Secret Invasion recap: Did you get what you wanted from this life?

And thus, the old “everybody calls me Fury, not Nicholas, not Joseph, not Nick” rule of Skrull identification maintains its (more or less) perfect record, with this episode of Secret Invasion confirming what particularly paranoid viewers have suspected for a couple of episodes now: Don Cheadle’s James “Rhodey” Rhodes is a Skrull. How long has he been a Skrull? Is the real Rhodey still alive? We have no idea, and Secret Invasion has no interest in answering any questions… at least not in this episode.

What we do know is that Rhodey Skrull is the one who contacted Priscilla Fury in the last episode, because he meets with her at a church here to give her some new orders: kill your husband. It’s fun seeing Cheadle go full mustache-twirly in this episode, though it doesn’t really escalate until later, and—if nothing else—it’s nice that Secret Invasion is giving some underrepresented MCU actors opportunities to stretch their muscles a bit beyond what the movies let them do.

Unfortunately for Rhodey and Priscilla, Fury has bugged… something (weird that they didn’t explain it after all the hullaballoo with the owl, unless I missed it) and has been listening in on their conversation. That means he knows Rhodey is a Skrull and that his wife has been ordered to kill him, even though she tries to get out of it by reminding Rhodey that Fury has lost his edge and will probably just die on his own soon enough (as you may recall from every previous episode of this show).

Meanwhile, we see in some quick flashbacks that G’iah used the Super Skrull machine on herself before being shot, so she recovers from last week’s seemingly lethal injury with the help of Iron Man 3’s Extremis tech. She and Talos later have a conversation on what appears to be a legally distinct version of the Avengers: Endgame bench, with G’iah refusing to turn her back on the fight and pleading with her father to tell her what his plan is, because Gravik actually has a plan and it’s probably going to work.

And, unfortunately for her and for him, Talos’ plan sucks shit: He and Fury will single-handedly stop Gravik and the Skrull rebellion somehow, then they’ll go to President Dermot Mulroney to ask for a prize, at which point he will graciously allow all one million Skrull refugees to remain on Earth—disguised as humans—forever. Talos figures that if the Skrulls keep doing nice things, humanity will accept that they’re nice. G’iah rightly tells him this is stupid and storms off.

Back at the Fury household, Priscilla comes home to find Fury making tea and acting kind of weird. He tells her that she was the biggest mistake of his life, but even knowing that, he probably wouldn’t have done anything differently. It’s sad and sweet, especially because he knows she’s there to kill him. The two talk through their relationship a bit, revealing (to the audience at least) that their whole marriage was a scheme for her to get close to him, and together they recite her favorite poem, Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment,” before pulling out their respective guns and firing.

They both miss on purpose, with Fury joking that he doesn’t know if that means they should get a divorce or renew their vows, and before he leaves—warning her that Gravik will come after her now—Priscilla asks Fury if he still would’ve loved her if she had been “her true self.” Fury says “I guess we’ll never know.” Samuel L. Jackson plays it very nice, though the moment does feel a bit rushed. We’ve only just met Priscilla, but clearly she means the world to Fury, a character we obviously love if we’re watching this thing, and it would’ve been nice to sit in his devastation a bit.

Fury, newly single and ready to party, grabs a $5,000 bottle of Pappy Van Winkle and meets up with Rhodey at his hotel room claiming he wants to settle their beef. Rhodey, freshly showered, doesn’t really buy it, especially when Fury starts telling him that Skrulls have infiltrated the U.S. government and that there’s even one with a close relationship to President Mulroney (I don’t care what the character’s real name is, even though I know it’s Ritson). Rhodey, lulled into a false sense of security by the knowledge that Fury has lost his edge (as you may recall from every previous episode of this show), laughs it off and threatens to release security camera footage of Gravik shooting Maria Hill while disguised as Fury if the real Fury doesn’t drop his conspiracy theories. Rhodey then chugs the rest of the bourbon as Fury leaves, revealing to Talos in a car outside that it contained a “liquid motion tracker.”

Talos and Fury tail Rhodey to a meeting with President Mulroney (who smells the booze on Rhodey’s breath, which is a nice little detail), who is getting ready for some kind of big conference with the Russians about the terrorist attack in the premiere. But, on the way, Rhodey calls in Gravik’s goons and they attack the president’s convoy, making a point to yell a bunch of things in Russian so any survivors will think it was a Russian attack.

I thought this shootout was well-staged, with the various helicopter crashes all seeming like a tangible part of the action and not just obvious CG stuff, though it felt a little weird to see such a protracted gun battle in an MCU thing. Anyway, Fury and Talos show up with some soldiers and save President Mulroney, but Gravik sneaks in close and stabs Talos as Fury tries to escape. Unless he also used the Super Skrull machine at some point when we weren’t looking, that might be it for Ben Mendelsohn and Talos, which should hit harder than I think it does.

Maybe it’s because this is turning into a show where not much happens for 2/3 of the runtime and then someone gets killed or we find out that someone has a secret wife (the two ways a Secret Invasion episode can end), which is beginning to seem a bit rote since we have no real sense of how Fury intends to save the world. He’s just kind of drifting through each episode, doing his best, which is fine because Jackson is always compelling in every role, but I’d like to get some real meat at some point.

Stray Observations

• I am, again, dropping the episode a full letter grade over the A.I. intro. I think artificial intelligence is a plague that must be eradicated immediately if we value art and culture at all, because even if something like this didn’t (or isn’t meant to) “replace” the work done by a human, it’s only a matter of time before the option to do that becomes more and more enticing to greedy executives who hate the thing that makes them rich. I continue to be appalled that this company, by which I mean Disney, would ever insist on using a technology that is so inherently toxic to the very work that it produces, and I can only hope that sanity eventually prevails in the face of this stupid, stupid snake oil tech fad.
• So when did Rhodey become a Skrull? His last appearance before this was in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, where I believe he was already working in some high-level government position. Before that he was shooting Thanos’ army while a raccoon was riding on his back. It would be cool and crazy if we find out that the switch happened a long time ago, but I don’t think that will happen. As it stands, though, I have a hard time really caring about this without knowing when he was replaced (just like with Martin Freeman in the premiere).
• This was a weirdly short episode, coming in a full 20 minutes under the nearly hour-long second episode. I wonder if something was cut? There’s a lot of stuff here about Russia and the U.S. potentially going to war, and we never do see any Russians. Marvel will probably never admit it if something was cut, like the rumors about a virus storyline being removed from TFATWS, but it is a bit odd.
• And did you get what
  you wanted from this life, even so?
  I did.
  And what did you want?
  To call myself beloved, to feel myself
  beloved on the earth.