This article contains spoilers for the Secret Invasion finale.
The Secret Invasion finale is finally here, wrapping a show that promised to delve deep into the MCU’s murky world of espionage, expose MCU heroes as Skrull duplicates and flesh out Samuel L. Jackson’s beloved but enigmatic Nick Fury.
Technically it ticked all those boxes, though after this finale we suspect it’s going to end up in the lower tiers of the MCU Disney Plus rankings. Put simply, a lot of it not only doesn’t make sense, but potentially harms future stories.
The mood over on r/MarvelStudios is not great. Comments range from wondering “why even make this show to begin with if you’re going to end it that badly” or dubbing it “a movie they didn’t set up for or care about finishing”. Perhaps the most cutting comes from a poster who went into this with high hopes: “I was really excited about this show before it aired. Now that it’s over, I wish they never made it. None of it made any sense.”
More specific criticisms center on how ludicrously Emilia Clarke’s G’iah is as the credits roll. She now has the powers of most characters present at Avengers: Endgame‘s Battle for Earth, including Hulk, Thor, Captain Marvel, and even Thanos(!). A fan rightly says her “very existence is world breaking. She’s just casually out here in the background with every power?” and another echoes that:
“Yeah she just shatters any threat that will ever come. Extremis and hulk power lets her regenerate from basically anything, and she can probably take on thanos alone with all her powers now. IDK what they were thinking with Giah, this is absurd. Now any threat on earth will just have audiences asking “Why didn’t they just call giah?”
Theories as to why things went so awry in the finale point the finger at late rewrites, possibly as a consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One fan says “they 1000% rewrote this, either mid-way through filming, or after the fact and reshot it, its why episode 1+2 are 101 minutes and episodes 3-6 are 155 minutes of content”.
All in all Secret Invasion has added up to a waste of a great premise and the squandering of a fine cast. What a shame.
