Prepare for Marvel’s Secret Invasion!

In the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was Robert Downey, Jr.’s Iron Man—but in a more accurate sense, in the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury. It was Jackson’s post-credits cameo as Fury in 2008’s Iron Man, after all, that heralded the idea of a complex, intertwined series of stories starring Marvel Comics characters that would ultimately become a license to print money. 

Yet despite being the glue that started connecting the Avengers, Nick Fury himself has not gotten a chance to be at the center of his own story—until the new Disney+ series Secret Invasion.  And as it turns out, the character who launched the Marvel Universe gets his first headliner adventure in a story that feels hampered by the 15-year accumulation of plot points in that universe.

Most directly, Secret Invasion follows up on the events in Captain Marvel, the 1990s-set story where we learned about the existence of the shape-shifting Skrull race, wandering the universe after losing their home planet during a long war with their enemies, the Kree. It was then that Nick Fury met a Skrull named Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), who re-emerges here to let Fury know that all is not well among the Skrull-in-exile. A disgruntled Skrull named Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir), angry over Fury’s failure to keep a promise to find the Skrull a new planet to call home, has founded a refugee colony for his people, while also implementing a plan to use their shape-shifting abilities for destabilizing terrorist violence, and perhaps even get humanity to exterminate itself.

In the first two episodes available for preview, the vibe showrunner Kyle Bradstreet and director Ali Selim are aiming for feels closest to that of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as a kind of ground-level political conspiracy thriller. That means a lot more talking than action, although plenty of that talking is satisfying stuff. Jackson and Don Cheadle—on hand as Rhodey, not in Iron Patriot armor—get a terrifically acted scene winding their long friendship through issues of race and politics, addressing material the MCU hasn’t typically been willing to dive into. Olivia Colman also gets to make a meal out of her every on-screen moment as an off-the-books government operative who seems to take particular glee in applying torture to get the information she needs. There’s a great cast here, and they get more to work with as actors than is the case with a lot of comic-book fare.

But MCU material can never ever stop reminding us of its place as part of the bigger narrative, and that’s where Secret Invasion starts to feel frustrating. I’m sure there are people like me who have watched every minute of every movie and series, and somehow retained all the information about when and why Nick Fury sequestered himself away on the S.W.O.R.D. space station, but the show makes a lot of assumptions about a viewer’s knowledge as the foundation for both Fury’s character arc and the motivations of his antagonists. There’s a subplot involving the death of Talos’s wife—previously seen, among other places, imitating Maria Hill (Colbie Smulders) in a Spider-Man post-credits sequence—that seemed to be something not actually shown in a previous movie, but for the life of me, I couldn’t be sure. Secret Invasion dives into a bunch of stuff about why its characters are haunted or angry at one another, and all of it depends on you knowing where they all fit into stories you may or may not have seen or recalled a few years later.

At one point in the second episode, after an apparent setback, Fury confidently growls, “I’m Nick Fury; even when I’m out, I’m in.” There are some assumptions built into that announcement—that we understand his resourcefulness and resilience as a character, in a sense beyond “Samuel L. Jackson is playing him, so he must be a badass.” The problem is that our previous knowledge of Fury has been sprinkled throughout a dozen other stories involving dozens of other characters. Secret Invasion ends its second episode with a promise that we’ll be seeing plenty of sides of Fury as a character that we’ve never seen before, and it’s great to see Jackson finally getting that opportunity. The challenge here isn’t so much the prospect of what we don’t yet know but the assumptions about what we already know. The longer the MCU experiment continues, the more its entries can start to feel like a test where you suddenly realize you haven’t studied long enough.

Marvel Secret Invasion Trailer

Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson, discovers that a shape-shifting alien race plans to make Earth their new home.  

Let’s Hear From You

Secret Invasion is spinning your way June 21st on Disney+. Will this make your watchlist? Let’s hear from you.