Main cast: Samuel L Jackson (Nick Fury), Ben Mendelsohn (Talos), Kingsley Ben-Adir (Gravik), Charlayne Woodard (Priscilla), Killian Scott (Pagon), Samuel Adewunmi (Beto), Christopher McDonald (Chris Stearns), Katie Finneran (Rosa), Emilia Clarke (G’iah), Olivia Colman (Sonya Falsworth), and Don Cheadle (James Rhodes/War Machine)
Director: Ali Selim
Betrayed refers to the people around Nick Fury, no doubt, as this episode sees Priscilla joining in on calling the guy out on heading off to space and leaving them to fend for their own.
Mind you, it sure looks like Nick has seemingly broken his vows to so many people, and now they are practically queuing up to go “REEEEE!!!” at him.
Under any other circumstances, Secret Invasion may offer an intriguing character study of sorts, but sadly, this is a present day MCU product, cobbled together by diversity hires with zero qualification or prior experience in spearheading a supposedly top tier A-list show.
The end result is tantamount of people acting like they are on Twitter, piling on the person they intend to cancel and raging without any subtlety. It is possible to express betrayal and hurt in nuanced manners on film, but the people behind this one clearly have no idea how people react aside from nagging and scolding while using phraseology and terms that seem like they were scraped together by an AI that used Twitter posts as its source.
In the meantime, everyone talks and walks slowly, when they are not staring moodily at one another or into the distance. The show is like a three-episode wonder stretched out to six by moving in the pace of a snail.
Oh, and the title of the episode also is about more people around Nick that may be Skrulls in disguise or just plain mean traitors in action. It also is about Gravik getting suspicious about G’iah maybe being a mole in his organization that is sabotaging things on behalf of her father.
With all this going on, there’s no reason why this episode isn’t action-packed and suspenseful, but yikes. Everyone talks and walks slowly, when they are not staring moodily at one another or into the distance. The show is like a three-episode wonder stretched out to six by moving in the pace of a snail.
Also, I can’t recall why Nick was away in space. My last recollection was that he was having a vacation in some space station with the Skrulls. Did he have that long of a break or am I missing something here? I can’t feel anything for this guy when this show feels like a jigsaw puzzle with the main pieces missing.
Another thing: why haven’t anyone worked on a device or method to tell apart disguised Skrulls from humans after all these decades? Am I supposed to buy that SHIELD and all these secret service people just buy wholesale that the Skrulls are uniformly awesome people?
The whole show is shaping up to be some slow-motion bore created and made by people that have little sense of pacing, tension, build-up, or suspense. It’s all talk, talk, talk, and then someone starts shooting for a second or two to wake up members of the audience that are this close to dozing off.
This show has three more episodes to change my mind, but yeah, I’m not keeping my hopes up. Maybe by keeping my expectations low, I may be pleasantly surprised. Am I ever the optimist!
