Warning: Some light Secret Invasion episode three spoilers to follow.
Secret Invasion is very off-piste for the MCU in terms of its tone, but it’s featured no shortage of tie-ins to the wider franchise in its first three episodes, what with connections to everything from Captain Marvel to Black Panther being filtered into its plot. This week’s third episode included perhaps its most unlikely Easter egg yet, however, as it harks back to a movie that Marvel has generally tried to sweep under the carpet.
Yes, I’m talking about the nod to Black Widow villain Dreykov in the installment’s opening flashback scene. This revealed that Nick Fury’s future wife Priscilla (or Varra, to use her Skrull name) started out as one of his agents during the ’90s, and once handed him some intel that “should put Dreykov’s men on their heels.” This rather implies, then, that S.H.I.E.L.D. actually got the better of Dreykov at some point.
But what if there’s actually more to this than meets the eye? As first floated by Twitter user UpToTASK, what if the Skrulls have been behind the Black Widow program and the Red Room operation all along? “Was the “TASKMASTER PROJECT” somehow an attempt at a Super Skrull?!?” they suggested.
Secret Invasion‘s revelation that there are a million Skrulls secreted on Earth really does cast so much of the MCU’s past into question, as we could spend forever theorizing that this character or that one might actually be a shapeshifting alien in disguise. And, yup, the despicable Dreykov would be one of the most likely suspects. Then again, we can’t go around blaming the Skrulls for every evil thing that humankind does in the MCU.
The “Who’s a Skrull?” game is pretty much the new “Who survived the Snap?” and we expect many more similar theories to pop up long after Secret Invasion ends.