The Marvels' cosmic connections: Who's the new villain and why does she hate Captain Marvel?

While Marvel Studios has been keeping plenty under wraps about the Captain Marvel sequel The Marvels, there are a few things we either know or can anticipate about the film. For instance, fans have already met the three heroes who are teaming up for this story: Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani). If you need a refresher on what you need to know (and don’t need to know) before seeing the movie, check out our useful cheat sheet.

But when it comes to The Marvels’ main antagonist, a Kree leader named Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), at this point we can only speculate as to why she’s targeting Carol and her allies. We also know that the Kree call Carol “The Annihilator,” a name she hates. What exactly, though, did she do to earn it?

At the end of Captain Marvel, Carol sent a message to the Supreme Intelligence via Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) that she was coming to get revenge on the Kree for stealing her life, suppressing her powers, and gaslighting her over it for years. That was back in 1995, and Carol has had plenty of time to make good on those plans since then. If she followed through, that could be where the Annihilator nickname comes from, and why Dar-Benn has a vendetta against her. “You took everything from me,” she tells Carol in the trailer. “Now I’m returning the favor.”

Carol Danvers and the Kree

Though the Kree have been a part of Marvel Comics since the late 1960s, they technically made their live-action debut in ABC’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. A chemical found in the blood of a dead Kree who had crashed on Earth proved to be the key to bringing Phil Coulson back to life after he was killed in The Avengers, and the series utilized the Kree race several times during its run, including in an arc set in a future in which the Earth has been destroyed and the remaining population are enslaved under a despotic Kree ruler. Ironically, we saw Agent Coulson’s first encounter with the Kree in Captain Marvel. At the time he didn’t know the impact they’d later have on his future, but fans did.

Whether you consider Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to be canon or not, the depiction of the Kree as a warlike race of conquerors is true to their comic origins. They’re also known for biological experimentation, and created the Inhumans by mixing ancient human and Kree DNA. Carol also became the subject of Kree experiments following the explosion of the Tesseract-powered engine that gave her the ability to harness cosmic energy. The Supreme Intelligence, the AI that controls the Kree empire, saw her as a threat and did everything it could to neutralize her.

It’s also worth noting that the center of Kree civilization is their home planet Hala, located in an area of space known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. Carol knows her way around this part of the galaxy from her time as a member of Starforce, an elite task force of Kree soldiers. We don’t know what she’s been doing all this time in space, but it’s a pretty safe bet that she’s been hanging out in her old neighborhood and stirring up trouble with her former comrades-in-arms.

Dar-Benn’s comic book origins

Which brings us to Dar-Benn, the film’s main antagonist. According to the official description, the version of Dar-Benn we’ll meet in The Marvels is “a warrior-scientist turned politician who is hellbent on saving the Kree home planet of Hala and exalting her people to their rightful place in the universe.” But that doesn’t quite explain her history with Carol and why she hates her so much. For the answers to those questions, we can look for clues in the trailers and the other marketing materials released so far, as well as the pages of Marvel Comics.

Dar-Benn appears in the comics, but in a very different form than the one we’re getting in The Marvels. Like Mar-Vell (played by Annette Bening in Captain Marvel) the character was originally male, but the MCU version is female. Dar-Benn was first introduced in an issue of Silver Surfer back in 1991. The one-shot storyline concerns the assassination of the Kree’s inept puppet emperor named—and we are not making this up—Clumsy Foulup. Dar-Benn plots with another general, Ael-Dan, to kill him and blame it on the Skrulls. Their plan works, and Dar-Benn and Ael-Dan take over ruling the Kree empire as joint leaders, a power-sharing agreement symbolizing unity between the factions of the pink Kree (the ones who look like humans, like Jude Law’s Yon-Rogg in the previous Captain Marvel) and blue Kree (like Lee Pace’s Ronan the Accuser).

Dar-Benn turns up again later in the crossover storyline Operation Galactic Storm. The Kree Super Intelligence manipulates the leaders of the Kree, Skrull, and Shi’Ar empires (we haven’t met them yet in the MCU) into declaring war on each other. At the center of the conflict is an arms race toward the creation of a massive weapon called a Nega Bomb. It all sounds very comic book-y, but one element in this story could have a connection to The Marvels. Among the components required to construct the weapon are a pair of powerful cuffs called Nega Bands. When the original Mar-Vell gets a hold of them in the comics, they allow him to switch places with human Rick Jones when he becomes Captain Marvel. Sound familiar?

Ms. Marvel originally got her powers from a bangle that her great-grandmother found on the arm of a deceased, blue-skinned alien (whom we can assume to be Kree) in some ruins in India. Based on what we’ve seen in the trailers for The Marvels, the other bangle will be showing up in the film in the custody of Dar-Benn. Perhaps that has something to do with the reason Kamala, Carol, and Monica start trading places whenever they use their powers at the same time.

How all of this ties into the MCU

Dar-Benn’s gender isn’t the only thing getting overhauled for the character’s MCU debut. In addition to the bangle that matches Kamala’s, we’ve seen her wielding a weapon similar to the one carried by Ronan in Guardians Of The Galaxy. In the comics, it’s called a Cosmi-Rod, also known as a Kree warhammer. It’s typically carried by the Accusers, a militaristic faction of Kree warriors who take themselves way too seriously. From this, we can gather that Dar-Benn was once part of their ranks, but it appears that she holds a higher leadership position among the Kree now.

At the end of the Disney+ series Secret Invasion, Nick Fury is called back up to space to negotiate a peace treaty between the Kree and the shapeshifting Skrulls, who have been at war for decades by this point. This would seem to indicate that the Kree, who started the war in the first place, are in such a bad way they have no choice but to negotiate with the race that they once tried to subjugate and then destroy. Meanwhile, many of the Skrulls have come to Earth and are hiding as humans while they wait for Fury to fulfill his promise of finding them a home. It’s already been 28 years, so they’re getting rightfully impatient, and some are even militant. There are other factions of Skrulls out there as well, including a colony ruled by Emperor Dro’ge, a comics character who gets name-checked in Secret Invasion.

Because Carol sided with the Skrulls against the Kree after forming an alliance with Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) in Captain Marvel, that planet of refuge may become a stop on Dar-Benn’s vengeance tour. In the trailer, Carol says that Dar-Benn is targeting every world that she cares about. So whatever she did to piss her off, it must have been world-shattering.