Stream It or Skip It: ‘Secret Invasion’ on Disney+ Finally Puts Samuel L. Jackson in the Lead

Marvel returns to Disney+ with the premiere of Secret Invasion, the first new episode of MCU TV in 251 days. If you think that’s a long wait, just think about how long it’s taken for Marvel to let Nick Fury take the lead. It’s been 5,528 days since he asked Tony Stark about the Avenger Initiative in Iron Man‘s post-credits scene — and here we are. Fifteen years have passed and Samuel L. Jackson is finally behind the steering wheel of his own Marvel Studios vehicle. The question now is, was Secret Invasion worth the wait?

SECRET INVASION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: It’s MOSCOW: PRESENT DAY and Everett K. Ross (Martin Freeman) is under a bridge, cloaked in the dark of night, and talking cryptically into a burner phone — or at least I hope it’s a burner considering how casually the ex-C.I.A. agent chucks it to the ground. And because this is Marvel, it should be pointed out that while this show claims to be set in the “present day,” the year is most likely 2025 thanks to The Blip and events unfold in the premiere that pinpoint the month and day to November 4.

The Gist: The Skrulls are angry. After debuting in 2019’s Captain Marvel (which was set in 1995 because this will never be simple), the shape-shifting refugee aliens have spent 30 years living amongst humanity. They’ve remained hidden and remained patient, waiting for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to find them a new planet to inhabit. And then the Blip happened, and Fury was one of the people who got dusted for five years. When Fury came back, he immediately peaced out to space and had his Skrull buddy Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) impersonate him for important Earth things, like starring in Spider-Man: Far From Home. The Skrulls, particularly the younger generation of Skrulls who’ve grown up during this 30-year exile on Earth, have a new plan: if Nick Fury won’t find them a new planet, then they’ll take Nick Fury’s planet.

To pull this off, the Skrulls have infiltrated a number of terrorist groups around the world and have been pitting them against each other. Their leader Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is working on his current scheme, and it’s the biggest one yet. Talos is desperate to stop it, but the Nick Fury he gets after sending an SOS is a grizzled, 70-something Nick Fury with Blip-induced PTSD and a limp. Has Fury gotten too old for this shit?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The tone, aesthetic, and even the villain’s motivation bear a striking resemblance to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The fact that anyone could be revealed as a Skrull at any time could potentially give this series a bit of Battlestar Galactica’s paranoia, but the premiere episode doesn’t go there for some reason.

Sex and Skin: None. The clothes stay on, even while shapeshifting. The Skrulls are not Mystique.

Parting Shot: No spoilers but — it’s one that will make a lot of Marvel fans incredibly angry.

Sleeper Star: In a really stellar cast all turning out solid performances, Oscar winner Olivia Colman turns out the best performance as the cheerfully intimidating Sonya Falsworth, a high-ranking MI6 official who has history with Nick Fury and her own idea of a job well done (two words: “scorched” and “earth”).

Most Pilot-y Line: The series starts by spelling out the premise, loud and — well, not clear so much as grumbly: “Imagine a world where information can’t be trusted. Not very hard, is it? News service says one thing, website says another. Society starts to fray. All we can turn to are the people we care about, but what if those people weren’t who we thought they were? What if the ones closest to us, the ones we’ve trusted our whole lives, were someone else entirely? What if they weren’t even human?”

Our Take: Early in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Nick Fury becomes the target of a coordinated attack orchestrated by HYDRA infiltrators — and the only weapon he has at his disposal is his tricked-out Chevy Tahoe. Fury takes them all on with a Gatling gun that pops up from his armrest, and then peels out and gives us the MCU’s first great car chase. It’s a killer scene with a migraine-inducing score and relentless, underlying tension — and also great jokes about the air conditioning being fully operational. After years of Fury doing nothing but handing out invites to his Avengers-themed party, it was exhilarating to see the MCU deploy their not-so-secret weapon: Samuel L. Jackson.

That was 9 years ago, and now Samuel L. Jackson is finally the lead of his own 6-episode limited series. And, at least in the first episode, no scene lives up to that car chase in Winter Soldier.

And that’s the underlying tension in Secret Invasion, a tension between the show you know it could be and the show it is. The lead is great. I’d even argue that this is Jackson’s best all-around performance as Fury, as all the disparate temperaments we’ve seen in 15 years of movies all coalesce into a satisfying whole. The premise is great. We’re getting a bunch of shape-shifty switcheroo spy stuff with a tinge of 1950s pulpy sci-fi? Hell yeah. The cast is beyond. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn have a great partnership and a visually unlikely one considering their average IRL age is 64. The villain is mostly a non-entity in the first episode, but Ben-Adir plays Gravik with a stoic, almost James Dean-esque cool. Everything is almost there.

That’s what makes the first episode a bit of a letdown even though it has so much going for it. What it’s missing is — and this is cheesy — any sense of wonder. Marvel’s greatest achievements all have that feeling of “I can’t believe they did this” to them, be those moments as tiny as Wanda Maximoff and Vision driving up to a 1950s suburban home or as grand as Avengers: Endgame’s “assemble” moment. Even better are the “I can’t believe we did this” moments where you can feel the creative team’s excitement through the screen — like Megan Thee Stallion agreeing to do a She-Hulk cameo or James Gunn getting to do a full-blown Guardians of the Galaxy holiday special with Kevin f’ing Bacon. The Winter Soldier chase has that feeling to it because it’s Anthony and Joe Russo taking their giddy love of ’70s thrillers and Marvel comics and smashing them together for actual superheroes to play in and not just the cast of Community.

Secret Invasion misses that feeling — and it’s not because it’s a spy thriller, either. This vibe is the reason why the Mission: Impossible franchise endures. That franchise, especially in the third and fourth films, really had a lot of goofy fun with malfunctioning tech, impossibly complicated schemes, and — most relevant here — masks. But Secret Invasion, at least in the premiere episode, almost seems too serious to have fun with its premise. These are shapeshifters! They’re green aliens with big pointy ears! Why is there only one “they were a Skrull?!” moment in a show that should be filled with them? At the very least, the show should be having fun with who is or isn’t a Skrull… and it’s not, at least not yet. Secret Invasion starts off as a show about alien shapeshifters who specifically have to remain in human form for plot reasons, and no one suspects anyone of not being who they say they are. A tense spy thriller is a hard sell when there’s no tension or thrills.

All that being said, Secret Invasion still has plenty going for it. The cast is, like I said, fantastic and turning out great performances. And as an MCU superfan (and sometimes apologist), it’s fun seeing the universe spread out just a little more and bring in a few elements of other genres. And I really can’t say enough about how great Samuel L. Jackson is here. He’s 15 years into this gig and it looks like he’s having more fun than ever. Like, I’m still thinking of a passing bit of business where Fury offers Maria Hill popcorn. I’ll even bend the strict rules of the Stream It or Skip It format and say that Episode 2 is better than Episode 1, which gives me a bit of hope that this alien invasion will become more suspenseful — and wonder-filled.

Our Call: STREAM IT — but maybe let a few episodes pile up first if you’re not an MCU devotee. With its deliberate buildup, Secret Invasion really feels like it should have been an all-at-once drop. As a weekly watch, though, it leaves me wanting more — and at least I have hope that we’ll get more.