Fortunately for all of us, Marvel’s Secret Invasion has finally wrapped after six episodes. There’s a lot of grumbling among the MCU fanbase today about this series, and deservedly so–this series was completely incoherent, and as has been the case so often in the MCU since Avengers: Endgame, it’s hard to tell if there was any point in watching it.
Warning: This article contains major spoilers about the finale episode of Marvel’s Secret Invasion.
Recently, Disney CEO Bob Iger said the MCU is having a bit of a downturn because all these movies and TV shows “diluted focus and attention.” While that is true, the real rot is deeper: Almost every MCU show and movie since Endgame has felt like it had its part of the MCU’s overall plot removed during post-production, and the result is a franchise with no story that anybody can see.
Secret Invasion might be the single most egregious example of this yet. This series told us that Nick Fury had been using the shapeshifting Skrulls to do all sorts of clandestine missions since the 1990s, and yet it couldn’t manage to retroactively place them in any past movie. Secret Invasion ends with a cliffhanger that might never be addressed, and we learned nothing new about Nick Fury except that he has a secret Skrull wife–Fury certainly didn’t learn any lessons or change in any way, and he wasn’t developed as a character any further than he had been in movies.
So what’s going on here? I don’t know, and like many of you I ended up with far more questions than answers from the Secret Invasion finale. So let’s get to asking.