With its second episode, Marvel's Secret Invasion solidifies its identity as a part of the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe and as a series unto itself, for better or worse. While there are certainly some bright spots in this episode, it sees Secret Invasion's creative team doubling down on some of the biggest problems with the first episode in disappointing fashion. Already one-third of the way through the series, what should feel like the coalescing of Secret Invasion as a creative work feels increasingly disparate and incoherent.
In my review of the show's premiere, I praised Secret Invasion's opening credits for how they emulated pulpy '70s science-fiction artwork. As it turns out, it did more than emulate said artwork; it stole from them by feeding them into a digital blender and using AI to construct the sequence. It isn't art, it's theft, and it's shameful.
This episode gets off to a jarring start, as it flashes back to retroactively fill in narrative gaps and key character motivations that were missing from the first episode. While utilizing flashbacks is a perfectly valid form of storytelling, it feels nonsensical here. Secret invasion sacrificed laying any kind of narrative or thematic foundation in the opening episode in favor of hitting the ground running with action setpieces. It is only now jumping back to provide information that audiences needed to have to invest in the initial conflict. It retroactively makes the first episode less effective and the entire story's structure all the more befuddling.
Even as the story moves forward in the present tense, Secret Invasion seems determined to undercut its greatest strengths. An early train-set scene sees Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn having a narratively weighty conversation, and in the midst of it, Jackson gets to deliver a strongly written monologue. Jackson tears into it with his trademark verve, and it is genuinely the most energetic that the series or Nick Fury as a character has felt in quite some time. But even as that is happening, the coverage and editing of the scene feel inconsistent and unfocused, lessening the impact of Jackson's performance.
This scene culminates with a huge, narrative-altering, stakes-heightening reveal with universe-ranging ramifications. And yet, this reveal is explicitly told to the audience, not shown. It is reiterated through dialogue numerous times throughout the episode, yet the visual scale with which Secret Invasion tackles it is surprisingly small. The reveal is a worldwide threat in the text, but just a room of six people on screen, and it leaves Secret Invasion's core hook feeling dissonant and diminished.
Where the first episode showed some promise in thematically tying the trying times of our modern-day world to the paranoia of the Cold War era, this episode illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of those same themes. Here, elements such as a news broadcast that is a cheap pantomime of a real-life misinformation spreader or the handling U.S. international affairs feel very surface-level and rote rather than thrilling.
Furthermore, Secret Invasion's second episode represents the MCU trying to have its cake and eat it, too, when it comes to the Skrulls. Captain Marvel subverted expectations and turned the Skrulls from comic-book villains into a blatant allegory for real-life immigrants. Secret Invasion has struggled with reconciling this interpretation with the more overtly villainous Skrulls in its own story, resulting in subtext that feels ill-advised at best and callous at worst.
The performances from everyone (especially Samuel L. Jackson, Olivia Colman, Don Cheadle, and Emilia Clarke) continue to be great, and there's even an episode-closing action sequence which is far and away the most cohesively constructed setpiece of the series thus far, with director Ali Selim getting to strut his stuff in an impactful and compelling way. However, in this second episode, Secret Invasion grows increasingly disjointed and dissonant in ways that feel further removed from its alleged genre inspirations and creative ambitions.
New episodes of Secret Invasion are released every Wednesday on Disney+.