Secret Invasion’s Greatest Sin Was Proving the Haters Right

This column contains spoilers for Secret Invasion and the overall MCU. If you’re not caught up, check out our last issue of Streaming Wars: Streaming Is Broken — The Strikes Can Save It.

Secret Invasion is guilty of a lot. It fridged Maria Hill, a character with deep comic roots who never once got to be her own person in the MCU; it absolutely wasted the unfathomable amount of talent at its fingertips (with the exception of Olivia Colman, who I would like to see do whatever she was doing here in a feature length film and her own television series immediately); and it dared to call itself a “spy thriller” without a single ounce of intrigue. But its greatest sin? Its greatest sin was proving the haters right.

It had me in the first two episodes, I’ll admit. Plenty of thrillers take a second to get rolling, favoring exposition early on so they can deliver punch after punch as the story rolls on. Even in those first two episodes, though, I knew calling it “Secret Invasion” was going to be one of the MCU’s greatest missteps. If Captain America: Civil War was a watered down adaptation, the Disney+ adaptation of Secret Invasion is just water. But I thought it might have been able to survive that! I thought it would divert from the comics but still deliver on the twists and turns it intended to. Instead, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — a series that I enjoyed but featured the same damn plot every single season — pulled off more interesting mysteries in its tenure with far fewer resources. (Sorry, Quake stans. I love her too, but it was never going to happen.)

For the past several years, I’ve had to listen to everyone from the casual fan to critics new and old twist themselves in knots to insist over and over again that Marvel post-Endgame was garbage and the MCU was slipping. Now, while that might be true of the quality of some of the films of Phase 4 (just as it was true for Phase 2), the television offerings that the MCU brought to the table from 2021-2022 were some of the best entries in the entirety of the franchise.

WandaVision knocked us off our feet, even if Wanda’s story was ultimately squandered in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. (There is not a single part of me that doubts she’ll be back, don’t worry.) Loki brought our favorite God of Mischief back into our lives and made us fall in love with him all over again. And Hawkeye finally gave Black Widow the eulogy she deserved while giving one of the most undervalued Avengers the spotlight and finally introducing us to Kate Bishop on screen. Moon Knight was gorgeous and different and introduced the Scarlet Scarab. Ms. Marvel brought the absolute joy that is Iman Vellani into our lives. And She-Hulk: Attorney at Law? She made swaths of strong, snarky women who are unafraid of their power and sexuality feel seen while telling a whole lot of dudes stuff that they should have known anyway but apparently needed to hear.

And let’s not forget the special presentations in Werewolf By Night — a gorgeous and absolute killer one-off that left us wanting more — and The Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas Special. If the latter doesn’t make your grinchy heart grow three sizes then I just don’t know what to tell you.

How can you tell me Phase 4 was bad when it delivered banger after banger after banger in the television department? Television has always been treated as film’s lesser sibling, but how that remains prevalent in 2023 after the power of longform storytelling has been proven again and again both in and outside the MCU is just baffling. (And don’t take this as some grand defense of Marvel or Disney. They’re multibillion-dollar companies and they’re gonna do just fine for a long, long time. What I am defensive of is the stories, because damn they were great.)

Then in waltzes Secret Invasion, providing a whole lot of folks looking to dog the franchise not just new ammunition, but warranted ammunition.

It’s almost baffling how bad the series managed to be. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier — which you’ll notice is the only live-action show missing from the above gush-session over the MCU’s series — at least had the decency to be half a good story (and half a very bad one). Secret Invasion is just bad, and in nearly every way.

In the beginning, it was fun to wonder what kind of crazy surprises it would have in store. Then it became “ok, well… what are the cranky spy dads gonna do next?” And then finally it shifted to spending every second wondering why the one guy who was appropriately mad at Nick Fury was so poorly written and how everyone else around the former Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn’t smacked him silly yet. At every turn it was someone new telling him he couldn’t hack it, and then Fury continuing to prove all the ways that he could not, in fact, hack it while everyone interesting around him died.

The struggles weren’t just with the writing, either. Poor Emilia Clarke is going to be a meme for the rest of eternity with that terrible Drax arm, while the scene where (fake) Fury and Gravik have their heart to heart in the Extremis machine looks like it was edited by a high schooler.

When Bob Iger made his crappy comment saying that the MCU series had “diluted focus and attention,” I thought he was just making a fuss because their movies were floundering. Now I wonder if he’d been made to watch whatever the hell Secret Invasion was meant to be and was feeling extra spicy. (Either way, superhero fatigue is fake, Bob. People just want good stories.)

Still, Secret Invasion leaves Phase 5 in a rocky spot. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania might be better than much of the internet has managed to twist itself in knots over (you can’t look me in the eye and tell me that was worse than Thor: The Dark World, a movie I also don’t hate), but Secret Invasion has managed to go from good will in the starting episodes to the worst thing the MCU has ever done by a country mile.

That said, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 destroyed us all in the best possible way, and Loki Season 2 is right around the corner. There’s still plenty of stories to be told. Whether it’s Loki or if there’s another release date shuffle in our future, may whatever the next chapter is be miles better than the waste of talent that was Secret Invasion.

Amelia is the entertainment Streaming Editor here at IGN. She’s also a film and television critic who spends too much time talking about dinosaurs, superheroes, and folk horror. You can usually find her with her dog, Rogers. There may be cheeseburgers involved. Follow her across social @ThatWitchMia