Three episodes in, Secret Invasion has already reached its halfway point. Gravik’s revolution is picking up steam as his plan to transform Earth into a new homeworld for the Skrulls comes into focus. But even as the Disney+ limited series raises its stakes entering the back half of the season, Secret Invasion is failing to provide any sense of suspense, and its potential to become a standout MCU TV show continues to fade.
With a running time of less than 40 minutes, “Betrayed” is the shortest installment of the season thus far. But the third episode packs a lot of events into a limited time span, including a dramatic meeting between Skrull generals past and present, the rekindling of an interspecies bromance, and another (suspected) death of a major character that falls flat on an emotional level.
Secret Invasion once seemed primed to be an exceptional series for Marvel Studios, a grounded espionage thriller that could thrive at a time when the Multiverse Saga is expanding the scope of the MCU exponentially and extend the studio’s recent trend of experimenting with new tones and genres. But the series lacks the creative ambition to transform into anything more than a standard MCU affair, and it’s still struggling to figure out what kind of TV show it wants to be.
The twists at the end of each of the first two episodes were either quickly resolved or failed to develop into anything more impactful the following week. After Maria Hill’s unceremonious death to conclude the pilot, Episode 2 (“Promises”) confirmed that her demise was real, and that it was designed to serve as little more than motivation for our protagonist, Nick Fury. (“Don’t let it be for nothing,” Hill’s mother tells him.) And after the reveal at the end of the second installment showed that Fury has a wife and she’s a Skrull, “Betrayed” rather casually fills in a big blank by establishing that Priscilla’s Skrull identity wasn’t much of a mystery to Fury after all.
Early in the third episode, Secret Invasion features a flashback to 1998—one year after the setting of last week’s opening flashback—as Fury meets with a Skrull named Varra at a diner in New York. The scene shows the beginning of their romantic relationship, as Varra takes on the human persona of Priscilla in front of Fury for the first time, providing a backdrop to the rift that has formed in their marriage in the present. As Varra sees it, Fury has abandoned her twice: Once when he was snapped out of existence by Thanos, and again after he returned in the Blip and then fled to space of his own volition. Like Hill and Talos before her, Varra resents Fury for choosing to isolate himself offworld not long after coming back from the dead. Although she previously appeared to be withholding her Skrull identity from Fury, the real question that emerges in this episode is whether Varra has now aligned herself with Gravik and his rebellion during Fury’s absence.
In “Betrayed,” Fury and Varra’s marriage isn’t the only human-Skrull relationship in need of reconciliation. After their falling-out in “Promises,” Fury and Talos are still at odds when they next meet. But not for long: All it takes for them to settle their differences is for Fury to massage Talos’s ego a bit. Their reunion is well-timed, as Talos has just received a tip from his daughter G’iah concerning Gravik’s plans to use a British nuclear submarine for an attack on a United Nations plane. With some help from MI6’s Sonya Falsworth and a lot of help from G’iah, Fury and Talos abort the sub’s nuclear launch just before Gravik’s followers can carry out their mission. (And despite the potential start to World War III, Fury and Talos even make time for some MCU-style bantering and bickering while parked directly outside the Skrulls’ base of operations at the Royal Navy’s headquarters. Although Secret Invasion maintains a solemn, self-serious tone most of the time, it still forces some space for humor here and there.)
But Fury and Talos’s win comes at crucial cost: G’iah’s cover is blown. As a result, Gravik stops her as she’s attempting to escape their camp, and he shoots her on the spot. G’iah returns to her natural Skrull form as she appears to die from her wounds. Much like Hill’s death, though, G’iah’s demise makes for yet another anticlimactic resolution to an episode due to the show’s failure to build her into a more significant or compelling character.
Until “Betrayed,” it wasn’t completely clear which side of this Skrull conflict G’iah was on. That ambiguity was a promising point of interest, as G’iah was forced to reconcile with both her father’s failures to lead their people and the Skrull revolution’s cruel ambivalence about the loss of life sustained in its quest to make a new home. But Secret Invasion’s creators (and by extension, G’iah) play their hand too quickly, affording too little time to G’iah’s inner struggle with whether to help her people or help humanity before the show reveals her choice. First, G’iah disguises herself as an old man to tip off her father. Then, more blatantly, she prevents the naval attack in reckless fashion before attempting to flee Gravik’s New Skrullos on a motorbike.
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Although G’iah deserves some credit for helping to prevent a catastrophic incident, her decision-making during her escape attempt is baffling. Her lack of imagination in using her species’ remarkable shape-shifting abilities to escape speaks to the larger lack of creativity that Secret Invasion exhibits in utilizing the Skrulls as the primary focus of a six-episode TV series. As Carol Danvers tells a younger Nick Fury in Captain Marvel, Skrulls “can transform into any life form down to the DNA.” That means that not only could G’iah have chosen to turn herself into any human she wanted—such as anybody else in disguise at the Skrull hideout—but she also could have transformed herself into any life form that she’s seen on Earth. She could have become a cow if she really wanted to. (Not that a rogue cow would have been so inconspicuous in this context, but you get my point. Anything but Khaleesi would have been better.) Alas, G’iah opted to remain in her preferred skin as Emilia Clarke to travel down the one road that appears to lead in and out of the base, only to find Gravik waiting for the traitor he had suspected all along.
Unlike Hill’s death, however, G’iah’s death feels less likely to be permanent—if only because the scene would be too bizarre a way to end Clarke’s tenure in the MCU just as it was getting started. (And also because the Secret Invasion trailer appears to spoil appearances from Clarke’s G’iah that we have yet to see. Oops.) There is still seemingly too much unresolved drama between G’iah and her father for her to be killed off so quickly, especially in light of how little the series has explored their relationship and her character in general. It’s more likely that her “death” is intended to be a shock that can complement the second reveal to revolve around Fury’s wife: Varra is in contact with Gravik and his followers.
As Varra goes to great lengths to retrieve a pistol from a secure vault in the final scene, she receives a phone call from one of Gravik’s associates, who directs her to St. James Church in one hour. “I need to speak to Gravik,” she tells the unnamed man in response.
“Yeah, well, you’re talking to me,” he replies.
Although it isn’t yet clear how sinister Varra’s connection to Gravik is, the more momentous aspect of this final twist is the voice on the other end of the phone. The subtitles list the mystery speaker only as “Man on Phone,” but he sure sounds a lot like Don Cheadle’s James Rhodes. Secret Invasion will likely confirm the speaker’s identity soon enough, but given how little effort the show makes to conceal his voice (in contrast to the earlier phone call that Varra received in the episode), it seems that the series has just revealed yet another major MCU character to be a Skrull in disguise. (As further evidence, Fury also informs Talos earlier in the episode that he “got a lead on a rebel Skrull that’s high up in the U.S. government, and he’s in London right now.” Rhodes works directly for the American president and in the last episode was at the emergency security summit in London.)
In each of the three Secret Invasion episodes so far, every cliff-hanger has involved a Skrull unveiling. As I wrote in last week’s recap, “there are diminishing returns to repeating this same narrative trick—especially if it’s used to conclude each episode.” And yet, here we are again: The episode-ending reveal in “Betrayed” comes with Rhodey off-screen, as Secret Invasion fails to leverage its aliens’ shape-shifting ability to make a closing impact. Each successive, futile attempt to leave viewers breathless only makes the next one less effective.
Many of the tensions in Secret Invasion draw on themes of trust and deception, as in Fury and Varra’s strained marriage or Fury and Talos’s partnership. Yet every time, these tensions culminate in moments that don’t deliver because they depend on events or relationships that have transpired off-screen. It’s hard to foster the suspense and intrigue of the type of spy thriller this show aspires to be when its twists focus on new, underdeveloped characters, or when it relies on the audience’s familiarity with the likes of returning figures such as Rhodey or Everett Ross.
With three episodes left in the season, Gravik will soon show the rest of the world the full power of the “Super Skrull,” a term he formally announces in the opening moments of “Betrayed” as he explains his plans to exterminate the human race to the rest of the Skrull Council. In his subsequent meeting with Talos, he shows that he’s already undergone the procedure himself, with his Extremis ability instantly healing the wound in his hand after Talos stabs him with a fork:
Fury will soon need to demonstrate that he and his allies still have a few tricks up their sleeves, even if no one believes in him anymore. As for the series at large, Secret Invasion is running out of chances to prove that we’re not headed for the standard-issue MCU conflict and resolution we’ve seen too many times.
