At the beginning of the latest Marvel Disney + series Secret Invasion, I thought I'd have a hot take on it – while others called it "promising", I thought it was dull. At the end of the series, however, I'm far from the only one to be critical.
The set-up of the series first. Nick Fury, the grizzled head of superhero-related intelligence, is called back to Earth from a mission in space. Back in the Nineties, he and Carol Danvers (aka Captain Marvel) promised to find a new planet for a fugitive alien species called Skrulls, whose most prominent feature is their ability to shapeshift. Thirty-odd years later, nothing has happened on the planet-finding front, and the Skrulls are getting restless. Some of them are beginning to wonder whether Earth wouldn't make a decent new home – once you get rid of all the pesky humans.
You could see how things could get interesting from such a premise. Now after the show has aired, however, there are far-from-glowing reviews all over containing observations with which I concur, such as:
- There's no in-universe reason for not calling in the Avengers. Nick Fury's insistence on handling the situation himself (with the help from a few friendly Skrulls), just because he wants to clean up what he considers to be his mess, looks dangerously pig-headed. The Earth's future is on the line here.
- The motivation of the villain, Skrull leader Gravik, makes no sense. I'd argue it's quite a leap from feeling angry with Fury to wanting to destroy the whole human race. Gravik isn't four years old. Why is he basically going "you promised, and now I'm gonna kill you all"? Plus his railing over the kills he did as Fury's secret agent rings hollow considering all the non-ordered murders he's done since, including some spectacularly stupid ones of his own kind.
- No-one's plan makes any sense. Not Gravik's, not Fury's, not Fury's best Skrull bud Talos's. Everyone's acting aimlessly and idiotically. This is a serious flaw in a thriller, which needs to be slick and smart.
- Why is it so hard to find a planet for the Skrulls? The MCU seems to be full of perfectly habitable planets. And what has Captain Marvel, who considered herself too fancy to help out in human affairs for decades, been doing with her time?
- Why is it so hard to integrate the Skrulls? Fury is appalled to learn that there were as many as a million of them originally. But even allowing for some population growth, that's not an awful lot compared to billions of humans. You could easily tuck all of Skrull-dom away in one admittedly large city somewhere, or spread them out. Even without a shape-shifting disguise they're not that scary-looking, and MCU humans have seen a lot of strange things by now.
- The series makes Fury look bad. He's supposed to be the classic Broken Hero who finds his mojo again – during the first episode, people are continually telling him he's past it – but he never quite does. He's also made to look caddish because he prefers his Skrull wife, Varra, to wear a (very attractive) human disguise, rather than be her green, ridgy, elf-eared and pointy-toothed self. My own main problem with this is that Varra's shapeshifting was her own idea; she purposefully sought out a woman she knew Fury would like the look of, who was conveniently dying, and asked her permission to take over her life. It's a bit much after that to ask to be loved "for yourself" years later.
- The last episode leaves one character ridiculously overpowered, and seeing as this character has previously been complicit is a mass-murder before seeing the error of their ways (kinda), it doesn't feel earned.
- And, yes, the series is actually pretty boring.
What can I add to all these (in my opinion) well-founded criticisms? A more personal disappointment for me was that the series failed to do something interesting with the whole shapeshifting concept. As someone who has been stagestruck since childhood, I've always been fascinated by the "acting" part of shapeshifting. To what extent do Skrulls who take over a human's appearance and tap into their memories also take over that human's personality?
In one episode, we saw a Skrull give in to Fury when Fury threatened the son of the human the Skrull was impersonating. How come? It wasn't the Skrull's boy. That would have been worth diving into, but the series never does. Plus, I've always loved scenes where shapeshifters give themselves away by acting "out of character" and doing or saying something the person they're posing as would never do. But Secret Invasion doesn't deal with psychological "tells" at all; Skrulls are revealed in a much more hands-on manner.
Instead of shapeshifting-as-acting-drama, we get yet another clunky immigration metaphor. This was all the more irritating for me because it hit the same beats as the Doctor Who two-parter "The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion", which also featured shape-shifting aliens who had lost their planet. There, as here, there were plenty of peaceful aliens who only wanted to live a normal life. There, as here, a growing dissatisfaction with having to disguise themselves led to some aliens being "radicalised". There, as here, the human originals whom the aliens were impersonating were kept in pods and their memories mined in order to make the impersonations more believable.
The Zygon two-parter is not a favourite of mine, but I must admit it explored the logistics of trying to integrate a shape-shifting species more thoroughly than Secret Invasion, and it did do more with the "human or alien" premise. But both "The Zygon Invasion/Inversion" and Secret Invasion lack something a shapeshifter story should have if I'm to enjoy it: a bit of fun.
