‘Secret Invasion’ just beat ‘Deadpool 3’ to the punch by inverting an iconic Fox X-Men ending

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Secret Invasion episode six.

Now that he owns the rights to the X-Men himself, Kevin Feige isn’t exactly hurrying to reboot mutantkind in the MCU, but he is clearly immensely enjoying himself reliving the greatest hits of what Fox achieved from the 1990s to the 2010s. We got Patrick Stewart back as Professor X in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the X-Men animated series is getting a revival, and most of all, a ton of Fox legacy stars are believed to return in Deadpool 3.

So, given all that, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Secret Invasion got in on the X-Men-aping action as well in its otherwise widely disappointing finale. Unlike the final episode of Ms. Marvel, though, this one didn’t end with anything as obvious as the sting of the animated show’s theme tune, but it did offer up a sly inversion of the conclusion to what remains perhaps the finest of Fox’s X-Men movie series.

Cast your minds back to 2002 (or whenever you most recently rewatched it) and consider the ending of X2. When the President of the United States is about to address the nation to warn them of the mutant threat, the X-Men teleport themselves into the Oval Office and explain how they’ve just saved the world from the genocidal General Stryker. Armed with this knowledge, the President goes ahead and delivers a more positive message of mutant tolerance.

While future X-Men films naturally back-tracked on this and further explored the team protecting a world that hates and fears them, this was still a powerful ending that offered hope that humanity — and politicians, specifically — could get over their worst instincts in order to co-exist peacefully. In the harder-edged world of Secret Invasion, however, the MCU’s own President Ritson has the opportunity to make a similar epiphany but resolutely runs in the opposite direction.

Despite Talos literally losing his life in order to save him a couple of episodes earlier, Ritson takes the existence of the shapeshifting Skrulls — who, like mutants, are beings who seem human and are scattered throughout the world’s population — as a threat to humanity’s continued existence. As such, he delivers the most hostile hate speech possible, which incites a wave of prejudice and violent vigilantism across the globe.

Again, we’ve still got no idea when the mutants of Earth-616 will properly be explored (although we’ve met a couple already, in the form of Kamala Khan and Namor), but Ritson’s actions may have ensured that the MCU’s X-Men have an even tougher time of it than their Fox counterparts. Unless Ritson’s successor, Harrison Ford himself, can save them, that is.