TV Review: Secret Invasion, season 1

TV #38 of 2023:

Secret Invasion, season 1

This latest Marvel series, set in the modern-day but picking up plot threads from the 90s-set Captain Marvel movie, is a tediously dramatic and joyless affair (with Olivia Coleman’s cheerfully ruthless British intelligence commander providing the rare bright spot). It starts with a bold premise: the shapeshifting alien species the Skrulls have grown their population on earth to a million, all posing as humans and thoroughly integrated into our society, and a new radical leader among them is pushing to wage war and overthrow us. I’ll even give the show credit for largely avoiding the antisemitic implications of the lizard-people-secretly-running-the-world angle, and at its best, it dabbles in the paranoid conspiracy genre that Marvel already perfected back in the HYDRA takeover of 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where any apparent friend could in fact be a hidden enemy operative.

The execution here is miserable, though. Two recurring characters from elsewhere in the MCU do turn out to be Skrull imposters, but we never learn how long ago they were replaced / whether the earlier adventures we’ve seen were really with them or not. Three other figures from previous titles, all women, are brought back only to be ‘fridged’ — unceremoniously killed off seemingly just to further a male associate’s angst — though one of those is later revealed as a feint and reversed.

The plot itself revolves around Nick Fury’s personal history with particular Skrulls, but much of that happened off-screen, which dampens the impact of developments here. The inclusion of a handful of flashbacks and a whole lot of exposition gamely tries to fill in the backstory, but it feels like a simple highlights reel rather than a meaningful segment of the narrative. And absent that weight, the actions of Nick’s adversaries and allies alike in the present have no clear gravity of their own. That’s even setting aside the villain’s bizarre scheme to turn himself into a Super Skrull with “Avenger DNA” — as though all superpowers reside in one’s genetic code, or as though unpowered people like Tony or Clint would have anything special in their biological profile as well — or the laughably random writing choice to have this antagonist use DNA from Groot and Thanos’s servant Cull Obsidian when the Avengers macguffin is initially out of his reach. I can handle a degree of technobabble hand-waving in my superhero stories, but everything about this element is silly and inevitably reduces to the standard CGI slugfest.

But that’s reflective of the scripting on this miniseries overall. There’s also a lengthy subplot about a certain Skrull infiltrator trying to mislead the White House into launching nuclear weapons, but never any indication of why the president himself couldn’t be captured and replaced. Or why professional thorn-in-the-side Nick Fury couldn’t, for that matter. With such a vast army of potential perfect duplicates at his command, why is Gravik wasting any time trying to trick specific humans into doing what he wants? The writers don’t seem to know or care.

Much of this could have worked, in theory. Samuel L. Jackson makes the most of his material, which is the meatiest he’s gotten yet for a role he’s played since 2008 and finds Fury scrambling without his customary easy answers. Emilia Clarke seems to be having a good time in this new franchise too. The story around them could have been a tight thriller that asked relevant questions, in an age of deepfakes and alternative news, about how we can ever trust what we see and hear. Instead, Marvel went with an AI-generated intro sequence and apparently put just as little effort into developing the rest of the show.

[Content warning for gun violence, racism, torture, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

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