After the Skrulls were first introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it was only a matter of time until we got a story based on the “Secret Invasion” comic event. However, Captain Marvel cast the Skrulls in a sympathetic light, making them victims of the Kree. So how can they turn that into an invasion event? Let’s take a look and see with episode 1: “Resurrection.”
And of course, there are spoilers ahead.
1. Let’s Talk About the Intro Sequence
Okay, let’s start with the elephant in the room: the title card intro sequence. My first thought upon seeing it was “this is all very green,” which makes sense, given the Skrull. It’s a bizarre sequence, with everything constantly flowing and shifting, with misshapen faces and distorted bodies switching between vaguely-human and vaguely-skrull.
At first I thought this was all intentional, in order to make us feel disoriented and off, as mystery and uncertainty are a big part of the series. But my wife, who’s far more versed in the ways of art than I am, quickly realized something: “this looks like something made on Midjourney.”
And… it is. Yes, Disney decided that, rather than pay actual artists and animators to create the opening sequence, they’d rather pay significantly less to have some guy feed prompts into an AI generator until it created a passable opening sequence using other peoples’ artwork as data.
To say I’m disappointed in this would be an understatement. Even putting aside the ethical issues still around AI generated imagery, this is a slap in the face to all the artists and animators out there who’ve trained their whole lives to create work that is, frankly, much better and designed with far more conscious intention than this.
You’d think Disney and Marvel would value artists, given how they’re literally built by cartoons and comics, but I suppose that comes second to saving a few bucks.
2. Trust No One
The biggest overarching theme of this series is trust, or rather, how you can’t trust anyone. The opening monologue makes that pretty clear, as it talks about disinformation and what it’s like if you can’t trust the people closest to you. That theme continues to pop up throughout the episode, and it frequently shows that trusting anyone can and will backfire.
It sets this up right off the bat by having us follow Everett Ross, a character we’re familiar with from previous Marvel movies. As viewers, we know him, we’ve seen his character development, so we’re predisposed to trust him. When the agent he’s talking to attacks him, our first thought is “this agent is super paranoid, of course he’d think Ross is a Skrull.” So we keep following him, and when he gets chased, we assume it’s by an enemy out to silence him.
Then it reveals that this Ross we’ve been following has been a Skrull since the start of the episode. So Agent Prescod may have been paranoid, but he was also right.
From there, it’s established that we can’t tell who we can trust and who’s actually a Skrull. Yet the idea of trust and deceit comes up even among Skrulls, with betrayals and backstabbing abound. Even among humans, there’s plenty of spycraft afoot. It’ll certainly keep us on our toes, and I’m already assuming everyone is a Skrull if they’ve been offscreen for more than a minute.
3. How Fury Got His Groove Back
Another recurring point brought up in this episode is that Nick Fury, who’s taking a lead role in this series, is getting old and off his game. We see it when he gets captured by MI6 (and Special Agent Sonya Falsworth says as much to his face), then just to nail it in, Maria Hill reiterates the point. Multiple characters point out how he’s changed since The Blip, and question why he left Earth in the first place.
While we know that Nick Fury has been working on S.A.B.E.R. up in space, he also admits to having a crisis of faith brought on by The Blip. This means that, while we’re used to a Nick Fury that always has a plan and knows more about what’s happening than he lets on, the Nick Fury we’re following isn’t nearly as prepared. He’ll be struggling to catch up and keep up, putting him in more of an underdog position, so we as viewers can follow the mysteries and decipher the plots with him.
Continued belowAs such, Nick Fury getting back up to speed and overcoming his crisis will likely be his main character arc. We’ll see how it develops over the season.
Fun little side note about S.A.B.E.R.: while the comic books have S.W.O.R.D. (Sentient World Observation and Response Department) as their space-based organization, the MCU swapped out “world” for “weapons” in WandaVision, necessitating the creation of S.A.B.E.R. to take its place.
4. The Skrull Resistance
So, who are these Skrulls our heroes are fighting against, and what’s their goal?
Well, Nick Fury’s attempts to find a new homeworld for the Skrulls has been unsuccessful so far. He died during The Blip and never fully came back, and Captain Marvel is off being a galactic superhero, making many of them feel abandoned.
So a lot of Skrulls set up encampments in abandoned Russian nuclear power plants (since radiation doesn’t hurt them), where they can live without being in disguise and restore what they can from their old homeworld.
But enough resentment has built up that a lot of them have decided they want the whole planet, and the best way to get that is to use their shapeshifting to kidnap people, steal their memories and identities, then use terrorist attacks to trigger a war between the US and Russia that will wipe out most of humanity and allow them to rise as the world’s new rulers.
So that escalated pretty quickly. It keeps most of the Skrulls sympathetic enough, as they’re just looking for a place to live and be themselves (“home in my own skin,” as they say), but still casts the ones actually doing the attacks as going too far.
As for how well they manage to balance this, that has yet to be seen.
We also get a more personal Skrull story with Talos (who’s working with Fury) and his daughter G’iah (who is a high-ranking part of the Skrull “Resistance”). Each one also seems to blame the other for the death of Soren, Talos’ wife. So that will be another subplot to follow.
5. Goodbye, Hill
Finally, we get to the shocking ending of the episode, and a stark reminder of the “don’t trust anyone” motif.
First, we get an unsurprising betrayal, as it looks like G’iah is going to betray the Skrull Resistance for her father, but double-crosses him and sends Fury’s team after decoys.
Then, when the inevitable first-episode disaster goes off, and the Skrulls set off bombs in a crowded area, we get a painful reminder of how the Skrulls can shapeshift to look like anyone, including Nick Fury, as Gravik (leader of the Skrull Resistance and member of the Skrull Council) shoots Maria Hill.
This surprise death gets an extra bit of pain added to it as she dies telling the real Fury “it was you,” giving the impression that she believes Nick Fury was the one to betray her (although she could just as easily be telling Fury “it was a Skrull who looked like you”). Given how long the two have worked together, it’s a properly painful moment, and the death of a named character in the MCU carries a lot of weight.
(Of course, given all the subterfuge afoot, there’s always the chance that she’s not actually dead, especially because she knew they’d be going into a dangerous situation and would have likely prepared accordingly. But we’ll see if that ends up being the case, and will assume for the time being that they actually killed her off.)
And thus ends the first episode of Secret Invasion. Overall, it’s a solid start to the season, although I’ll be making good use of the “skip opening credits” button. There are undoubtedly more twists and revelations to come, so we’ll see where this series go.
