Spoilers

Fury makes his move…

This is what failure looks like. Every step of this show is flawed. From collecting a fantastically talented ensemble of actors and then not providing them development, arcs or even coherency to set pieces that felt small and meaningless to a script that was, with the exception of a couple of notable moments, at best perfunctory.

The antagonist was utterly incoherent and charmless despite the presence of the talented Kingsley Ben-Adir. Gravik was angry but he’d also, apparently, built political alliances, out-manoeuvred long standing political operators, infiltrated some of the most powerful institutions on the planet, developed hyper-advanced technology (including the manufacturing and logistics processes needed to build them), charmed the ordinary folk and built a secret lair.

For such a highly accomplished antagonist he was also entirely without strategy, loyalty, common sense and basic intelligence – making decisions that made no sense for reasons that are never explained.

I despaired each time he was faced with a choice because I came to know that Gravik would choose the least effective way forward every single time. Kill loyal followers, suppress questions, dismiss concerns and then entirely ignore your history, your allies and your resources at every critical juncture.

It made watching Gravik painful and pointless.

Not a single other character in the show fared any better. From people’s apparent ability to travel thousands of miles in a matter of minutes, for their ability to pass one another critical McGuffins without ever meeting or to know things they couldn’t possibly know. From a complete lack of bureaucratic infrastructure that is absolutely true for big security apparatuses both in the spy genre as well as in reality.

This show lacked just about every component to make it interesting. We had no real sense of the relationships between Gravik and G’iah, no idea what happened to Talos and, honestly, the ridiculous US hegemonic nonsense at the end where a US president says, without irony, that people should get off ‘my planet’?

This is not just bad – in the end this series is catastrophically bad.

I also cannot see why it turned out this feeble when the source material continues to be perceived as one of the major storylines of Marvel canon.

Were the writers not allowed to really upturn continuity by swapping out actual superheroes for Skrulls?

Was the production hampered by underfunding or a refusal to allow it to run as long as it should?

The challenge here could be as simple as this – you can run a Jason Bourne style story in a couple of hours or a Smiley’s People over a limited series but both of them are small, narrowly focused affairs that dig into people, motivations and the crippling oppression of paranoia and very real threat.

Secret Invasion tried to recreate a major comic book event in a limited series but without any of the big twists from the source material.

Except if that was the only thing wrong with the show we could probably conclude that creative problems were to blame but here the fight scenes made no sense, basic facts were ignored for the sake of plot, and the show simply didn’t know what to do with its central characters.

In some senses this was a vehicle for Nick Fury but he had nothing to work with except occasional moments where we were expected to feel something but where we didn’t actually have any grounding with Fury to actually sympathise.

I really wanted to empathise with his relationship but it never provided a reason for me to believe they were in love and together. Nick’s failure to be a decent partner was never more than an unexpressed problem which was, silently, accepted and largely forgiven without comment. Where was the emotion in all this because it wasn’t on screen.

Verdict: I came into Secret Invasion expectant, not least because of everything it promised – solid cast, exciting story and space in between other series and movies to stand alone.

Instead, it took all those advantages and squandered them. 3/10

Stewart Hotston