The first episode of Marvel’s Secret Invasion series was a solid start to a spy series that could upend the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which a group of extremist shape-shifting Skrull refugees are plotting to take over Earth and, in the process, kill the humans who live there. It’s well-written, the cast is uniformly great, it doesn’t look like it was shot on an extremely fake-looking CGI soundstage. I can’t help but hope that this will be a rare Marvel season that manages to start well and then maintain its quality.
But the first episode of Secret Invasion also gave me a feeling I’ve been getting from the MCU a lot over the past few years: Why wasn’t this story ever set up or teased before now? There have been 11 movies and eight seasons of TV that have come out since the Skrulls were introduced in Captain Marvel, but all that Marvel has done with them since is to very occasionally remind us that Nick Fury’s green pals are still around. And there’s been nothing, meanwhile, about these secret other Skrulls who are doing that titular invasion.
Warning: This article contains light spoilers for the first episode of Secret Invasion, and it also discusses major plot details from some past Marvel series, like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and WandaVision.
As it stands right now, there have been no meaningful story precursors at all for Secret Invasion since Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2020. None of the nine movies or eight seasons of TV that we’ve gotten since Far From Home have been relevant to what’s going on here–and the last canonical appearance by a Skrull was at the end of WandaVision, when one of the aliens working for Fury recruited Monica Rambeau for something we still haven’t seen yet. Monica is not expected to appear on Secret Invasion, so whatever that was likely won’t come up until The Marvels this fall.
That lack of connective tissue between different movies and shows has been an increasingly sore spot for fans in the post-Endgame era, and it’s an issue that’s exacerbated by how it often feels like that connective tissue was present in a story and then removed. It’s not a completely ridiculous idea. The MCU expanded dramatically with the addition of Disney+ series, and then COVID-19 upended the release schedule–it follows that sacrifices would have to be made once things got out of order because there were and are so many moving parts.
One of the biggest victims of that shuffling has to be The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a series that never really settled on a thematic focus because its villains, the Flag Smashers, were so poorly sketched out, leaving a weird gaping hole where their character development and personal motivations were supposed to go. During the Blip, national lines were redrawn or erased, and people lived where they pleased. But once the half-empty world became full again, everybody tried to push things back to the old normal–and that left a lot of folks newly displaced, which led to the formation of the Flag Smashers.
But regardless of the righteousness of their cause, by the end of the show they’re all dead, and Sam Wilson finished their mission by giving a “why can’t we all just get along?” speech on TV.
The whole bit was unsatisfying and vague, and it felt like the true thematic core of the story had been sucked out. Since that was very early in the post-Endgame cycle, it was tough to even know where to begin trying to figure out how they’d gutted this story. Now, we have too many possibilities, but Secret Invasion has given me my favorite one so far: that the early days of this Skrull invasion were a part of this story, but their part was cut.
The aspect of Secret Invasion that put the thought into my head is that these Skrull rebels have a remarkably similar cause to that of the Flag Smashers. These alien refugees, whose world was demolished by the Kree, were promised a new home by Nick Fury. But Fury got snapped, and he hasn’t come through with anything since his return, and so a group of these Skrulls decide to take matters into their own, newly extremist hands in order to get things done. They’re pretty much the Flag Smashers: Outer Space Edition.
Aside from that remarkably obvious thematic parallel, there’s nothing else of note in the text that actively supports this idea. But it fits well enough circumstantially in a lot of different ways. The rushed new Captain America could certainly be the work of a secret Skrull in the U.S. government who wants an unwitting Skrull-controlled superhero who can act in the open on Earth. At the same time, Skrulls are super strong to begin with, and so you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a Skrull disguised as a human and a human who had taken the super soldier serum like members of the Flag Smashers had.
But I want to stress again that this is mostly speculation and guesswork. It’s educated speculation and guesswork, but that’s still a very long way from verified fact. Fortunately, though, if there’s anything to this idea, we’ll probably find out pretty soon. While the MCU didn’t manage to set up much of Secret Invasion in advance, it’s a good bet that it will retroactively insert these rebel Skrulls into past stories so as to establish how they’ve managed to get this far in their secret war.
Retroactively setting up your story in flashbacks certainly wouldn’t be as satisfying as it would have been if they had set up this storyline in advance the normal way, but if they can manage to effectively sell those retcons, it could go a long way toward fixing the MCU in the near future by actually giving the MCU a bigger picture once again.
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