Secret Invasion recap: Nick Fury has a bad day, and the Skrull plan takes shape

In last week’s premiere episode, Secret Invasion repeatedly insisted that something is different about Nick Fury. Various characters made a point to say that he’s lost his edge, that he doesn’t seem nearly as with it as he used to be. Before her death, Maria Hill noted that he was always three steps ahead of everyone, and now he’s not. I thought the show pushed that too hard, because he seemed like the same old Nick Fury to me and pretending to lose his edge seemed like exactly the sort of thing Nick Fury would do. But this episode makes a stronger case for the argument that Fury’s not doing so hot.

And, perhaps to really underline that, this episode began a Captain Marvel-style jump back to the ’90s for a scene where young Nick Fury talks to a small group of refugee Skrulls with Talos about his plan to find them a new homeworld with the help of Captain Marvel herself. Among those Skrulls is an angry young man named Gravik whose family was killed by the Kree and who had to escape the destruction of the Skrulls’ original homeworld all alone.

Young Fury says that, while he tries to find them a planet, he needs them to pose as humans and help him protect this world. Talos makes a big show about how much he trusts Fury, and Fury seals his future fate by telling the Skrulls—and Gravik—“You keep your word, I’ll keep mine.”

Jumping back to the present day, we see how that’s going: Gravik and the Skrull rebels, mad at Fury for breaking his promise, have just bombed Moscow. More than 2,000 are now dead, and one of the bombers—who we know is a Skrull named Brogan—keeps shouting “I’m an American” as he’s arrested. Uh oh!

Talos sneaks Fury away, and the two board a train out of Russia, hiding from the cops as they do it (who suspect that Fury was involved in the bombing). On the train, Fury tells Talos about the long train rides he and his mom would take and how they weren’t allowed in the dining car (because they’re Black) so they’d bring their own food and play games to pass the time. His mom’s favorite game was called “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,” and it was an obvious trick to suss out his secrets. So Fury decides to play it with Talos and says “tell me something I don’t know about the destruction of Skrullos.” Talos says the Kree wiped out everyone but one million Skrulls. Fury says “tell me something I don’t know about the Skrulls that fled” and Talos reveals that they’re all on Earth. One million Skrulls on Earth and Fury didn’t know.

So he’s mad about that. Talos says he couldn’t tell him because Fury ran off to space as soon as he was un-Snapped, but he believes humans and Skrulls can someday learn to coexist. Fury goes off on him, reminding him that humans can’t even coexist with each other. Later, in London, Fury looks on while Maria Hill’s casket is loaded onto a plane. Her mother is there, making this (I think) the first time we’ve ever learned anything about Maria Hill’s private life. Elizabeth Hill yells at Fury and makes him tell her the real reason her daughter was killed, because the government won’t say. She gets some good lines in, telling Fury that her daughter believed in him, saying, “She would’ve followed you to the gates of hell and back.” She tells him not to make Hill’s death be “for nothing.”

Her reference to the government not telling the truth about the Moscow bombing tees up a montage of news segments, with one saying that Russia intends to retaliate against the U.S., another saying that NATO won’t commit to anything and wants to investigate, and one from a Fox News-type (played by Christopher McDonald!) who says the attack was a “false flag operation.” I generally hate when fake news segments do a Fox News thing, because fuck Fox News, but there’s pretty quickly a cute little payoff to this: A bunch of these news people are Skrulls! The NATO boss, the Fox News guy, the British Prime Minister, they’re all members of the Skrull council (made up of the Skrulls that Fury gave his speech to in the ’90s), and they want to talk to Gravik.

He’s in trouble for bombing Russia, but he’s like “no, screw you guys and screw Nick Fury.” He says humanity is going to wipe itself out eventually, why not just nudge them along and take this planet that they don’t value anyway? The British Prime Minister is already on his side and moves to have him put in charge of all Skrulls as their new general, and he’s like “cool, yeah” and a goon intimidates the other council members—except one—into agreeing.

Meanwhile, in human(?) drama, the EU nations have called on the U.S. to address its potential involvement in the bombing, but President Dermot Mulroney (his name is Ritson, I guess) sends Don Cheadle’s James Rhodes in his place. Rhodey does his best Tony Stark impression, shrugging off all of their accusations, but then Nick Fury calls him after the fairly tense hearing and he agrees to meet up. Rhodey, away from the various heads of state, reveals that he’s actually pissed at Fury for being there at the bombing and wants to hand him over to the Russians.

By the way, Jackson is really on something this episode. He gives Rhodey a very Nick Fury talk about how he shouldn’t trust any of the people around him, but Rhodey doesn’t think the Skrulls are really a threat. Fury tells him that not only are they a threat, but they’ve already invaded, secretly. Rhodey suggests calling on “our friends,” but Fury says no, then the Skrulls will just replace the Avengers and make things worse. Fury they goes on a tear about how Black people like them had to fight for power so that “mediocre men who don’t look like us” can’t rule the world. He even mentions Alexander Pierce, Robert Redford’s character from The Winter Soldier, which is the kind of nice little lore acknowledgement that I don’t think MCU stories do often enough. We know who Alexander Pierce is and why he made it harder for Fury to trust anyone, so the characters should know that too!

Anyway, Rhodey doesn’t buy it. He also thinks Fury is washed up and fires him from whatever his job was, so Fury takes his security guy’s gun and breaks his arm, just for show, before leaving. But—at the risk of saying something that I thought was dumb earlier—it seems like Fury really has changed: He seems to be having trouble breathing and has to take a break on a bench, at which point he holds his head in his hands. Has he lost his edge? What’s up with him?!

Olivia Colman’s Sonya, who I’m no longer sure is either MI6 or a Skrull (but I made my bet last week and I’ll stick to it), finds where some Russian goons are torturing Brogan, hands them a phone and has the person on the other end tell them to back off, and then takes over the torturing herself. She cuts off one of his fingers, which turns green (proving he’s a Skrull), and then injects him with something that makes his blood boil (literally). As he’s screaming in pain, he reveals that Gravik has some kind of lab run by a married couple called Dalton that will make the Skrulls “stronger.”

Meanwhile, G’iah is snooping and finds some records on that lab’s experiments on a computer and uncovers data on Groot, a Frost Beast (a Thor-related monster), Cull Obsidian (a member of Thanos’s Black Order), and the Extremis tech created by Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3. I almost don’t want to spoil what that means for anyone who doesn’t follow the comics, but…they’re doing a thing, and they’re doing it in a different way than how the comics did it! I’ll say it down at the bottom, just in case you want me to say it.

Before we get to the shocking ending twist, Gravik saves Brogan and then has him shot after figuring out that he told his torturers something about the Skrull plan. (Sonya escaped before he got there.) And he gives G’iah a very suspicious look while he does all this—as if to say, “This will be you soon, if you side with your dad over me.”

Finally, Fury gets a car out of an old storage thing and drives off to visit a Skrull woman who is cutting vegetables in her kitchen. Fury walks into the house weirdly casually, like he’s been there before, and when he gets to the kitchen the woman has taken human form. But she refuses to greet him. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asks with a playful tone, and he goes over to a nearby table and puts a wedding ring on. “Try A Little Tenderness” plays as the two share a big hug and a big kiss. Nick Fury has a wife and she’s a Skrull! (She’s one of the Skrulls from earlier; he knows she’s a Skrull.)

Stray observations

• Nick Fury has a wife! So many questions. Were there any teases hinting at this? He mentioned having a wife before he fakes his death in Winter Soldier, but that was his phony cover story to explain why he was crashing at Captain America’s house when S.H.I.E.L.D. tried to kill him.
• Talos mentions that the only Skrulls who aren’t living on Earth are part of “Emperor Drogge’s colony.” I think that’s an invention of the MCU and not a thing from the comics, so I’m assuming it’s just some hand-waving to account for any Skrulls who might pop up elsewhere in the MCU.
• Speaking of a Skrull emperor, my current theory is that Sonya is Skrull Queen Veranke, part of some loyalist Skrull faction that doesn’t like the Rebels or Talos’ pacifists. Or hell, maybe she’s a Kree? Or a Skrull who betrayed the other Skrulls to join the Kree?
• So it came out last week along with the premiere that the intro sequence for this show was created with A.I. I thought the intro sequence was weird/trippy before, but now that I know that, I think it sucks and is awful. If the idea was to make it so the viewer doesn’t know what’s “real,” then that doesn’t apply to this show at all. The Skrulls aren’t unfeeling machines; they’re living beings with thoughts! Using A.I. and passing it off as thematically relevant is an insult to viewers and artists, so I will be dropping the grade down a full letter each episode from now on.
• Okay, now I’ll say it: Super-Skrulls! In the comics, Super-Skrulls have mash-up powers of other superheroes, the most famous one being a dude named Kl’rt who has all of the powers of the Fantastic Four. But since they don’t exist in the MCU, it seems like we’ll be getting a Super-Skrull with Groot’s branches, a Frost Beast’s iciness, Cull Obsidian’s strength, and Extremis’ superheated exploding-ness. I love that they’re doing this with other established MCU things and not just saying “we gave you fire powers and stretch powers,” which would be the lazy old pre-MCU comic-book adaptation way of doing things.