{"id":20130,"date":"2023-08-06T10:40:31","date_gmt":"2023-08-06T17:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=20130"},"modified":"2023-08-06T10:42:24","modified_gmt":"2023-08-06T17:42:24","slug":"spoilery-unhappiness-about-secret-invasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2023\/08\/06\/spoilery-unhappiness-about-secret-invasion\/","title":{"rendered":"Spoilery unhappiness about Secret Invasion"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I recently finished watching the 6-episode MCU <cite>Secret Invasion<\/cite> miniseries. I found it very disappointing.<\/p>\r\n<p>Unlike some people I\u2019ve seen talking about the show, I don\u2019t see this show as evidence that Marvel has gone irredeemably downhill, or that all MCU TV is terrible. I\u2019ve at least somewhat liked all of the other Disney+ MCU TV shows except for <cite>Moon Knight<\/cite>, and I\u2019m looking forward to <cite>Loki<\/cite> s2, <cite>Echo<\/cite>, and <cite>Ironheart<\/cite>.<\/p>\r\n<p>But <cite>Secret Invasion<\/cite> really didn\u2019t work for me.<\/p>\r\n<p>I have a bunch of questions about it (and some annoyances that I\u2019ll phrase as rhetorical questions, but it\u2019s possible that they might have real answers).<\/p>\r\n<hr width=\"25%\" \/>\r\n<p>The below questions will include huge spoilers, so I\u2019ll precede them with some spoiler space.<\/p>\r\n<lj-cut text=\"Behind a cut, if cuts work in this context.\">\r\n<hr width=\"25%\" \/>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<p>.<\/p>\r\n<hr width=\"25%\" \/>\r\n<h3>Things that seem to me like plotholes<\/h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Why didn\u2019t Fury and Danvers find a new homeworld for the Skrulls, in 30 years of searching? (Are there really <em>no<\/em> habitable but uninhabited planets in the entire MCU? Not even ones that are uninhabitable to most species because of radiation, which Skrulls are immune to?)<\/li>\r\n  <li>Given that they didn\u2019t find a new homeworld, why hasn\u2019t Fury ever said that the search wasn\u2019t working out, nor apologized for his failure, nor brainstormed with the Skrulls about other options? Faux-Fury gives an explanation in the final episode of <cite>Secret Invasion<\/cite>, but that seems to me to be a weak one: the claim there is that he gave up on the search and decided to make a home for the Skrulls on Earth, but then figured out that it would be too hard to get humans to accept Skrulls. (So, I guess, he then just gave up on the whole project, but didn\u2019t bother to tell any Skrulls he had done so.) Given that I had already guessed that that wasn\u2019t really Fury speaking, I assumed at the time that that wasn\u2019t the real explanation; but maybe it was meant to be, in which case I think it was a really weak one.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Someone in a comment somewhere raised a point that I totally agree with: There\u2019ve been a million Skrulls on Earth for years, and not <em>one<\/em> of them has accidentally died and turned back into their original form in front of humans? That seems implausible.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Speaking of Skrull detection: We\u2019ve seen that removing a piece of their body causes that piece to revert. I suppose that must not be true of blood, or a blood test would be all that\u2019s needed to detect them. But even so: surely in some circumstances, if you need to convince (say) the President of the US that someone is a Skrull, cutting off the tip of that person\u2019s finger would be an acceptable sacrifice? That\u2019s not the kind of test that you can do frequently, but in a specific one-off saving-the-world scenario, it seems like an easy decision to make.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Speaking of that sort of scenario: in that final episode, Fury and Falsworth casually kill one or two dozen Secret Service agents, all of whom apparently turned out to be human. (At least I didn\u2019t see any of them revert.) But when it comes time to save the world, instead of killing the Skrull impersonating Rhodes, they hold him at gunpoint in a tense scene of trying to convince the President with words. Why don\u2019t they just kill Rhodes immediately?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n<h3>Things that I\u2019m honestly uncertain about<\/h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Multiple times in this series, Fury gave the impression of being old and tired and out of resources. I felt like each time that happened, we subsequently saw indications that it had just been an act, and that he was more or less on top of things most of the time, as usual for him. Did I misinterpret that? Is the idea supposed to be that he really is old and tired and worn out?<\/li>\r\n  <li>Apparently the ending was supposed to indicate that the person we thought was Rhodes may have been really a Skrull for years, possibly since just after <cite>Winter Soldier<\/cite>. How long <em>has<\/em> he been a Skrull? don\u2019t think we have any way to know. But if it has been over the course of years and multiple movies, I find it kinda annoying\u2014why would he have apparently done nothing to further the bad-Skrull agenda during all that time?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n<h3>Things that might be answered in <cite>The Marvels<\/cite> or other forthcoming works<\/h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>What has Fury been <em>doing<\/em> on SABER all this time? Why has he stayed away so long? And why hasn\u2019t he been able to (for example) make a phone call to Varra? (Also, where <em>is<\/em> SABER? I had assumed it was in Earth orbit, but various things might make a lot more sense if it\u2019s elsewhere.)<\/li>\r\n  <li>There were a couple of times when Gravik (and maybe others, I forget) said to Fury something like \u201cAre you going to suddenly have the Avengers show up and save you?\u201d I assume that was the writers lampshading the standard connected-superhero-universe question: where are all the other heroes while this is going on? But in this case, I don\u2019t buy the standard answers. The Skrulls are about to start WWIII and kill all of humanity, and Fury doesn\u2019t even <em>try<\/em> to contact any superheroes to help out, just proceeds as if he\u2019s entirely on his own, with like three allies? But I can imagine that <cite>The Marvels<\/cite> might show us something extremely important that\u2019s keeping all of the remaining major heroes busy during this time period.<\/li>\r\n  <li>What was going on in that final Falsworth\/G'iah scene, with the vast array of (apparently) bodies in some sort of storage? Were those all humans who\u2019ve been replaced by Skrulls? Were they Skrulls? Were they some other species entirely?<\/li>\r\n  <li>What is Varra\u2019s work that\u2019s so important for her to do on Earth? Isn\u2019t she a geneticist or something? If her work is that important, why didn\u2019t we see her doing that work during this series?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n<h3>Things that I\u2019m just annoyed by, and am thus asking rhetorical questions about<\/h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Did they really have to kill Maria Hill? In the first episode? After all these years of her being annoyingly underused? At first I interpreted it as fridging, as killing her to give Fury a reason to get revenge, but later it became clear that it wasn\u2019t even that\u2014it was a way to <em>frame<\/em> Fury. Surely there were other ways they could have done that. (\u2026Of course, it was also a way to keep Hill out of the show, so that Fury would have one less loyal ally\u2014but given that they just kept the whole rest of the MCU offscreen with no explanation, surely they could have done that with her too.) See also <a href=\"https:\/\/collider.com\/secret-invasion-maria-death\/\">[SPOILER] Deserved Better in \u2018Secret Invasion\u2019<\/a>.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/lj-cut>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20130"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20132,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20130\/revisions\/20132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}