I just finished watching the Disney Plus Secret Invasion finale, what I would consider to be the worst MCU series that’s aired to date. If that upsets you, you may not want to keep reading, as I don’t think the finale did anything to change that, and if anything, made it worse. Spoilers follow.
What the finale did, however, is reveal where at least a good chunk of its absurdly bloated $212 million budget went. While action scenes have been pretty minimal before this, we did get a sprawling slugfest between Emilia Clarke’s G’iah and Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Gravik this final week.
I did not think it was a particularly shocking twist that Fury turned out to be G’iah in this sequence, as it made little sense that Fury would stumble into the radioactive Russian compound, hand Gravik the key to destroy Earth or any other world, then die. Of course, it was really G’iah and when Gravik got his array of superpowers from both Avengers heroes and villains, so did she by being in the same chamber. This entire plan revolved around Gravik not instantly killing Fury or at least, throwing him into a wall out of the chamber for fun, so uh, a bit of luck there, I suppose.
The resulting fight was…actually quite good! It was fun to pick out which powers the pair of Super Skrulls were using, including my favorite moment where G’iah channels, of all people, Mantis, to get an edge in the fight. It was on par with anything you’d see in an actual MCU movie and I bet it was expensive, as the CG even looked good, which is not a guarantee given the rest of Marvel’s recent projects.
The rest of the episode was not good. Nothing redeeming about this finale to make up for a lackluster series of episodes before it. This is between dialogue (“did you take a stupid pill with your breakfast this morning??”) and actual plot turns. There is an absurd prolonged conversation in the hospital where Fury and Sonya Falsworth try to convince the President that Rhodey is a Skrull. All they literally have to do is shoot him in the hand or something to show this, but they let fake Rhodey argue his case before ultimately, Fury shoots him in the head. That’s all he had to do in the first place! This entire scene was pointless!
If you were expecting a series about Skrulls secretly being important people in the MCU to have a surprise twist ending, don’t hold your breath. The only twist is the “Gi’ah is Fury” part, and no one else important is revealed to have been a Skrull this whole time. The only MCU character of any significance that was a Skrull was Rhodey. The implication at the very end was that Rhodey had been replaced longer than anyone, perhaps all the way back to his injury in Captain America: Civil War, not that it really matters.
No, Carol Danvers never shows up, even as G’iah and Gravik use her powers. There is no post-credits sequence. Nothing of importance changes in the MCU at all other than the President now trying to hunt down Skrulls, which I am guessing will probably never come up again, relegated to “giant statue in the ocean” status.
This whole thing should have been an Avengers-level event like it was in the comics where left and right, heroes were revealed to be Skrulls and it threw the whole world into chaos. Nothing like that here. Just a waste of time and money and talented actors.
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