Longtime readers of my blog will know that I’m a big Marvel Cinematic Universe apologist. I’m not ashamed of it. I enjoyed both Thor: Love and Thunder and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. I have enjoyed all of Phase 4 and everything we’ve seen so far in Phase 5. I am not someone who is ringing the bell that Marvel is dead. But even I can’t work up too much energy for Secret Invasion now that it’s over.

TV Show Rating: 5/10 – Alright

I loved the trailers. I had high hopes for the series. But ultimately, I don’t think Secret Invasion was anything special or all that memorable. I don’t think it was a bad show. It’s going to take a lot for me to say any Marvel Studios project is actively bad. I watched every episode. I thought they were all largely fine. It started stronger than it ended. But, overall, it was a big nothing of a show. Just fine. Just alright. Now let us never mention it again.

Join me after the jump for my thoughts and review of the first season of Secret Invasion. Expect FULL SPOILERS for the whole show. And feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments below.

6. Mostly just alright

Secret Invasion had enough action and intrigue to be watchable, but it didn’t do much with those things, and wasn’t much to brag about overall. The action scenes were cool. That attack on the President’s caravan was fun, and Nick Fury held his own in the action. Everybody was at least trying, I think. We had some great actors doing a reasonable job, and it was a show that never sank into outright badness, at least as far as I’m concerned. I watched it, I don’t regret watching it, I’ll never watch it again; it was just a show that fulfilled all the basic requirements of being a show to watch. The problems are really all in the larger execution and the wasted potential.

5. Actors were the best part

Secret Invasion had a lot of great actors on screen, and they made a lot of good decisions in putting those actors together. The best part of the show was setting Samuel L. Jackson sit down with the likes of Ben Mendelsohn or Don Cheadle and just have a great, tense conversation. Sometimes those conversations didn’t lead anywhere particularly good or fun, but they were great scenes nonetheless. Like Nick Fury and Talos on the train. Or the restaurant scene where fake Rhodey fires Nick. Or every time Olivia Colman was on screen just being a crazy sweetie of a British spymaster. There were a lot of great actors given a lot of fun dialogue to bounce off each other with, even if it didn’t go anywhere.

4. So much wasted potential

I know you’re not supposed to judge a show by what could have existed in your mind, but damn did Secret Invasion really waste their potential. And I’m not talking about revealing that Tony Stark was a Skrull or something like that. I just mean that the show did so little with either the alien invasion or the shapeshifting aliens. Gravik’s big plan to take over the world essentially amounted to just a bunch of generic terrorist attacks. They blew stuff up and tried to start a war between world powers. How did that have anything to do with an alien invasion or shapeshifting? We had a couple of scenes where it was revealed that high ranking world government officials were Skrulls…and that went nowhere. The President wasn’t a Skrull. Our minds were not fucked with. There was no invasion.

3. Gravik sucked

Gravik sucked as a villain. He was just an angry guy for angry guy’s sake. He didn’t have any grand scheme. He wasn’t playing any complex chess. He wasn’t Nick Fury’s adopted son or anything I predicted. He was just an angry Skrull who came up with a plan to blow up a lot of things, and that was that. No costume. No cleverness. Even his own people tried to turn on him and take him down halfway through the show, because they recognized his plan was dumb and he was a bad leader. Expect to see him on the top of MCU’s worst villain lists for years to come.

2. Too many dead characters

Secret Invasion killed both Maria Hill and Talos. This was such a waste of two great characters. Granted, maybe Cobie Smulders and Ben Mendelsohn were done with the roles and didn’t want their contracts extended. I don’t know. But they were great characters, great actors, and the show didn’t even use their deaths for some spy twists or reveals. Just two people MCU characters dead on the ground for no greater purpose.

1. No more Skrulls

I think we can be done with Skrulls as a plot point or a story focus for a good, long while. Granted, they haven’t been a major story point anywhere. But I’ve seen some people online suggesting that Skrulls should have been an entire phase of the MCU. No thank you! They’re not that interesting, Secret Invasion has proven Marvel can’t do anything awesome with them, and we’ve got more important stories to tell. An entire phase of Skrulls popping up everywhere? Perish the damn thought!

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