The Pitch: The last time we saw Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he was bopping around the universe on a space vacation while his Skrull pal Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) impersonated him back home. But Fury’s just come back to Earth, because Talos’s fellow Skrulls have become unsatisfied with Fury’s unfulfilled promise from decades ago — finding them a new home, since their original planet is a no-go. Galvanized by a new young leader named Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir), the Skrulls are mounting an invasion where they have the easy advantage, because they can look like anyone… including even Fury himself.
Previously On…: These days, every new MCU project typically has an obvious precursor to watch in advance of the new project’s premiere. Sometimes they’re obvious, like how for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, your required viewing was The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. Sometimes the connections are less clear — 2021’s Hawkeye might have been a bit confusing, if you hadn’t seen Black Widow or the Netflix-originated Daredevil series.
For Secret Invasion, the homework is Captain Marvel, which first introduced the plight of the Skrull people, refugees from an alien war searching for a new home — set in 1995, it also established the Skrull capability to shapeshift and impersonate humans, without detection.
However, the real inspiration point isn’t the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s something just a touch dicey about how much of the first episode is set in Russia, but it’s arguably quite apt, because the show is very deliberately aiming to invoke a genre the MCU has dabbled in before, very effectively: The political conspiracy thriller, with Secret Invasion taking its cues very directly not from typical superhero fare but from John le Carré and other iconic tales from the Cold War.
Who Watches the Watchers? Central to those narratives, as it is here, are two questions packed with dramatic power — is that person who they say they are? Can they be trusted? It’s a dramatic conflict that has been explored so well over the years, in both non-genre and genre arenas; there’s an entire library’s worth of fiction and non-fiction exploring this topic, while some of the best episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine involved how the ostensibly peaceful Federation handled the incursion of Changelings who sought to bring down their society from within. (Even peaceful utopian societies need their own secret agents, it turns out.)
The MCU already has its own secret agents — that’s what S.H.I.E.L.D. is, after all — and so the incorporation of these tropes is pretty effortless. Also in keeping with the project’s roots as a thriller: The first two episodes have a body count, good and bad guys alike, in a way that feels stickier than other franchise entries — like the deaths in this context actually count. The most important aspect of this is showing how Fury, like a lot of spies, knows all too well what failure feels like — it’s the name of the game too much of the time, and while this franchise’s heroes have faced plenty of setbacks, the stakes feel different when the action is spycraft, not superpowers.
Secret Invasion (Disney+)
