The Marvels cheat sheet: What you need to know—and what you don't

When The Marvels premieres on November 11, it will be the 33rd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At this point, the canon timeline is a mess, and it doesn’t help that several new MCU TV series on Disney+ have muddied the water even further. MCU projects have always built on lore established in earlier films and shows, but when you’re dealing with a franchise this big, it gets a little hard to keep everything straight—and that’s if you’re even inclined to watch every piece of new Marvel media, which is becoming more and more of a chore with each passing film or TV show.

Case in point: the Disney+ series Secret Invasion. It takes place right before The Marvels in the MCU timeline, so it probably has some pretty important context for the film, but the show wasn’t well-received by fans or critics. It’s not hard to imagine that many people who show up for The Marvels won’t have seen Secret Invasion, whether that’s due to a lack of interest, bad word of mouth, or simply a lack of time to consume everything the MCU has to offer. And, honestly, you’re better off skipping Secret Invasion anyway: it’s pretty boring and mostly inconsequential … except for a few things that help establish the state of the world in The Marvels. So if you’d rather save the six hours it would take to consume what amounts to “Nick Fury makes a bad decision and the Skrulls are rightfully angry at him,” here’s a quick guide to everything that happened in Secret Invasion, and why it will be important going into The Marvels.

Give me a quick and dirty summary of Secret Invasion

At the end of Captain Marvel, which took place in 1995, Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), took off into space to find the Skrulls a new home. In Secret Invasion, we learn that Nick Fury brought some of the Skrull refugees to Earth. Fury offered protection and continued dedication to finding them a permanent home if they would help him with super-secret S.H.I.E.L.D. spy stuff. (The Skrulls, after all, are shapeshifters who can take the form of anyone they’ve ever seen.)

The Skrulls agreed and continued living and working on Earth for the next 20 years while Fury just … never found them a home. After two years, he and Captain Marvel realized there weren’t any suitable places for the Skrulls to live, but Fury kept that information to himself, apparently hoping the problem would eventually go away. It did not, and, shockingly, his unfulfilled promise caused a rift in the Skrull population. Secret Invasion is ostensibly about Fury trying to suppress the Skrull rebels who want to kill all humans and take over Earth as their new home, but it mostly functions as an info dump about Fury’s mind-bogglingly bad decision. It’s Scott’s Tots but with an entire race displaced instead of just a few kids who won’t have any money to go to college.

Uh-huh. And what does that have to do with The Marvels?

At the end of Secret Invasion, Fury learns that the Kree are open to peace talks with the Skrulls. Very magnanimous of them, considering they’re the ones who originally tried to subjugate the Skrulls and destroyed their home planet in the process. Fury and his wife (who is a Skrull and to whom Fury has been married for more than 20 years) head back to the S.A.B.E.R. space station, ostensibly to help negotiate the peace talks. So that’s where Fury is at the beginning of The Marvels: on the S.A.B.E.R. station, trying to finally fulfill his promise to the Skrulls.

You told me that long-winded story about Fury and the Skrulls just to establish that Fury is in space at the beginning of The Marvels?

He was also in space at the beginning of Secret Invasion before Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) and Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) called him back to Earth to deal with the Skrull uprising. So basically, Secret Invasion was pointless, except in establishing that Fury is kind of an asshole and killing off Hill and Talos.

Excuse me, Secret Invasion did what?

Yeah. It sucked.

So The Marvels is going to be about Carol and Fury finally stepping up for the Skrulls and dealing with the Kree to find them a new home, right?

Nah, those peace talks were probably just a trap to lure Captain Marvel out so the film’s main villain, a Kree warrior named Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) who blames Carol for a Kree uprising, can draw her into a fight. That’s just a guess, but, considering the official synopsis from Marvel only mentions Carol, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and Kamala Khan, a.k.a. Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) saving the world from a Kree threat, the Skrulls are probably going to get shafted again.

Secret Invasion really was pointless, huh?

Yeah, it was. Also, the Skrulls are no longer welcome on Earth, as U.S. President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney) has declared all off-world species enemy combatants and emboldened the public to exact vigilante justice upon them. The show has no explanation about what this means for the citizens of New Asgard.

Tell me something good, at least

Goose, the adorable Flerken who blinded Fury in his left eye, is back in The Marvels. There’s an excellent shot of him devouring a couple of baddies in the trailer. And hey, maybe we’re wrong about The Marvels and its implications for the Skrulls. Maybe they won’t get forgotten again. Maybe there actually was a point to Secret Invasion, other than establishing that state-sanctioned genocide against aliens is now a thing on Earth. It’s not likely, but then again, Marvel wouldn’t have just built up all this Skrull lore in Secret Invasion for nothing, right? Actually, on second thought—don’t answer that.