A Secret Not Worth Keeping

Shortly before I left for Gen Con, the latest Marvel TV series finished up its six-episode run. Picking up on plot threads seeded in Captain Marvel, Secret Invasion centered on Nick Fury as he struggled against alien Skrulls capable of impersonating humans. The show was generally panned throughout its brief run, and I can't say my opinion was much different. Every week, Tuesday would roll around, and only the knowledge that another new episode was about to arrive would make the previous episode bubble to the top of the "time to watch this" queue.

The problems with the show were numerous, and essentially all at the script level. The overall story was weirdly both too complicated and too simple at the same time, in a way that made it really difficult to follow the narrative from A to B to C. That's largely because character motivations made little to no sense, quickly devolving into humdrum "the main villain hates the main hero, just because" tropes. Along the way, significant characters are killed off in stupid ways for minimal impact -- from classic "killing the female character to motivate the male character" to "killing off one of the better actors on the show without ever giving them a truly good scene first."

But the biggest miss of all is that Secret Invasion failed to deliver on its core premise. The very first scene of the first episode is an extended sequence that shows the audience that anyone we've ever known, anywhere, might actually be an alien Skrull. The ramifications of this are staggering, setting the stage for a paranoid thriller in which no one can be trusted, and in which we're sure to discover that multiple characters we've followed for years might actually be bad guys.

And then, essentially none of that ever actually happens. The "stolen identity" reveals are few and far between, and only one has any long-standing ramifications on the MCU. (Does it really, though?) This is probably the inevitable consequence of telling this story as a TV series and not an actual Marvel movie, because very few MCU characters are actually here in the show (and many of the ones who the audience would care about most have already left the franchise). Or maybe it's just bad writing more generally. It's not like Marvel television is incapable of telling a story like this; I could not help but think of the "LMD" arc on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and how much stronger it felt by comparison.

So why did I keep tuning in for six episodes? Well... because the acting was superb, better than any entry in the MCU has seen in years. It was, of course, a showcase for Samuel L. Jackson to do his trademark thing more fully than anywhere else in the MCU. It was an opportunity for more of his great banter with Ben Mendelsohn. Don Cheadle was given the best scenes he's ever had in the MCU.

And Olivia Colman gets a paragraph of her own here, because as always, she crushes it. This multiple award winner has a long history of being the very best thing in basically every project she takes on, despite often being surrounded by a talented ensemble. That's no different here, as she steals every scene playing a jolly psychopath of an MI6 agent, and ultimately leaves me wishing we were watching the show centered on her.

I wrote of the movie Eternals that it was the worst entry in the MCU franchise. Were it not for the efforts of a great cast spinning something like gold from straw here, I think Secret Invasion would have given that movie a run for its money. That monumental effort pulls this up to a "still not worth watching" C- for me.