How did Gravik know how to use Ebony Maw’s powers in the ‘Secret Invasion’ finale fight?

Warning: Spoilers for Secret Invasion to follow

Secret Invasion is finally all wrapped up, and while it didn’t quite stick the landing that we all may have been hoping for, there’s no denying that it shook up the MCU‘s nuances and in-universe tensions to an extremely marked degree. Indeed, Earth’s newfound genocidal hunt for the Skrulls, poorly written a development as it was, is bound to cause some problems down the line on Earth-199999, and the introduction of the Harvest makes one wonder what else Nick Fury might be hiding from everyone.

But the introduction of Super-Skrulls could be the biggest game-changer of them all, especially after that rather ominous final showdown between G’iah and Gravik; as the two of them shifted between the powersets of just about every Infinity Saga hero, trading blow after blow with admittedly humorous-looking bulging arms and cosmic blasts, G’iah’s emergence as the eventual winner — and her newfound place as one of the MCU’s most powerful characters — doesn’t spell good news for any enemies she may make down the line, and we reckon she’ll be making quite a few.

Although, there’s one aspect about that showdown that may have caused some viewers to elicit a confused hum; indeed, it’s one thing to obtain the powers of Ebony Maw, the telekinetic tactician that served under Thanos during the Mad Titan’s quest to gather the Infinity Stones, but it’s quite another to wield them so effectively moments after receiving them, as Gravik did in his battle against G’iah. It’s no big leap, after all, to assume that the Maw’s extreme intellect — which he no doubt built over a long stretch of time — was part of the reason he could use his powers so well, so how come Gravik could drop the proverbial training wheels so quickly?

First of all, it’s worth mentioning that Gravik’s proficiency with the Maw’s powers didn’t even come close to reaching the heights of what the Black Order member displayed in Avengers: Infinity War; where Gravik merely hurled a piece of debris or two at G’iah, the Maw was slicing cars in half, reshaping his environment into hardened granite spikes that he then launched at his opponents, and was more or less able to manipulate many more objects in one sitting to an infinitely more incisive degree. For all we know, Gravik’s demonstration of telekinesis was the training wheels.

As for the question itself, there’s any number of explanations as to why Gravik knew how to use the Maw’s telekinesis; one that springs to mind immediately is that the injection of the Maw’s powers via his DNA also brought his power-based instincts along with it, i.e. the muscle-memory that’s no doubt involved with telekinesis was part of the fusion process.

But, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if this were the case, and they included that explanation in Secret Invasion, there would be lots of folks complaining about how that breakdown slowed down the show’s pacing.

Indeed, genre fiction — especially horror, sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes, etc. — is certainly not beyond critique, but consuming these types of stories requires a very particular suspension of disbelief, and the question of Gravik’s sudden telekinesis proficiency is an instance where that suspension should be utilized. If you sit down for a show like Secret Invasion and expect every piece of the entirely fictional and even more nonsensical comic book science to be laid out for you, rather than prepare to fill in a few blanks of your own, I’d suggest avoiding such content entirely.

Secret Invasion is now streaming in full on Disney Plus.