‘Let’s just say he had COVID and call it a day’: ‘Secret Invasion’ gets written off as a Nick Fury fever dream

Classic 1980s show Dallas had a problem. Everyone hated the ninth season and thought the death of Patrick Duffy’s Bobby Ewing in season eight was a big mistake. The solution? The season nine finale sees Bobby emerging from having a shower alive and well, confirming that his death and the entirety of the preceding season had all been a dream.

It’s difficult to imagine any modern show having the cojones to write off an entire season as a dream, but after the disastrous Secret Invasion, we imagine Kevin Feige must be considering it. Right now the finale is the worst-reviewed thing Marvel Studios has ever released, the show leaves a lot of difficult loose ends for future writers to deal with, and fans are mutinous after the nonsensical reveal that Don Cheadle’s James Rhodes may have been an imposter since Civil War.

We’ve already seen calls to retcon the show, and now fans on r/MarvelStudios are wondering if everything that happened could simply be forgotten. One reply has a neat solution, saying that it’s probably a weird dream Fury had while suffering from COVID:

“Honestly, I wouldn’t be mad if they made the whole thing a weird fever dream that Fury had. Let’s just say he had COVID and call it a day. Cause it was bad bad, not just regular bad; yes, it would be a waste of all the effort that went into producing it, but that’s better than making the storytelling atrocity we witnessed part of the canon. I want Maria Hill back by any means necessary.”

Replies concur, saying Secret Invasion may be so irredeemable it’s one of the few situations where “it was all a dream!” is acceptable.

Sadly the interwoven nature of the MCU makes this almost impossible. Plot elements from Secret Invasion are inevitably going to be baked into The Marvels and Armor Wars. Even so, we’re still hoping for a speedy retcon from up on high that underlines that Rhodey’s replacement by a Skrull duplicate came sometime after Endgame, as him being an impostor since Civil War erases years of interesting character development in the stroke of a pen.