Marvel’s ‘Secret Invasion’ episode one review: Nick Fury battles inner demons and a Skrull rebellion in series opener

Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury in a still from ‘Secret Invasion’
| Photo Credit: Disney+ Hotstar

Most of the time when questions are left unanswered in a Marvel title, you can trust those dark corners to become passages for something new. Remember how Captain Marvel left bits and pieces of information unaddressed? Did Carol Danvers find a home for the Skrulls? What happened to Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D.S’ association with the Skrulls? What happened to them since the events of Captain Marvel? Most of these are answered in the first episode of Marvel’s Secret Invasion, with the rest of the series and the upcoming movies expected to answer the rest.

It’s a no-brainer to see where a story about an alien race with shape-shifting powers residing on Earth as refugees — growing impatient about finding a home — should go. 30 years after sending Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) to find the Skrulls a home, and years after The Blip, Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) is now building an aerospace defence system at S.A.B.E.R. But when our Skrull friend Talos (still masquerading as Agent R Keller, played by Ben Mendelsohn) and Agent Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) unearth the big ploy that rebelling Skrulls’ leader Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is orchestrating, Fury is beamed down to Earth.

There’s an endearing scene in which he meets and consoles (touching their heads as per Skrull’s tradition) the 136-year-old Talos, who is grieving the loss of his wife Soren and is hurt by his daughter G’aih (Emilia Clarke) joining the rebellion. They now have to thwart Gravik’s plans before it’s too late; they learn he has confiscated a huge consignment of bombs!

Before getting into the episode, the introduction to the series is an awe-inspiring matter of concern; it looks gorgeous with great theme music and a tastefully-designed title logo. But the visuals have apparently been created by AI! They also hint at where this story might head towards.

A still from ‘Secret Invasion’
| Photo Credit:
Disney+ Hotstar

While setting up what seems like the start of an investing story, the first episode also taps into ideas like why Fury seems so different. He is visibly weaker, as pointed out by many in the episode, and he seems to be battling with the PTSD of Thanos’ snap, or as MI6 agent Sonya Flasworth (Olivia Colman) tells him, “It (The snap) taught you that no matter how hard you fight for what’s right, there’s always someone stronger to undermine you.”

One can expect the rest of the series to further this undercurrent in Fury’s character, possibly showing us the dark spaces that the snap took him to. This parallels what Talos is fighting as well. With his own people rebelling against him and behaving in tune with the Skrullphobic notions that Kree had built, Talos also realises that he is no longer the strongest of his lot. He now has to find strength and a pillar to deal with his mid-life crisis, like how Fury assembled The Avengers “to assuage his midlife crisis.”

These past two phases of the MCU have had titles — like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, WandaVision, and the Spider-Man films — with themes about communities finding homes for themselves, or characters in exile finding a space in this enormous cosmos (particularly on Earth). In Secret Invasion, Gravik, with the help of young displaced Skrulls, is upset at how the Skrulls have been abandoned and he creates Skrullos, a makeshift Skrull territory in the abandoned, radiation-prone areas of Russia. These Skrulls prove to be more ruthless and dangerous than those we saw earlier. They not only abduct humans to take as shells (assume identity), but they also use the Kree technology we saw in Captain Marvel to control their minds as well, rendering them quite difficult for even other Skrulls to identify.

There’s a lot to take away from this first episode and it’s clear that Marvel wants this storyline to be much grittier, subduing the goofy mood we saw in Captain Marvel (the scene with Colman is a comic delight). However, the climax does caution us to beware if the series will take a politically-skewed take on immigrants and refugees, especially considering the prevailing political sentiments of Earth-1218.

Secret Invasion is currently streaming on Disney+ Hotstar