‘Secret Invasion’ Ending Explained: How Long Has Rhodey Been a Skrull?

And there you have it — the wild ride that is Secret Invasion has come to an end. Marvel’s blockbuster summer series wrapped up and left us with just as many questions as answers. What else would you expect from a show about spies and aliens? Lots of reveals, lots of twists, and lots of mysteries that need unraveling. So what are we waiting for? Let’s break all of these wild reveals down!

Does Secret Invasion have an end credits scene?

Come on! It’s a Marvel TV show all about espionage and intrigue that’s stacked with spies and shapeshifting aliens. It has to have an end credits scene that pulls the rug out from under everything! Doesn’t it…? Apparently not! Secret Invasion does not have a post-credits scene. When Secret Invasion’s finale ends… it ends. Maybe that’s the big twist…?

How does Secret Invasion end? Secret Invasion ending explained:

Secret Invasion ends with the Skrull’s stealth takeover of Earth being thwarted by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Sonya Falsworth (Olivia Colman), and G’iah (Emilia Clarke).

Posing as Nick Fury, G’iah entered the Skrulls’ radioactive compound and presented Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) with what he’s been searching for: the Harvest, a collection of pretty much every Marvel character’s DNA. Gravik used the DNA in his Genetic Easy-Bake Oven and grafted all of those powers onto his being, with Fury by his side. That turned out to be a mistake, since Fury was actually G’iah and therefore gained all of the genetic enhancements that Gravik did. Both Super Skrulls duked it out using the powers of dozens of characters until G’iah Captain Marvel-blasted a hole through Gravik’s torso, killing him.

Meanwhile back at the hospital, Fury and Falsworth worked together to draw Skrull Rhodey (Don Cheadle), President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney), and all of his Secret Service agents out into the open. They picked off the agents one by one — with tranquilizers, mind you! And then they confronted “Rhodey” and Ritson, convinced the president of the truth, and had him call off the nuclear attack he’d ordered on the Skrull compound. Good thing, too, since the real Rhodey and all of the humans being doubled were held captive in pods beneath that compound. Oh — and Skrull Rhodey got a bullet through the head.

That leads us to the denouement. President Ritson does the shady thing of addressing the nation and telling everyone that shapeshifting aliens totally infiltrated all levels of government and power all over the globe, and he issues a threat that all off-world agents will be hunted down and killed. This leads to a montage of vigilantes killing Skrulls as well as mistakenly killing humans who were Skrulls, like England’s prime minister. Seems like a huge narrative choice to stuff into the middle of a short montage, but here we are — !

G’iah frees all of the Skrull captives, including Rhodey and Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), who no one seemed concerned about all season long. Glad he’s alive, though. Sonya also recruits G’iah, promising that she won’t make the same mistake that Fury did with G’iah’s father Talos (Ben Mendelsohn). There’s no friendship here, just a mutually beneficial partnership with the goal of protecting humans and Skrulls. As for where this is going, there’s truly no precedent in the comics. Sonya Falsworth is a creation for the show, and G’iah is a minor Skrull in the comics and also a completely different character. The options are endless.

As for Fury, he’s ready to head back to the orbiting S.A.B.E.R. satellite — and he’s taking his wife Priscilla (Charlayne Woodard), now going by her Skrull name Varra, with him. It turns out that after decades and decades of waiting, Fury might just be close to making good on his promise to find the Skrulls a new world. He tells Varra that the Kree have agreed to enter into peace talks with the Skrulls and that she will make a great ambassador during these negotiations. The series ends with the two of them being beamed up.

Of course with all of these developments, there are some loose ends. Let’s see if we can tie them up! First.

Is that Evan Peters in a Skrull pod?

I have… no idea.

This actor and character go unnamed in the credits as well as in the brief scene of Sonya and her team discovering hundreds of captive humans. If it isn’t Evan Peters, then why does the camera linger on him? If this shot was more of an “oh wow yeah the Skrulls did abduct a lot of humans” shot, then why would Marvel Studios cast an actor that looks so much like Evan Peters? And if it is Evan Peters, why is it Evan Peters?

For those who need a refresher, Evan Peters played Ralph Bohner on WandaVision, a stalled actor/slacker/stoner bro who lived in Westview. He was caught up in Wanda Maximoff’s chaos magic which turned him into a “recast” version of her dead brother Pietro. Since Evan Peters played Pietro in another movie franchise, that led to lots of WTF moments and speculation that Evan Peters was actually going to play the MCU’s Quicksilver, or that the MCU was going to fold in Fox’s X-Men franchise. Neither happened, because it was instead revealed that “Pietro” was just a dude named Ralph.

So why the hell would a Skrull be posing as just a random dude named Ralph?! And if this is setting up a reveal wherein Evan Peters actually is Pietro Maximoff and the Skrull imposter used Pietro’s face to create dudebro Ralph Bohner, and was then caught up in chaos magic and transformed into Pietro… even though the MCU’s Pietro was actually Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and we know this isn’t like how Don Cheadle replaced Terence Howard as Rhodey because it’s established in WandaVision that Evan Peters does not look like the Pietro they all knew… I’m in pain. Trying to figure out the logic or motives behind this is painful. I don’t know. If it’s Evan Peters, it’s dumb. If it’s not, it’s dumb.

How long was Rhodey a Skrull?

There is a more straightforward answer to this one, and more involved than just “a long time.” There’s one thing we do know: the James Rhodes that’s freed from the compound is paralyzed and needs to be carried out, which means that Rhodey was the real Rhodey through at least Captain America: Civil War.

As for when Rhodey was replaced, I think there are two options. He could have been replaced sometime during the Blip, when Rhodey and the other remaining Avengers were maintaining some semblance of order across the galaxy. That would mean, though, that the Rhodey who went on the time heist with Nebula in Avengers: Endgame was a Skrull, which… I dunno, feels like we’d need some motivation as to why the Skrulls would go along with the time heist? Like, sure, half of the Skrulls were dusted too, but this just adds another layer onto an already complicated story.

The other option is that Rhodey was swapped out sometime immediately after Avengers: Endgame, which would mean that the Rhodey who took a position of power in the government was replaced. That makes more sense, since we know that Gravik’s mission was to place Skrulls in positions of power. Once they see Rhodey getting promotion after promotion, he becomes a more desirable target for abduction. That means that the only continuity that gets messed with is the scene between Rhodey and Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Reminder that a long time has passed between that series and Secret Invasion — two and a half years.

We’ll see the fallout from Secret Invasion sooner rather than later, too. Threads from the series will continue when Nick Fury returns in The Marvels on November 10. Rhodey will step into the lead in the feature film Armor Wars, which opens on July 25, 2025.