I don’t even know where to start right now, man. The ending of Secret Invasion sucked, and truthfully, I’m hard-pressed to want to watch something from them again.
As many of you know, for the last few weeks I’d been reviewing Secret Invasion, and then I stopped. It isn’t the first time I’ve done that. I’m talking about the utter and total mess that is the MCU. I don’t normally get hot and heated like this, but now I’m going to.
I’m not happy with the way Secret Invasion ended. It’s another disappointment in a long line of continuing disappointments. And I love this stuff, okay? If I were to swing the camera around, you’d see my geek wall, which has all of my posters and pictures. There’s Marvel characters, there’s DC characters, a preponderance of Marvel characters, and I love those things. I’m not happy, man.
By the way, this isn’t a review, and I’m going to talk all about it, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you’re going to get spoiled. I have no intention of finishing this thing.
Six Episodes, and It Still Dragged
With Secret Invasion we were getting something different, and I didn’t mind at all. I actually thought it was a good idea. I liked the concept, this whole idea of an espionage spy show. We also got to see more Nick Fury than we’ve ever gotten. I mean, you know, Samuel L. Jackson is 117 years old, but hey, whatever, he’s still kicking, still MF-ing like nobody’s business.
So you say to yourself, okay, we want to make this show really pop, so we’re going to make it six episodes. Now understand something. Back in the day we used to get 22, 24, 26 episode seasons, and you’d always get filler episodes and bottle episodes and bridge episodes and all kinds of nonsense that you didn’t actually need. Then streaming services started giving us less. Here’s 18 episodes, here’s 12, here’s 10, here’s eight, here’s six. So we’re in this moment of six episodes and you feel like, okay, great, you’re going to get something great and wonderful.
And then it just dragged.
I was with them up to last week. I was like, you know what, this is a style, I’m okay with it. It’s less rock ‘em sock ‘em action and much more thoughtful, or purposefully paced, we’ll say. And as it goes forward, little by little by little, you suddenly get to a place where you’re like, what? Okay, what’s going on?
Then this week’s episode. You find out the Super Skrull program isn’t what it’s supposed to be. G’iah fools everyone, Gravik included. Apparently dude freaked out last episode and killed a whole bunch of folks who were turning on him, so he’s holding on to Skrull leadership, he’s the general of the Skrulls, by the bare skin of his teeth, and he’s just wrecking shop. So she shows up pretending to be Nick Fury. Big surprise there, and I knew it wasn’t Nick. She hands him the secret thing, knowing he’s going to use it and won’t kick her out, so she’ll get all these abilities too.
You end up with the Super Skrulls, which should be something exciting, and it was just a letdown. They’re arguably a horrible MacGuffin of a powerful character that has all this stuff.
The Real Secret Invasion Was Sitting Right There
See, the fanboy in me wants to sit here and say no, no, there’s still hope. Because if you know anything about the real Secret Invasion storyline, there’s a lot to hope for.
If you want the whole story, go to Comics Explained. Rob over there put all of his videos together into one giant thing. It’s a really great story and well worth the watch.
The short version is that the Illuminati catch wind that the Kree-Skrull War is spilling over to Earth. The Illuminati, which is Reed Richards, Namor, Black Panther, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Professor Xavier, show up with big balls, go over there and tell off the Skrulls. The Skrulls tell them, you ever show up again, we’ll find a way to end you. The Skrulls do what they do and start dissecting them. And then you find out that for a long time the Skrulls have been impersonating superheroes. They’ve been impersonating people.
That alone should be an amazing premise. Of course, this show just botches it. I mean botches it bad. What you end up with is nothing at all like it. I saw everything coming from a mile away, man. From 200 miles away.
I’m so livid with this ending. Those of you in the Know-It-All Nation know I don’t talk about things I don’t like. But I have to protest this. I do not like what’s happening. Secret Invasion screwed the pooch of an ending, and that’s what’s been happening for a while now.
How the Disney Plus Side Got Here
At the height of it, when the pandemic was starting and things were rolling through, everybody announced they were going to be making some kind of shift, industry-wide, and everybody moved toward their various streaming services. We were all like, oh yeah, it’s going to be great, we’re going to start telling more stories. You had all the issues Marvel had back when Perlmutter was overseeing it, and him and Kevin Feige butting heads, that old classic thing. And then all of a sudden they’re like, hey, here’s the MCU serialized side, the TV side. And you sit there and go, oh wow, this is going to be great.
You start at the beginning, where the serialized side started on Disney Plus, with WandaVision. WandaVision was fun. It was an experiment. It was probably, arguably, the closest to looking like the MCU at that moment. It was an excellent story about trauma, and it set up what I hoped would be more stuff. Everybody speculated about what they thought was going to happen in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and that movie screwed the pooch.
Then you go to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which sets up several things. Obviously it sets up Falcon taking over the mantle, if you will, of Captain America. But it also starts setting up the Thunderbolts. You get U.S. Agent, who comes out of that. I thought The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was really good. It had its holes, it had its issues. I thought it was on par with the Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie, and I thought it sat very well in that universe. That’s where I thought Secret Invasion was going to fit, by the way, in that sort of espionage-y place.
We roll into Black Widow, which, by the way, excellent movie. But at the same time Black Widow ends up screwing everything, because it introduced some other characters and made people want something. The reason it didn’t do better was, why did you give us something cool that no one asked for? There’s no promise here. Well, sure enough, what they promised us was Yelena. Yelena, we know, is going to become the new Black Widow in Thunderbolts and whatever else. We also got the Red Guardian, or whatever the Russian version of Captain America is, played by David Harbour.
Then we got Loki, and Loki was excellent. Loki walked the dog on everything. I thought Loki was really kicking open the door, especially because it literally introduced the multiverse. Not kind of, sort of, as a question. Legit timelines, the TVA, all that good stuff.
Sorry. I’m frustrated, so I’m getting a little derailed.
I liked Hawkeye. It wasn’t the greatest thing in the world, but as an adaptation of the Matt Fraction Hawkeye series, I thought it was really good. The Know-It-All family enjoyed Hawkeye. The show didn’t hit every single episode, but it hit enough that I was like, okay. It was supposed to be setting something up in this Echo thing, and it introduced Kingpin back into the fold, which was the open door we needed to kick down and find out, oh, we’re going to get all the Netflix stuff, we’re going to get Daredevil.
What If…? introduced a whole bunch of really fun things. But a lot of things were being introduced in this phase, and nothing was connecting.
Ms. Marvel was a misstep. My daughter, Baby Know-It-All, said, “I think they were aiming for me, but they fell short, and it feels like it hit a 13-year-old type age group.” That’s from my kid, so I’m not going to argue with her. I didn’t like the show because it wasn’t talking to me. I felt no affinity, no connection to it. It’s like me trying to watch iCarly with my kid. Once in a while we’ll do that, because we used to watch it when she was younger, but I still always feel a little like, this is weird, whatever, this is fine.
She-Hulk was a legal drama without the drama. Without the legal, rather. And then it went off the rails hard, which, by the way, She-Hulk does in the comics. But I felt like this show didn’t know what it wanted to be. She can break the fourth wall all day, fine by me, but the writing was poor.
And that’s the other thing. There’s been a huge quality issue, I’m not going to lie. Bob Iger says they’ve spent too much time going for quantity instead of quality. Fine. So you’re going to go quality now. But mind you, quality is going to cost money, so start paying your artists and your writers and your actors.
Moon Knight was a thing. I enjoyed Moon Knight. I don’t think they effectively used the things they were building, and they didn’t build in enough for me to think, oh, there’s more coming. So to me Moon Knight was a one-off. I don’t know if Oscar Isaac’s coming back. Maybe they announce it, who knows. But Moon Knight is so far away in my rearview mirror that it makes no sense for me to care. Werewolf by Night, loved it. I thought it was great, and I understood going in that it was flat out a one-time thing.
It Should Have Been a Movie
Then you get to Secret Invasion, and they introduce a lot of excellent concepts. Secret Invasion should have been a two-hour movie. You make it a two and a half hour movie, and that’s it, and you’re done.
I may very well do it as an editing exercise. Like I’ve told you guys, I’m a video guy. I edit my own videos. This is all my tech from when I was working in television. I may very well go in and re-edit those six episodes into a movie.
So do me a favor, and this is the first time I’ve done this, because I don’t do it often. If the video gets to 200 likes, which is not a lot, if 200 of you who watch it like it or share it with people and tell them to like it, I’ll take the time out of my life and I’ll do the edit. I’ll find a way to share it with you guys.
Because there are good things in Secret Invasion, and there’s a way you get to them without having a problem. This could have been the thing that made everybody go, you see? Even the intro being AI and people being upset, it got you talking. It got buzz happening. And there are really good nuggets of stuff in there. But they don’t pay any of it off. I don’t feel like any of it matters.
When Did I Stop Caring
I don’t care. And when did I stop caring? Seriously. I don’t even know the answer to that question. I just know that I don’t care anymore.
You can call it superhero fatigue. It isn’t. One of the few things that was really good in this last year, when it comes to movies and stuff, was Guardians of the Galaxy, the Christmas special and the movie. And I’m sorry, that guy just went to the Distinguished Competition. Those of you playing at home know that’s what Marvel used to call DC in the comic books back in the day.
This was embarrassing, man.
Kevin Feige is on record saying this phase was about introducing new things and new characters and new stuff. I don’t care about any of it. What this entire phase has made me do is miss the previous phases. I miss Steve Rogers as Captain America. I miss Black Widow. I miss the actual core of the stuff that worked. Not this trash.
And I’ll be honest, I’m extraordinarily skeptical about a lot of the things coming down the pike. I’m not excited for Daredevil, and I should be. Everything I’m reading says they’re just like, yeah, we’re going to do whatever we want, we’ll figure it out, we’re not really looking to make it too much like the Netflix one. Well, then you’re an idiot, because the Netflix one was great. I have no clue what they’re going to do with Frank Castle. I have no clue what they’re going to do with Kingpin. I have no clue what this Echo show, if it’s even still supposed to happen, is going to do.
The Verdict
Secret Invasion is a 5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index, and the finale by itself was a 4, and that’s being generous.
It’s funny, this morning I was giving the whole thing a six in my head. I’m giving it a five. It was just meh. It was mid, like Baby Know-It-All likes to say. I wasn’t impressed at all.
The ending was honestly so sad. Take a basic three-act structure. Three acts, not even four. I can see how you break six episodes up into two and two and two. But that means we were hip deep in the third act last episode, and then we get to this episode and it screws the pooch on us. Man, it was awful.
They had a lot of opportunity. They had a lot of good things and did nothing with them, and that seems to be what’s happening right now.
It’s not a good look. MCU, figure it out, man, because I’m telling you right now, I’ve got my DC shirt ready. And I love all this stuff, I always have. Like everybody says, a rising tide raises all ships. If Marvel’s successful, DC benefits from that. If DC’s successful, Marvel benefits. It’s good for everybody. But right now I’m not excited for anything coming out, and I’m not excited for some of the movies I’m hearing about.
They have some making up to do and they have some stuff to fix, and they better get on that. Seriously.
Tell me where you landed on the Secret Invasion ending, and whether you’d actually watch a two-hour cut of it. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
