Secret Invasion

The first episode of the Secret Invasion series was a little lackluster and it included one of my least favorite and most sexist story tropes. It did not set the bar very high and quite frankly did a great job of lowering any expectations I had for this series, there weren’t very many to begin with anyway. But here we are back for week 2 expecting absolutely nothing.

I will say that as much as I love her entrance into the MCU, Captain Marvel as a movie really fucked continuity and blew some plot holes into the universe. We see in this second episode that Fury spent a lot of time helping the Skrulls after the events of Captain Marvel and the problem with that is, in the first Avengers the big bad was aliens…ya know her specialty, her turf, her job. And yet he didn’t feel the need to call her until he was being turned into dust. Sorry but there is no justification for that, it makes no sense.

Fury vowed to help the Skrulls find a new home if they were willing to disguise themselves and help the human race…this was in 1997….it's canonically 2024 so not only is Fury useless to these poor people but a faction of them getting impatient and bombing us is pretty fair. Lets not pretend like the human race has ever been that patient in what we feel is a life or death situation…like ever.

Fury’s whole humans can’t get along with each other and neither can Skrulls' argument . All I heard is the Skrulls will fit right in because all humans have ever done is hate each other.

We also find out that the Skrulls have essentially infiltrated the governments of several major countries. The full premise seems to be that since Fury didn’t keep his promise to find the Skrulls a new home, they’ve decided to take earth. Now I feel like for some reason we are supposed to root for the humans but the Skrulls are kind of justified here and they are acting as any single human superpower would and have throughout the whole course of human history.

Fury’s lack of motivation to find them a new home off or on earth is also inexcusable, like they would coexist so well in Wakanda or New Asgard and yet he decided to use them and cast them aside. Their anger and hostility is entirely justified. This is just like the Flag Smashers in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, they are supposed to be this terrorist group but everything they stand for makes perfect sense. Sorry Marvel but you are not doing a good job of getting me on the side of the people we’re supposed to root for.

And we are still pretending that Rhodey is relevant…okay. Literally all he’s done in the MCU is show up and be annoying, he’s useless and irrelevant to the current state of the MCU. Also American propaganda is gross and way too prevalent in comics and comic book media. The nationalistic approach is tired and really not necessary unless you want me to hate a character.

Also this dialogue is not good…”I’m Nick Fury even when I’m out, I’m in” dude I know the MCU goes out of their way to hire writers that don’t read or even like comics but that is such a piss poor decision. Especially considering the effort that the comics have made to line up with the MCU as if MCU heads are out here reading comics. The only people you are affecting are the people already reading comics and you're pissing us off. Comics and MCU are separate universes, and Marvel needs to treat them as such.

There are a lot of lingering shots, and dead time between dialogue like they are trying to build some kind of tension but it just seems half assed and pointless. Now the original X-Men movies did the same thing, particularly the first one but when they did it it was creepy, and haunting and it built anticipation and I think that’s what this episode was going for but it failed.

Also Nick Fury has a wife or a girlfriend or whatever? Sure why the fuck not. A whole lot of nothing happened in this episode and my standards for this show continue to be low.

Only two episodes in and I am feeling nothing, I am invested in nothing and no one, including Emelia Clark’s character who is the only reason that I am watching this. This is the first time I’ve ever felt like this with an MCU project, including movies I didn’t particularly like. It's not just that I’m not a fan of the story, it's that the writing has given me no reason to care about these characters or their outcome.