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Secret Invasion Recap: Dead Again

Season 1 Episode 4 Editor’s Rating2 stars **

Photo: Disney+ When the newest episode of Secret Invasion opened with a lingering shot of G’iah lying on the ground in the aftermath of her fatal-looking shooting, I had to laugh: at my own naïveté in assuming the show had killed her off for a cheap shock last week; at how a mere moment of her body on the ground immediately indicates that the death was a fake-out; and at the old-fashioned serial shamelessness of knocking off a character, then immediately doubling back to explain that, actually, she hastily infused herself with the Extremis formula Gravik used to make himself a Super Skrull and therefore is able to instantly (but not too instantly? Can you hold in Extremis?) heal herself once Gravik is out of sight, after he conveniently abandons her body. It’s an example of the corners Secret Invasion keeps backing itself into; there will be another one before this week’s 30 minutes sans credits are up.

In theory, “Beloved” should get to the juicy stuff: the state of the marriage between Fury and Priscilla; the revelation that a key character has been a Skrull for an indeterminate but presumably substantial amount of the time; and that action-movie standby, an attack on the president’s motorcade. This week’s flashback takes us to 2012, when the Battle of New York (that is, the climax of The Avengers) has just made headlines, and which Priscilla/Varra recognizes, somewhat dubiously, as Fury’s handiwork. When they meet for dinner, Varra is reading a book of Raymond Carver poetry, almost certainly Carver’s MCU debut. (We can safely assume he is not a Skrull. Or can we?!?) She has Fury participate in a reading of Carver’s “Late Fragment.” (Nice touch that Fury is, boring-dad-style, “more of a history guy.”) The poem, structured as a fragment of dialogue between two people, is short enough to reprint in full here:

And did you get what 

you wanted from this life, even so?I did.And what did you want?To call myself beloved, to feel myself 

beloved on the Earth.

Cut to the present, where Varra attends the meeting she arranged at the end of last week’s episode with, as several commenters heard correctly, Colonel James Rhodes. Or is he?! No, he is not. Though the official reveal happens a little later in the episode, it’s pretty clear from his familiarity with Varra, and the orders he gives her, that this Rhodes is a Skrull who answers to Gravik, not the president or the ghost of Tony Stark or whoever. Fury, ever the savvy spy, is listening in, so he hears Varra protest that there’s no need for her to kill her husband, who she claims will be “dead from exhaustion and defeated soon enough.” Fake Rhodes isn’t hearing it, and she has her marching orders: Put a bullet in him.

This leads to a conversation at the Fury homestead that should be more fraught than it really is. It’s not really the fault of Samuel L. Jackson or Charlayne Woodard, who imbue their characters with a certain poetic gravity — or at least, as much as the middling scripting allows. The show simply isn’t especially adept at conveying the fullness of a decade-long marriage and longer-than-that partnership; almost every scene between Fury and Tarra has felt like a shortcut. Even during their big confrontation, they’re feeding each other exposition, as Tarra tells (or, presumably, retells?) the story of how she chose the real-life Dr. Priscilla Davis when she was shopping around for a human form that would, presumably, maximize her ability to lure Fury in.

The questions of how much Tarra genuinely loved Fury, and how much of her true self she gave him access to, and how much of himself he gave over to her, and whether Fury maintained any percolating doubts over his Skrull wife over the years, should fill the air in this scene; it should ride a sea of rich ambiguities and trade in a palpable hurt that’s nearly impossible to articulate. We should feel the years between these two. Instead, Fury recites the Carver poem again, about ten minutes after it was introduced, which is less a metaphor for the Fury marriage than for the way this show tries to cash in its gravitas too quickly to yield any substantial effects. Fury and Varra draw on each other, shoot toward each other, and both miss. Fury makes a canned quip about whether this means they should file for porce or stay together indefinitely. Varra lets Fury go, knowing that the Skrulls will be displeased with her inaction. All together, it feels like the show’s biggest blown opportunity so far.

The question of characters’ true selves does, at least, echo across this episode, as we see when the not-dead G’iah meets up with her dad Talos for one of those patented spy conversations that take place on quiet park benches. (This is the first place any agent should search when on the hunt for a rogue agent: every quiet park bench in a ten-mile radius.) G’iah wants to know the plan, now that her Skrull cover has been permanently blown. (Although, really, being dead is the best undercover position in the world, isn’t it?) Talos reveals a hilariously shaky master plan: Take down the Skrull insurgency; go to the president with the supposedly massive bargaining chip of, uh, already having done what he would want them to do; and secure amnesty from the Skrulls who are already on earth.

G’iah is not impressed: “Don’t you want to live in your own skin?” Talos makes a practical appeal (where, exactly, are the Skrulls supposed to go? If Captain Marvel hasn’t found them an empty planet to colonize in the past bunch of decades, maybe living among the humans makes more sense) but dresses it up in good-immigrant rhetoric: “Keep contributing, show them our hearts.” G’iah, even more understandably, does not necessarily think her people should “keep contributing” in order to prove their worth (though I wonder if, in neoliberal style, the show doesn’t side more with Talos; I guess we’ll see). She leaves in disgust.

Meanwhile, Fury shows up at Rhodey’s hotel, in a scene that Jackson and Cheadle manage to make a proper meal out of. Fury brings a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle, as well as the understanding that Rhodes is likely a Skrull, giving their exchange an appealing spy-picture layer of deception: He knows, but does he know that he knows, and does he know that he knows that he knows, and so on. Fury pretends that he’s trying to get his job back, and Skrull Rhodes dismisses him. But Fury was actually there to give him a liquid location tracker — something he basically announced from the jump, as a joke.

This allows Fury and Talos to follow Rhodes via the presidential motorcade to the faux-Russian attack that Gravik and the other Skrull insurgents are staging. While attempting to rescue the president with Fury, Talos is shot in the shoulder, leading to a neat, disquieting image of his Skrull visage slowly making its way across his face; instead of bleeding out, he undergoes a gradual return to his green-skinned form (though this feels like something the Skrulls would be dealing with constantly, and conspicuously, during a mass infiltration). Gravik, initially disguised as a soldier helping Talos to his feet, appears to finish the job, his Extremis Super-Skrull status proving a strong defense against Fury’s bullet to the face. Fury is forced to drive off with the president, leaving the fully Skrulled body of Talos in the street.

If we’re being charitable, we could say this brings the episode full circle, from daughter lying seemingly dead in the road to father doing the same. But let’s be real: When two episodes in a row end with two related characters seemingly dead in the middle of the road, is the show creating thematic episodes, or is it running out of ideas in real time? As with the Fury marriage plot, there’s no real dramatic or tragic irony to savor, not least because the show can’t help but pose logistical questions with no good answer. (That is, if Talos is truly dead, it feels like an ignominious end to an interesting character; if he’s not, it’s another cheap episode-capping fake-out.) The Secret Invasion comics are ridiculous, but they sometimes work as pulp. The TV show seems to aspire to something brainier or more emotionally fraught and struggles to get there. In the MCU’s weakest moments, it produces shows that feel like they’re calling themselves beloved, and then calling it a day.

Secrets, No Lies

• Fury Fashion Watch: The Nick Fury equivalent of activewear: turtleneck sweater, skullcap, nice-looking overcoat.

• “Late Fragment,” the Carver poem quoted twice here, is also the epigraph used in the movie Birdman, which is about an actor who used to play a superhero, played by an actor who used to play a superhero (Michael Keaton), mounting a play based on the work of Raymond Carver. Which is worse: the idea that the Secret Invasion writers saw Birdman and thought that the quote would make a great MCU touch point, or the idea that they had no idea Birdman got to the poem first?

• Skrull Rhodes places a towel over their chest the way a woman usually would when coming out of the shower. Are we meant to assume that a female Skrull has assumed the form of Rhodes? Or do Skrulls just have a similar yet different sense of modesty compared to their human counterparts?

• Skrull Rhodes also finally gets to say that elusive S-word; I admit I smiled, rather than cringed, at his line wondering why Fury has shown up to see him after he “shitcanned [Fury] into oblivion the other day.”

• How long do we think Rhodes has been a Skrull? My guess is that we’ll eventually find out he was replaced sometime after Endgame, just to preserve the reality of that movie (and because there’s plenty of space afterward where it wouldn’t much matter), but I feel like the truly comics-y thing to do would say that it happened like a decade ago. (Though at least tell us that was still the “real” Rhodes bantering with Stark in Iron Man 3.)

• Speaking of the excellent Iron Man 3, that movie’s Extremis … tech, do we call it? … has made a comeback in this series. It was last glimpsed via one of the fighters in the tournament in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, something I admit I had forgotten. I always just think of it as the thing that makes Pepper Potts not die.

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