With the days of 2012’s original The Avengers movie now more than a decade behind us, it can still be fun to catch up with old friends. I can’t lie: I do miss the original six-person crew, led by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and a team of well-fitted agents of SHIELD. The eight million new installments in the franchise without them have been frustrating. But it’s nice that, although Disney+’s Secret Invasion clearly feels like one of those lackluster new installments and nothing like the older movies, we’re reunited with a few of the MCU’s original characters.
Fury is back, as is his right-hand woman, Agent Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), in Secret Invasion. While the show itself is already reaching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier-levels of darkness in just one episode, which could bore viewers, being reunited with these characters is at least a good time.
It’s been quite a while since we’ve seen Fury—the last time was Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2019, if you can believe it, though Jackson voiced the character in the warped animated show What If…? as well—and he’s changed quite a bit. It’s been a few years since the “blip” (when Thanos removed half the world’s population), and these days, every character is required to say the exact same thing to Fury—to remind him, and us, that he’s in recovery from all this trauma.
“You were never the same after the blip,” Fury hears, upward of 14 times in this episode. (Kidding. Only, like, five times.)
That seems to be the premise of this show: An overworked guy involved with the Avengers must go through a therapeutic mission to tap into his emotions. Though they’re not always guys, and not always human beings, this is essentially the thesis of every Marvel program post-Endgame. They’re working through it!
While Fury’s inner-workings are a main part of the show, the action-packed plot follows two divisions of Skrulls: an evil kind and a good kind. The Skrulls, if you’ll recall, were introduced in 2019’s Captain Marvel. They’re an alien breed that can shape-shift into any form they want, a particularly helpful tool for anyone looking to take over an entire planet. Handy, considering that’s precisely what the evil Skrulls want to do with Earth.
After being saved from a bigger bad trying to wipe out their population in Captain Marvel—which takes place in the 1990s, while this, presumably, takes place around current day—the Skrulls have been living safely on Earth. Fury, however, had promised the alien race that he’d find them a new planet. Now three decades later, with no luck, a horde of Skrulls has gotten tired of waiting. Earth will be their planet.
The Skrull storyline is already dead in the water. There’s a somewhat interesting dynamic between Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), a good Skrull, and his daughter G’iah (Emilia Clarke), a bad Skrull, considering her mother died at the hands of the Skrull revolution that G’iah now fights for. But this conflict is far less interesting than whatever Fury’s going through. It’s no shock that all we can take interest in is Agent Fury. What’s he up to? How does he (or rather, did he) manage to balance the egos of the world’s strongest heroes without so much inner turmoil?
We get a few Fury moments in this episode. In the scene where Olivia Colman makes her MCU debut as Sonya Falsworth, a Secret Intelligence Service agent investigating the Skrulls, Fury is at his prime, snarky and tight-lipped about everything he knows. The two banter back-and-forth about the Skrulls, and we realize there’s history between Fury and Falsworth. Perhaps they hate each other. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a hint of chemistry. Whatever’s going on in that darkly lit spy library, I dig it. If only the entire episode could mimic this level of intrigue.
There’s one more scene that feels almost, dare I say it, retro—it’s very 2010s, because it’s so reminiscent of Phase 1-era MCU and the old Nick Fury we know. While working on the Skrull situation, chatting with some of the folks involved with the evil Skrulls’ fight, Fury sits in a plush leather seat fit for a king. Well, because it is a chair for a king—Louis XV, to be precise.
Plus, Fury himself is a fashion king, sporting a slick black beanie and a black trench coat we can only all dream of wearing. He’s also a cool guy: “Everything is priceless, ’til it gets blown to bits in a hail of bullets,” Fury says, when he’s asked to get out of the chair. None of these Fury-isms is perfect, nor nearly as good as those from the original MCU Fury. But Jackson does his best to revive some of the show with great wits.
The rest of Secret Invasion is, well, a bloodbath. Though G’iah informs Talos, Hill, and Fury of the big attack the Skrulls are planning in Russia, the trio is unable to stop the Skrulls’ bombs from detonating in Moscow. The Skrull revolution has started, and G’iah is somewhat of an informant. But how can you stop a group of alien folks that look and talk like regular humans?
The episode ends with the death of one of the MCU’s big, original characters: Maria Hill. Unfortunately, it’s a lazy kill. After the bombs go off, she’s approached by Fury, who shoots her in the chest. But it’s not actually Fury. It’s Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir), one of the Skrulls leading the fight against Earthlings. The real Fury comes to save her, and she dies in his arms.
If there’s one positive note to give Secret Invasion, other than my compliments to the always great Jackson, it’s that the show knows how to move a plot along. There are many conflicts in motion—G’iah versus Talos, humans versus Skrulls, Fury versus his inner demons. Hopefully, though, the rest of the season dives the most into that final conflict.
Editor’s note: This article was updated to correct the name for Emilia Clark’s Secret Invasion character, G’iah. We regret the error.
