Secret Invasion

Episode 2 Season 1 Episode 2 Editor’s Rating 2 stars **

Secret Invasion

Episode 2 Season 1 Episode 2 Editor’s Rating 2 stars **

It’s arguably admirable that Secret Invasion doesn’t depend heavily on your knowledge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to make sense. The opening scene of its second episode, a flashback to 1997 and (approximately) Captain Marvel–era de-aged Nick Fury, is intent on filling in any emotional gaps viewers who missed that billion-dollar blockbuster (or, more likely, don’t remember much of its particulars). In London, Fury meets Gravik, the future Skrull revolutionary, as a prodigious child recruit; the Kree killed his parents, and Fury is told that the kid has the grits and the goods for his new project. Talos is on hand, too, making explicit Fury’s lynchpin role in the Skrulls’ future: “This man, I trust,” he tells the small group, somehow not adding, for maximum irony, “and in no way would I expect him to put this task off for several decades and then go on unrelated space missions without us.”

Fury addresses the Skrull recruits, too, and preaches cooperation, saying that “the world is facing a serious threat, and I could use your help.” He proposes that the Skrulls use their valuable shape-shifting skills to spy for him in exchange for the tireless efforts (cough!) of him and Captain Marvel (double cough!) to secure them a new home. In the process, we also see a young Gi’ah, whose mother is the first to volunteer for Fury’s mission. Which is … what, exactly? Why wouldn’t Fury explain this to the people he’s trying to convince to join him? (Even if he’s bullshitting a little, wouldn’t he try to gin up a better motivation than “trust me”?) It’s at this elliptical point, just a few minutes into the second episode, where it becomes equally arguable that Secret Invasion is already taking some shortcuts to keep its undercover-Skrull story from undermining a bunch of continuity — and in doing so, is undermining other aspects of itself. But maybe that’s just information being strategically withheld, and the show’s flashbacks will get progressively more specific about what “serious threat” Fury was facing in 1997.

To underline Fury’s broken promises — this show has already spent a considerable amount of time stressing that the amicable ending of this Captain Marvel subplot was absolutely and unequivocally undone — the show cuts directly from the group scene to both Gravik and Gi’ah surveying the wreckage of the bomb that went off at the end of last episode. Fury, whom we last saw dragged away from the body of Maria Hill, is thrown in a van on behalf of Talos; next thing we know, they’re fleeing via a private train compartment. Fury, luxuriating again in his Sam Jackson–ness, tees up their chat with a story about riding the train with his family during segregation, not unlike the anecdote he tells in Winter Soldier about his grandfather, a sly nod, perhaps, to how Fury mines some very real familial pathos for rhetorical ends. His point this time is less about his family’s resilience (though there is that) than arriving at his mother’s improvised game: “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know.” There is great musicality to Jackson posing this question; truly, it is an ongoing pleasure to see a Marvel show allowing him these kinds of monologues.

Pressing Talos for intel beyond what he already knows, Fury learns that all of the remaining Skrulls, about a million, have already resettled on Earth. (How that actually works, given the replacements engineered by the Bad Skrulls, and presumably not undertaken by the majority of the population, is unexplained, and Fury doesn’t ask questions about it beyond his initial disbelief.)

It’s a compelling scene, but staged with shot/reverse shot tedium by director Ali Selim, and the same is true for a later contentious chat between Jackson and Don Cheadle. Maybe when you have actors as good as Jackson, Cheadle, and Mendelsohn arguing with each other, interesting compositions that build on their actorly tension, rather than kind of sticking it in neutral, might seem to distract. Or maybe this is a pretty functional TV show, not an epic six-hour movie.

Anyway, this episode has plenty of Fury getting, uh, furious: first with the idea that Skrulls and humans can coexist easily (when humans by themselves, Fury points out, run into plenty of coexistence problems), and later when Cheadle’s James Rhodes meets up with him only to serve him a firing. (From what, I’m not exactly clear.) It turns out Rhodes was also aware of the bigger Skrull presence on Earth but didn’t especially believe that invasion was imminent. He’s more focused on how Fury’s mere presence at the site of the terrorist attack has “flipped our allies to Team Russia,” even though this seems, frankly, pretty inexplicable: Does Fury have such a terrible reputation as the founder of the three-time world-savers the Avengers that his just being photographed near a bunch of people getting killed is grounds for international suspicion?!

It’s fun to watch Cheadle and Jackson snipe at each other with increasing hostility, and having Jackson play the scene reclined in a fancy restaurant and subsequently collapsing into weariness on a bench after exerting himself during his forced exit is a nice touch. Fury is clearly struggling to regain his cock-of-the-walk power-player mojo; his insistence that “I’m Nick Fury … even when I’m out, I’m in” is supposed to sound defiant, but there’s exhaustion behind it, too. He may not want to admit he’s getting too old for this, but he seems awfully out of the loop. Solid start, but it’s missing the shades of moral ambiguity that characterized Fury in his movie outings; here, his failures are abstracted off-screen, so there’s never much sense that Rhodes could be in the right here.

Meanwhile, Gravik is moving and shaking on the Skrull side, attending a Skrull Council meeting while Gi’ah waits outside. The council includes public figures who have infiltrated the human world with no suspicion whatsoever — “playing the man’s game,” as Gravik puts it. There’s some interesting implicit class conflict between the Skrulls, who are happily assimilated, and the Gravik-led faction that wants more immediate revolution to follow, but it’s relegated to expositional dialogue rather than action or story and seems more or less sorted once Gravik strong-arms his way into becoming the official Skrull General; his platform includes his claim that he has a plan for if the Avengers return. In his conversation with Rhodes, Fury seems to anticipate this: Talking about the Avengers, he says, “Next thing you know, they find themselves duplicated and turned into terrorists.” (Also known as the actual plot of the Secret Invasion comic book.) It seems increasingly clear that this show will be more about attempting to prevent that story line from happening, not really adapting it.

This is fine; it’s not as if the MCU desperately needs more CG bombast. What it could use is a little more X-Files–style shadows and paranoia. There are hints of this when Olivia Colman is onscreen as Sonya Falsworth, who isn’t as opaque, menacing, or funny as classic X-Files recurring characters but has a similar way of enlivening her scenes. She’s looking for the same Skrull scientists that Gi’ra has been investigating on the sly, only Falsworth gets the husband-and-wife team, named Dalton, from torturing a captured soldier. Gravik and his crew arrive to retrieve the soldier, and though Falsworth escapes, Gravik winds up having his own man shot anyway for giving up any information to the enemy. Is it too early to say that Gravik’s ruthlessness is a bit on the predictable side?

Less predictable: The episode ends with Fury finding his way home to his wife, never before seen and only minimally referred to. What Fury doesn’t see before their “Try a Little Tenderness”–scored clinch is the green skin of a Skrull before she switches back to Mrs. Fury’s form in time for his arrival. It’s a neat twist that also encapsulates this show’s weirdly anti-climactic approach: We meet a character we weren’t sure actually existed, whose confirmed existence raises some logistical questions, and immediately find out that she’s not who she’s supposed to be. Even when this episode is in, it’s a little bit out.

Secrets, No Lies

• Fury Fashion Watch: In his confrontation with Rhodes, Fury sports a slick dark-gray suit and a jaunty hat. Remodeling Fury in the image of the oft-dapper man who plays him is a delightful move and perhaps the chief selling point of this show so far.

• It’s hard to sell the harder-edged, real-world toughness this show is going for when you have Rhodes referring to a geopolitical mess as a “bucket of steaming hot caca.” Real badass, guys.

• The Skrulls’ greatest triumph so far: taking over Shooter McGavin!

• I’m going to harp on this one more time: Fury is getting publicly blamed for the Moscow bombing … why?! Hasn’t a Skrulls-front terrorist group taken credit for this stuff to the public? What does that have to do with Fury? Moreover, isn’t it weird that Gravik was in the position to really implicate Fury by impersonating him on-site and only covertly shot Maria Hill, whose death doesn’t seem like it’s specifically galvanized the U.S. media?

Secret Invasion Recap: Even When I’m Out, I’m In