This discussion and review contains spoilers for Secret Invasion episode 6, “Home,” the series finale, on Disney+.
Before diving into “Home,” the season finale of Secret Invasion, it is worth pausing to consider the show as a whole. This is a television show budgeted at $212 million, meaning that each individual episode cost on average more than $35 million. To put this in perspective, this is more than twice as much as each of the final six episodes of Game of Thrones and a full $15 million more per episode than House of the Dragon. That is a lot of money.
More than that, it stars Samuel L. Jackson, one of America’s greatest movie stars, who has been at the heart of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) since its launch. Its regular cast includes Oscar winner Olivia Colman, Game of Thrones Emmy nominee Emilia Clarke, and Oscar nominee Don Cheadle, along with promising up-and-comer Kingsley Ben-Adir and respected industry veteran Dermot Mulroney. This should be a cultural event.
However, Secret Invasion has petered out into a whimper. The show has had no real cultural impact. Obviously, ratings for streaming services are opaque — that’s one of the central issues in the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes. However, what metrics exist are not great. Nielsen reported that, in its debut week, Secret Invasion was outperformed by The Bear and Black Mirror. This isn’t a perfect like-with-like comparison — The Bear and Black Mirror had more episodes — but again, it isn’t great.
Perhaps the most honest assessment of the show’s performance can be derived from statements Disney has made while it was on the air. In mid-July, Disney CEO Bob Iger signaled the company would pull back on the volume of content it was producing, particularly for Marvel. “(Marvel) had not been in the television business at any significant level, and not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of TV series,” he stated. “Frankly, it diluted focus and attention.”
This is depressing. Marvel Studios is one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. The MCU is the most successful cinematic franchise in history. The company has unlimited resources. Coming off the successes of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, it had the unwavering brand loyalty of both mass audiences and hardcore fans. The studio was in a position, just four years ago, where it could do no wrong.
So it is particularly frustrating that all of that potential, power, and influence leads to something like Secret Invasion in general and “Home” in particular. This is 30-odd minutes of “content” that will ultimately be forgotten in weeks or months, if it hasn’t already slipped from the minds of its winnowing audience by the time the credits have been minimized and the algorithm has recommended the next thing to fill a few more waking minutes so as to retain subscribers.
Watching “Home,” one wonders what could possibly be gained by picking through the episode’s entrails. In many ways, this is the obligatory final episode of a Marvel Studios miniseries. There is a big computer-generated superhero throwdown that borders on visual incoherence. There are a host of teases for future Marvel projects. There are reassurances that supporting characters like Rhodey (Don Cheadle) and Ross (Martin Freeman) are not really dead. There are monologues and montages.
None of it actually means anything, of course. It’s all the familiar sleight of hand. It’s a company moving some intellectual property around the board, with the understanding that nothing that happens in this story can have any meaningful impact on any of the potential four-quadrant hits that it has in the cinematic pipeline. It’s loosely arranged in the shape of a story, but it’s ultimately just an intellectual property storing house.
The emotional centerpiece of “Home” is a conversation between Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir). This should be the heart of Secret Invasion, the story of a failed father confronting the radicalized surrogate son that he alienated, dealing with the consequences of his actions. Jackson and Ben-Adir are both great actors, and the idea of having the two stand on a set as their characters work through their dysfunctional relationship should make for compelling drama.
After all, Secret Invasion has pointedly withheld this moment from audiences. Fury is back on Earth specifically to deal with Gravik because he feels responsible. The two have faced off in the midst of action scenes in episodes like “Resurrection” and “Beloved” but have never really gone head-to-head. In contrast, most of Gravik’s big dialogue scenes have been with G’iah (Emilia Clarke) and Talos (Ben Mendelsohn). So, logically, Secret Invasion has been building to this argument.
Except, of course, it’s not really Fury arguing with Gravik. It turns out that it’s G’iah pretending to be Fury. What should be the story’s big moment of emotional catharsis becomes a cheap fake-out that leads directly into a superpowered throwdown brawl through an empty and abandoned nuclear reactor, one of the worst examples of those sorts of computer-generated wastelands that populate so many blockbuster third acts. As such, none of that scene with Fury and Gravik means anything.
This is to say nothing of the episode’s non-resolution of the core plot. In the wake of Gravik’s plot, President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney) announces “a bill that designates all off-world born species enemy combatants.” He warns the Skrulls, “We know who you are. We know how to find you. And we will kill every last one of you.” This is horrifying. The president of the United States has basically announced a literal genocide, an ethnic cleansing.
To be fair, Fury acknowledges the horror of Ritson’s decision, cut against a montage of imagery that evokes the iconography of January 6. Heavily armed militia members storm offices and press conferences to enact violence against the leaders that they feel have betrayed them. It is striking and provocative, perhaps hinting that the visual language of these superhero stories might finally have moved past the iconography of the War on Terror.
However, it is also crass and vulgar. In the end, Secret Invasion doesn’t just return to the most conspiratorial and xenophobic subtext of the Skrulls that Captain Marvel rejected, but it pushes further. Militia members storm into a television studio and execute FXN talk show host Chris Stearn (Christopher McDonald) live on air. They kill a few innocent humans along the way, but it doesn’t matter. Their political enemies are truly inhuman monsters.
Of course, Fury is horrified by this. He tells Ritson as much. However, he also doesn’t do anything. More than that, none of the superheroes on the planet seem to do anything. Ritson has ordered the eradication of an entire people, which would conceivably put him on par with Ronan (Lee Pace) from Guardians of the Galaxy or Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) from Captain Marvel. Fury has stood up to authority before, in both The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but he doesn’t here.
There’s a depressing cynicism to all of this, which recalls the facile “bothsidesism” of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which suggests a moral equivalence between dispossessed refugees and the people oppressing them. This is a show that is so actively hostile to the notion of having a point of view that its reaction to an attempted genocide by the president of the United States is a sternly worded monologue from a character who then leaves the planet.
Most cynically, Secret Invasion suggests that its actual resolution comes entirely off-screen. Preparing to abandon Earth yet again, Fury tells Varra (Charlayne Woodard) that “the Kree said they are open to peace talks with the Skrulls.” He assures her, “It’s a good thing.” This “peace summit” comes out of nowhere. The Kree haven’t even appeared in Secret Invasion. It is an ending that paves the way for the Skrulls to leave Earth, without actually confronting the horror of humanity’s attempted genocide.
It’s hard to be disappointed with the crass hollowness of all this. It is not like Secret Invasion is the first of these miniseries to end in such a pointedly empty manner. This has been a problem with these shows dating back to WandaVision. It is a problem that extends beyond the Marvel content, also playing out with Willow. This is just how these shows work. With each passing release, Andor seems more and more like a miracle.
However, what is truly surprising about “Home” is the sense of deterioration even beyond the inescapable logic of diminishing returns. “Home” has the same core issues as the finales of shows like WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki, but it is also decidedly shoddier. It just looks worse. This is most obvious in the episode’s finale, which was likely heavily reshot against green screen. Couldn’t the production team find a real forest clearing for Samuel L. Jackson?
In the end, the most damning thing about Secret Invasion isn’t that the six-episode miniseries will soon be forgotten. It is that this outcome would be a blessing for both the show and its audience.
Published: Jul 26, 2023 10:40 am