1x02 Promises

[7.6/10] Secret Invasion has an advantage most shows don’t -- a bevy of incredible actors who can play off one another. You could pretty much just rotate scene partners and do any variety of conversations between Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Olivia Coleman, and Don Cheadle, and come out shining. And while Kingsley Ben-Adir is new on my radar, he seems to have the presence and electricity to make his scenes work on acting alone. That alone makes episodes like this one worth it.

Nick Fury and Talos debate who betrayed who in bringing the Skrulls to Earth. Gravik makes his case for the rise of the Skrulls and the decimation of humanity to his countrymen in a big monologue. Fury and Rhodey hash out not just the invasion but their unique place in the power structure. Sonya cheerfully gets what she needs while torturing a member of Gravik’s crew.

All of these scenes work on the strength of the acting alone. It’s just electric to watch talented performers go at it, particularly when given the time and space to do so. I bristle a little at the bloated runtime of an episode like this one, but it’s worth it if it means we get a chance to see talented performers like these bounce off of one another at length.

That’s a good thing, because I’m not super invested in the plot. It’s all fine. The fallout -- among governments, their intelligence agencies, Fury’s rogues, and the various Skrulls -- in the wake of the Moscow attack is all fine. Gravik taking over the Skrull council is fine. Gaia having second thoughts is fine. Sonya starting to piece the puzzle together is fine. Fury going home to a wife we’ve never seen before is...weird.

But it’s not really what I care about here. I appreciate the paranoid atmosphere at play. And I like the personal and practical challenges Fury faces in navigating the lines of friendships and professional relationships at play in all of this. But it works better as a sort of mood piece and acting showcase than something propelled by the story alone.

For example, I presume the secret science project that G’iah snoops in on is a plan to turn Gravik into the Super Skrull. But I dunno, it’s just hard to care about the narrative specifics when much of it seems like a mix between boilerplate spy stories and boilerplate sci-fi stories.

But beyond just the performances, I like the themes and issues at play here. Fury and Talos have legitimate disagreements about whether Talos overstepped his bounds by bringing a million Skrulls into a volatile geopolitical space, or whether Fury broke his promise by not taking care of these refugees and then straight up abandoning them.

Gravik’s declaration that he’s merely accelerating humanity’s fate has unfortunate resonance in the midst of some of the planet’s hottest days on record, even if it plays like a self-serving justification. And the thing I find so striking is that it feels like he and Fury agree on some things, namely humanity’s natural belligerence. They make interesting opponents on that score.

I particularly like the conversation between Fury and Rhodes, which touch on everything from racial solidarity to indoctrination within the power structure, to what friends and colleagues owe one another. What I love about it is that you could read Rhodey as a Skrull plant who’s stonewalling Fury to serve his own interests, or you could read him as someone who’s legitimately pushing back on Fury taking liberties and having minimal evidence for his claims, or you could read him as the real War Machine who’s simply become acclimated to the halls of power and the transactional nature of that world. The ambiguity is a feature, not a bug.

The same goes for the show’s willingness to interrogate whether Fury’s done something wrong, been somehow responsible, for all of this. I love the “Tell me something I don’t know” scene because it’s fair to both sides. But the dispute becomes more interesting when Fury basically made a bargain -- work for me and use your powers to help my spy agency, and in exchange, I’ll help you find a home. The Skrulls held up their end of the bargain. Fury didn’t. Whether that justifies Talos bringing the rest of his people to Earth without authorization is a fair question, but whether persecuted refugees in need trump authorization and “host’s privileges” is another fair question. And the idea that the Skrulls themselves may be in this predicament because they were too eager for war adds another compelling wrinkle.

Again, there’s a lot of fascinating ideas floating around in this show, and even more fascinating performers to bring them to life. I’m still waiting for the storytelling to catch up to those standards, but for no at least, those other elements are enough to keep me engaged.

Okay, this one was a bit better than the first episode. The Skrulls plan to annihilate humankind by sowing war, and then to take over Earth. Fury's suspected of planting that bomb in Moscow...

Still, my main problem is the transition for Fury - last time I saw him was at Tony's memorial (and being impersonated by Skrulls in Far from Home)... so, why does he spend some time on a space station? Where does that Skrull wife come in? And let's not mention Rhodey's attitude here. (Although, I have to admit I like that "I'm so much better than you"/moral arrogance that SHIELD once upon a time displayed towards Tony, used against Fury.)

So, the Skrull side is more interesting, Talos and Gravik and their respective histories with Fury (and his wife). Fury has done some shady things in the past and using the Skrulls for his own advancement, without holding up his end of the bargain of finding them a home, is way up in the shady things. On the other hand, there were 90 Skrulls on Earth by the time that deal was made, now there are a million because Talos called every refugee to Earth. So, not sure who's actually to blame for the dissatisfaction and understandable anger - I think the parallels to the "real world", i.e. the treatment of foreign workers, the integration of foreigners in host countries, are pretty obvious.

And I have to say I love Colman in this one... she does that deviousness really well.

Feels a little more settled than the first episode, and I like that it's touching on broader world conflicts, but the Skrull infiltration, both in their numbers and positions, feels like such a retcon to justify their premise instead of building on what came before that the series still feels like a big shoehorn. The writing is still very clunky and obvious, especially in how it's setting up their power-replicating Super Skrull experiments, and even great scenes like the ones with Olivia Coleman and Don Cheadle are carried more by their performances than the material. Sam Jackson just continues to feel off, even in the scene where they de-age him. It's the constant pauses during his lines that feels strained and reaction timing that doesn't gel, that legit has me worried for the actor's health. I'm also not sold on Gravik as a compelling villain, because he's so openly cruel and ruthless that he completely lacks any nuance to give his cause consideration, even as this episode touches on issues with integration, how immigrants are expected to bury their real identity to adopt one deemed locally acceptable. The reveal that Fury has a Skrull wife is interesting, but I'm already confused how them having an established home on Earth ties to him spending years locked away on a space station, but we'll see.