The fourth chapter of Secret Invasion begins with a swift reversal of last week’s episode-ending death: Before the opening title sequence, G’iah gasps for new life. This doesn’t come as a tremendous surprise: Emilia Clarke’s character’s story had been half-baked, and there was still a lot to learn about the relationship between G’iah and her father, the former Skrull general Talos. Yet “Beloved” seemingly ends the renewed opportunity to explore their kinship, as Secret Invasion repeats its trademark finishing move: a supposed death on the home team. And this time, the victim is Talos.
With just two episodes left in the series, Secret Invasion remains a slow-burn thriller with twists and turns that never amount to much excitement. Three of the first four episodes have ended with Gravik’s shooting or stabbing of one of Nick Fury’s allies. Even though this episode has the first death that feels significant (sorry, Maria Hill, we hardly knew ye), the potential for any real shock value is squandered thanks to the show’s repeated cycle of sudden reveals followed by unsubtle explanations in the next episode. G’iah’s demise is undone via a flashback scene in which she uses the new Skrull machine to absorb Extremis DNA before her escape attempt from New Skrullos, granting her the healing abilities shown in last week’s “Betrayed.” Head writer Kyle Bradstreet and director Ali Selim are attempting the same magic trick time and time again, even though the audience has already seen the secret to how it’s performed.
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“Beloved” ties up a second loose thread introduced at the end of “Betrayed.” In the final moments of the third episode, Fury’s wife, Priscilla, is revealed to be working for Gravik when she receives a phone call from a man who sounds a lot like Don Cheadle’s James Rhodes. “Beloved” quickly confirms as much. Rhodey waltzes into a church to meet with Priscilla and tells her that she’s been ordered to kill Fury, a meeting that her suspicious husband happens to be listening in on. (Everyone and Maria Hill’s mother is out here telling Fury how washed up he is, but my guy is still somehow managing to bug his enemies and allies alike with listening devices and trackers whenever he wants. Maybe it’s the fake beard.)
But rather than prolonging this tension, Secret Invasion almost immediately resolves it. A few scenes later, Fury confronts Priscilla when she returns home. He puts all his cards on the table—and his gun, too. He has been an absent partner for years, but he sways her nonetheless with his rare vulnerability and some of her favorite poetry. We’ve seen previous signs of Priscilla’s wavering loyalty to Gravik, so her mind may have been made up before the emotional conversation with her husband. Whether because of the Fury charm or her own sense of morality, she disobeys her orders and lets Nick walk away unscathed, giving Team Fury another ally and leaving her ultimate fate unknown.
Fury wastes little time in confronting the other Skrull involved in the secretive church scene, the shape-shifter posing as Rhodes. The former director of S.H.I.E.L.D. has always had quite a knack for appearing in rooms without any invitation, and here he shows up in Rhodes’s hotel room, bottle of bourbon in hand, to get his old job back. Fury all but accuses the colonel of being a Skrull to his (shape-shifted) face, only for fake Rhodey to retaliate by threatening to release video evidence that shows Gravik—who took on the likeness of Fury—shooting Hill in Moscow. As Fury reveals to Talos just moments after leaving the room, his real motive for the visit was to implant a tracking device in Rhodes via the liquor.
Skrull Rhodes is ultimately the key to what is perhaps Gravik’s boldest move yet: an attempted assassination of the American president. Gravik leads his small army of Skrulls, pretending to be Russians, against the Americans in Secret Invasion’s most ambitious action set piece of the season so far. However, much like the rest of the drama in the series, this would-be jolt of excitement falls flat. Helicopters explode left and right in a battle that exposes the continued strains on the VFX industry, most noticeably as Gravik’s Super-Skrull capabilities are put on full display. More so than any shoddy CGI, what’s puzzling about the climactic scene is the lack of logic and purpose in everything transpiring amid the hail of gunfire and exploding helicopters.
Despite the fact that the safety of the president is the Americans’ top priority, no soldier or agent makes an effort to save him until Fury and Talos arrive to help out. (Mind you, Fury is still a wanted man in the U.S. and the world at large, yet he’s still treated as a commanding officer.) President Ritson has been unconscious, hanging upside down in a flaming car, for minutes at this point. Now, I’m no military expert, but I don’t think the president looks very safe in his current predicament:
Unfortunately for the Americans, Talos gets shot as he attempts to batter through the door of the overturned vehicle with his bare fist, and he begins to revert to his Skrull form. For whatever reason, there is only one American soldier in the entire scrum who witnesses the green reptilian alien taking shape beside them, and he simply takes Fury’s word when Fury proclaims, “He’s with us!” (In fairness, if you’ve lived this long in the MCU, I guess nothing would surprise you by now. Roots spontaneously grew out of Gravik’s arm and he crushed some poor soul, and no one seemed to bat an eye.)
Furthermore, no one questions Fury’s initiative to single-handedly carry the president through the battlefield to his personal vehicle once Talos manages to break through. Nor does anyone wonder why Rhodes—the sole Avenger on the scene—has been sitting in his car and taking it all in as if he had a front-row seat to the Hunger Games. Even as a minor Shakespearean tragedy unfolds in the middle of the battlefield when Gravik, disguised as an American, reveals himself to Talos and stabs him in the chest in front of Fury, the other American soldiers are oblivious to the spectacle of an alien (next to the corpse of another alien) who survives a shot to the face.
The episode ends as Fury looks back at Talos’s unnoticed body with remorse while he drives away with the president, and Gravik retreats with his top lieutenant. Although Talos’s death comes after Secret Invasion took the time to play up the sacrifices he’d already made for Fury over the years to demonstrate his steadfast loyalty, it’s cheapened by the G’iah fake-out. It seems highly unlikely that the show would repeat the same trick (again) by resurrecting Talos in Episode 5, especially given his lack of access to the Extremis strain. But if Secret Invasion can just decide to insert scenes that hadn’t been shown sequentially, as it did to save G’iah, perhaps anything can happen.
“Beloved” does a better job of developing the relationships between Fury and Priscilla and between Talos and G’iah, but the series at large is failing to take advantage of the narrative room its six-episode format affords. Fury and Talos’s partnership has been one of the show’s highlights, but it’s still unclear why Talos’s loyalty to Fury never faltered, even as the human reaped the career-altering benefits of wielding a network of shape-shifting alien spies while failing to hold up his end of their agreement to find the Skrulls a planet. With its episodes progressively getting shorter (“Beloved” runs about 30 minutes without the credits), Secret Invasion doesn’t have much room left to explore its characters in ways that the MCU’s movies typically can’t.
In theory, Marvel Studios’ weekly release model on Disney+ should be working in Secret Invasion’s favor. Had Bradstreet and his creative team conceived a more subtle approach to their deployment of the Skrulls’ shape-shifting abilities, for instance, there might have been greater potential for this series to become a hub for the kind of galaxy-brain theorizing that had WandaVision fans believing neighbor no. 4 was secretly Mephisto. But no amount of suspense can be generated if Rhodes’s Skrull identity can be revealed through an off-screen phone call or if a major “death” like G’iah’s can be rescinded so hastily. Streaming numbers have been scarce since it was reported that the premiere garnered the second-lowest viewership of any MCU series over its first five days, but Disney may have been better off releasing every episode of Secret Invasion at once, just as it intends to do for the upcoming series Echo.
Secret Invasion reportedly cost $212 million to produce, which would make it one of the most expensive TV shows ever created on a per-episode basis. Yet through two-thirds of the season, Fury’s much-anticipated return to the screen has been a disappointing journey, frittering away what could very well be Samuel L. Jackson’s one and only headlining project in the MCU.
