It’s hard to get excited about Secret Invasion: Episode 2 review

We start this week’s new episode of Secret Invasion with a flashback showing a young Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) making “Promises” — hey, that’s the title — to a group of displaced Skrulls, including a young Gravik. He and Carol Danvers will find them a new home. While that happens, the Skrulls should take on human faces and live among the Earthlings. With time and patience, all their dreams will be realized.

Well, that didn’t work. In the present, the rebel band of Skrulls have just killed some 2,000 people (!) in Moscow, acting under the guise of a group with the hilariously direct name of “Americans Against Russia.” Says it all. Their goal, again, is to bait the nations of the world into waging war against each other, and then the Skrulls will rule over the rubble. Why would nations be angry at the United States for an act of terrorism carried out by a non-governmental group? Don’t think about it.

It doesn’t help that Nick Fury was present at the bombing. (In fact, he was present twice; the real Fury was there as well as a Skrull impersonating him.) This has angered the collected nations of the world, who grill James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) about it in a hearing.

Secret Invasion is a silly show that takes itself very seriously

Chunks of this episode suffer from what is known as the “idiot plot,” or a plot that only works if everyone acts like an idiot. For instance, if the nations of the world see Nick Fury at the bombing and assume that he was involved in planning it, why wouldn’t James Rhodes just point out the truth: that he was there trying to stop it and that he failed? And wouldn’t people notice that there were two Nick Furys at the sight? The Skrulls aren’t great at keeping this invasion secret.

Or how about the scene near the start of the episode when Nick Fury and the sympathetic Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) are hiding out on a train? Russian operatives are looking for Fury, but Talos shakes them off…and then the two start yelling at each other for the whole train to hear. Not great spycraft, Fury.

Elsewhere, Gravik steps up his war against humanity by gathering a group of highly-placed Skrulls and convincing them to join his side. The scene should be chilling, and it works, but it also feels…perfunctory. Like, any resistance among the Skrulls to Gravik’s plan collapses pretty immediately, despite some of them being in very powerful positions; apparently the leader of NATO is a Skrull. Why are they attaining such influential positions if they don’t want to take over the world, anyway?

Fear the Skrulls

I also see a pattern emerging with the villains. Disney is doing the same thing with them that it did with the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: it gives the Skrull rebels good reasons to be salty — Nick Fury didn’t follow through on his promise to find them a new home — but then makes them so over-the-top evil that we can’t possibly be on their side.

For instance, at the end of the episode, Gravik kills a Skrull operative who gave up some information under extreme torture by Sonya Falsworth (Olivia Colman, who’s having a great time in this role). Like…even if he did give Sonya accurate information and didn’t lie like he claimed, which is usually what people do under torture, why kill him after he’s out of danger? It just feels like cruelty for cruelty’s sake.

It’s just hard to get too excited about Secret Invasion. We’ve seen a lot of this stuff before. It’s not hard to predict how it will end. The show still has surprises in store for us — at the end of the episode, Nick Fury puts on a wedding ring and introduces us to his secret wife, which is sweet — but I don’t know if there’s enough here to really get the blood boiling.

Secret Bullet Points

• “It would be likelier to encounter aliens.” Pushing your luck, Talos.
• I liked the dialogue about between Nick Fury and James Rhodes about James’ suit.
• G’iah strolls into a lab and stands surreptitiously in the back as she overhears Skrull scientists talking about DNA and “the harvest.” Gravik is making some kind of MacGuffin machine that will make the Skrulls stronger. G’iah is being set up as some kind of double agent; look for her to defect back to the humans in an episode or two.
• Nick Fury won’t call in the Avengers because he’s afraid the Skrulls will change into them and make them look bad. Okay…I mean, couldn’t they do that regardless? And at what point do you just tell the world about the alien threat so people can be on their guard?

Episode Grade: C

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