Is ‘Secret Invasion’ leaning too hard into racist conspiracy theories?

Secret Invasion is now four episodes in with just two to go. At this point, we have a fairly good idea of how things are going to shake out. While Gravik hasn’t succeeded in sparking a nuclear war, he’s certainly raised the geopolitical temperature, and an apparent Russian assassination attempt on the U.S. President certainly isn’t going to help matters.

Fury’s job in the next two episodes will be to convince people that the Skrull infiltration is real, defeat Gravik and his men, and hopefully finally deliver on his promise of finding the other Skrulls a permanent new home.

The thematic underpinning for all this is a broadly empathetic look at what it means to be a refugee living in a host country. This is the type of fuzzily defined liberal theming we expect from a Disney franchise, and as is typical, we expect the show to conclude without ever coming close to an argument about how to solve anything, much less take an explicit political position.

But while Secret Invasion tiptoes around the issue, it’s inadvertently waded into some very murky waters.

Demonizing refugees

Despite the obvious efforts to get the audience to sympathize with the Skrulls, there’s still an innate xenophobia to the way Secret Invasion treats them. We’ve been told that there are “millions” of Skrulls secretly hiding out on Earth, and Gravik’s mission to work behind the scenes to put his people on top and subjugate humans has uncomfortable parallels to the white nationalist “great replacement” theory, which claims that non-white immigrants are slowly eradicating “white” culture.

The show’s defenders would undoubtedly point out that Gravik and his rebel Skrulls represent a single extreme faction and that there are “good” Skrulls fighting to stop them, though a story in which the villains are desperate stateless refugees committing acts of terrorism and the heroes are representatives of institutional power fighting to maintain the status quo is going to raise eyebrows.

But if you don’t buy that, how about Secret Invasion unambiguously taking a leaf from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and David Icke?

The reptilians are here!

Secret Invasion sees a race of shapeshifting green-skinned aliens infiltrating the highest echelons of power where they secretly manipulate world events to their own ends. This is word-for-word what infamous British conspiracy theorist David Icke claims is really happening in our world.

This isn’t a coincidence. The MCU’s version of the Skrulls is inspired by Mark Millar’s Chitauri in The Ultimates comics, who are also shapeshifters that infiltrate society in order to quietly take over. When Marvel Studios used the Chitauri in The Avengers, Millar commented:

“It’s funny because the Hollywood guys don’t know this and I love that. I didn’t tell them. I’m a huge David Icke fan and I took the Chitauri from there. I love the fact that it’s in a $1.6bn grossing movie and it’s straight from David Icke!”

On the surface, Icke’s beliefs are deranged sci-fi nonsense, though elements from them (for example, the elite’s secret blood-drinking ceremonies) have been seamlessly incorporated into the QAnon conspiracies, and the notion of a sinister “other” secretly controlling world events tessellates neatly with Nazism, with Hitler being open that his antisemitism was informed by the infamous text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Like Secret Invasion‘s Skrulls, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion claims that Jewish people are sneakily planning for world domination by infiltrating centers of power, controlling the media, and fomenting conflict between groups. I doubt head writer and showrunner Kyle Bradstreet intended to make Secret Invasion a mirror of the most notorious antisemitic text of the 20th century, but it is, so here we are.

Perhaps this is simply (and depressingly) Nazism culturally percolating through David Icke’s reptilians, out into science fiction in general, and finally re-emerging in a big-budget Disney show. It’s arguable that it’s difficult to tell any story about the world’s governments being infiltrated by an evil minority looking to manipulate world events without crashing headlong into antisemitic conspiracy theories, so… well, maybe just don’t do that.

We just wish Disney and Marvel Studios had thought Secret Invasion‘s implications through a bit more. These ideas are infectious, and having them front-and-center in one of the biggest entertainment franchises in the world can’t be a good thing.