‘Secret Invasion’ Finale Recap: Even the Avengers Couldn’t Save This Show

Only Secret Invasion could stage a fight featuring Avengers-level powers without Avengers-level drama. Although the Nick Fury-focused (Samuel L. Jackson) drama seems to think it went out with a bang, the series finale opts for a whimpering, wheezing final fight and boring repetition. After the previous five episodes, did we expect anything else, though?

The finale, titled “Home,” opens with Fury explaining his plan to defeat Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) to his Skrull wife Priscilla (Charlayne Woodard). Gravik is about to start World War III, pitting the humans against the Skrulls, but Fury believes the countless deaths that could come are avoidable. Gravik will call off the impending World War III if Fury brings him “the Harvest,” which is code for Carol Danvers’ (Brie Larson) supercharged DNA.

‘Secret Invasion’ Episode 5 Recap: Olivia Colman Is the Only Salvageable Part

At a hospital somewhere else in the country, the Skrull revolution attempts to convince POTUS (Dermot Mulroney) to call for war against the Skrulls in Russia. Gravik’s new right-hand Skrull, Raava, inhabits the body of Rhodey (Don Cheadle) to stay close to the President. Fake Rhodey receives a call from MI6 agent Sonya (Olivia Colman), alerting him to Fury’s presence—Rhodey needs to relocate the President now, to keep everyone safe from Fury’s wrath. Sonya is playing a double agent to someone. Thank goodness she’s not two-timing Fury. Another plot-twisting swap to the Skrull side would be too much to handle.

But before we get into the Sonya hospital drama, we have to go to the Skrull revolution headquarters, where Gravik meets Fury. The compound has been abandoned. Everyone has turned against Gravik, so he’s locked them up to keep them around as fighters in the upcoming war. Gravik monologues about Fury’s betrayal of the Skrulls—it’s about as boring as you’d expect. It doesn’t help that the whole conversation between Fury and Gravik takes place in the drab, winding halls of an amusement park ride’s queue. No one cares about scenery in the MCU anymore!

Fury has nearly passed out from the nuclear radiation tearing his body apart. So, after giving his own retort to Gravik’s statements (Gravik feels hurt by Fury’s lack of compassion for the Skrulls; Fury tried super-hard to find them somewhere to live but ultimately gave up and focused on the human race), Fury offers up Danvers’ DNA. Gravik can take it, so long as he promises to go to another planet and use the powers to destroy some other alien race. Fat chance that happens.

‘Secret Invasion’ Is Yet Another Marvel Letdown. Samuel L. Jackson Deserves Better.

Immediately, Gravik rejects Fury’s offer and attacks the agent. But what would Secret Invasion be without one final Skrull fakeout? Fury has been G’iah (Emilia Clarke) all along. Now, using their Avengers DNA, the two Super Skrulls have the big series fight, showing off powers from Hulk, Drax, Ant-Man, and more.

This fight might be more interesting if any of these powers were on display for longer than 10 seconds in battle. But the Skrulls keep cycling through the Avengers, showing that Secret Invasion is less focused on making a graceful action sequence and more interested in tacky callbacks to Fury’s road with the long list of superhumans. The less-than-epic spar between Gravik and G’iah ends almost as quickly as it started: Gravik’s internal organs are blown out by G’iah, who uses the powers of Captain Marvel and Mantis to take him down.

Marvel has run so completely out of ideas that the franchise’s next powerful superhero—G’iah—simply has all the other heroes’ superpowers. But that was the entire point of introducing Captain Marvel, goddess of the Avengers. And just as a character, G’iah is remarkably bland. Poor Emilia Clarke; she deserves a more prominent, lasting role than “orphaned girl with every superpower in the universe.”

The real Fury is at the hospital with the president and Rhodey, who storms in to warn the president against the strike. This scene is as tepid and anti-climactic as the fight scene: Rhodey is revealed to be a Skrull, and although Fury demands the President stay quiet, POTUS can’t get over his fears of the Skrull invasion and calls for war. Pandemonium begins.

‘Guardians of the Galaxy 3’ Has a Lesson for the MCU—but Will It Listen?

The one glimmer of hope comes from a conversation between Sonya and G’iah, who make a promise to stay aligned. Unlike Talos and Fury, they agree to be less emotionally attached to one another. This is great news for me, a huge Olivia Colman-head who loved her every moment this season, and anyone else who wants to see more of the snarky secret intelligence agent.

Fury and Priscilla—who now prefers her Skrull name, Varra—profess their undying love for one another. Underneath it all, Secret Invasion also had a Romeo and Juliet story, too.

But that’s not the lasting message Fury chooses to end on for his standalone series. The war between the Skrulls and the humans has started. The President has banned all aliens from entering Earth, which sounds an awful lot like the Avengers-restraining Sokovia Accords from Captain America: Civil War. Fury calls for peace between the Skrulls and humans: “Now you got dumbass vigilantes killing innocent humans too,” he says, as we see humans trying to murder random people to prove that the Skrulls are everywhere.

As with every Marvel production, the final question is: What’s next? There are no post-credit scenes, although Fury is slated to appear in the next MCU film, The Marvels, out in November. Rhodey’s human body will be recovered so that he can appear in the upcoming Disney+ series Armor Wars. And who knows when we’ll see G’iah next—if Secret Invasion has taught us anything, it’s that she’ll be roleplaying as an important human later down the road. It’s all the Skrulls are good for.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now.

Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now.