has scattered these kind of false graves all over the world. I also found his secrecy and spycraft using the aspect of his personal life that we only just learned about in this series to be extremely efficient from a storytelling perspective. Fury created a fake headstone in Finland because that’s where he and Priscilla honeymooned. He could have said any number of reasons in that moment, but the fact that the writers chose to refer us back to Priscilla made a relationship that we have only just been introduced to feel a lot more lived in.
Image Credit: MCU Wiki
Most significantly, however, the reveal of The Harvest in this secret location reminds us of how exploitative and manipulative Fury was with The Avengers. He didn’t have complete faith in them because he’s a spy and he needs his contingency plans. Hence the squirreling away of secret DNA presumably collected without consent.
There’s something quite symbolic in Fury demonstrating that he’s still in the game by reaching into a material representation of his own mortality. If I think back to the themes of aging or being out of touch and “out of the game” that the series worked so hard to establish early on, I’d say that it’s no coincidence that a cemetery would be the place Fury would have to go to regain strength and prove everyone wrong. The world may think he is at death’s door, but he knows that it’s all a facade. He knows where his leather trench coat and eyepatch are at all times, literally and figuratively.
I still wish the series had done more to earn the return of the eyepatch moment, but, thankfully, I have decades of other films with Nick Fury to fill in that gap.
Image Credit: Space . com
Without any reasonable segue, I want to give a quick shout-out to the scenes between Varra/Priscilla and G’iah. This was the first time Emilia Clarke has really had the chance to do anything with emotional heft in this series, and Charlayne Woodard continues to impress with the rapport she builds with Clarke. Their best moment, I thought, was when G’iah bitterly says, “Did he ever get lost watching you in your own skin?”(I want credit for bringing that issue up in my Episode 2 review, by the way). Varra, who has been very kind and close with G’iah, holding onto her arm as they walk around the house, suddenly disconnects, turns cold, and says, “That’s none of your business.” The panicked and flustered tone that suddenly permeates G’iah’s voice indicates that she immediately realizes she’s crossed a line and potentially sabotaged a genuine bond with another Skrull.
And then — and I credit the writing of the scene for this — the tension between the two becomes a generational conflict. Varra says that G’iah meant to offend because she’s young, and later when they’re burying her father we learn that while Varra knows the end of life traditions for Skrulls, G’iah does not. She has to ask Varra to lead the prayer. I thought there was so much potential here for deepening our understanding of Skrull culture. Their life on and their relationship to Earth, and how it’s changed them. It would have been incredibly useful as a way to build towards the actions of Gravik’s rebel group so we might better understand what could have produced such an extreme viewpoint.
As evidenced by where my attempt at praising this series always seems to circle back, I would still say that a lot of what I have critiqued in past weeks has neither improved nor worsened. The plot somehow feels both hurried and stilted. Major reveals and climactic moments fall flat. And yet there are brief shining moments to hang onto.
Will the series be like Nick Fury and have hidden contingencies stowed away for the finale? We shall see.
It has had moments where it tasted a little like flat soda. You nailed it that the spy themes should have been leaned into much harder since ‘his spies have spies’ - The Super Skrull thing seems to have indicated that this series was packing some heat but not a great amount of ammo to stay in a long fight. (But we still have another episode left)