REVIEW: Secret Invasion – Season 1, Episode 3, “Betrayed”

Television Reviews

“Betrayed” is the episode that comes in seemingly every Disney+ Marvel show: the turn. It’s where something that was either enjoyable or looked like it might be great reveals itself for the undercooked, politically skewed, poorly plotted, character-destroying pablum it really is. And, as always, there are traces of what Secret Invasion almost was – and, if they right this ship quickly, what it still could be, at least partly – until they dropped the ball.

Nick Fury butts heads with his neglected wife. Talos confronts Gravik about his planned war on the human race. G’iah continues to spy on her comrades. Two of Gravik’s plans are horrifyingly revealed.

“Betrayed” begins by showing how even a betrayal committed for the right reasons can render someone untrustworthy. Back in the 90s, Fury meets his future wife, Priscilla, at a diner on official SHIELD spying business. But it turns more intimate as the two show affection for each other, clearly having established a connection. Fury tells her that SHIELD regulations prevent agents working on the same team from getting romantically involved, but Priscilla reasons that, since she technically doesn’t work for SHIELD because Fury is employing the Skrulls off the books, the rules don’t apply to them. (This also confirms that he knew she was a Skrull when they got together.)  It’s nice, it’s sweet, it’s the kind of thing we’ve seen in many spy stories, but it’s also a betrayal. Fury and Priscilla are flouting the rules of the agency to which Fury dedicated his life. What does that say about her character?

*SPOILERS*

Fury wonders the same thing in “Betrayed” because while Priscilla is cooking him breakfast, he suggests she could be a part of Gravik’s terrorist group. That’s a ballsy thing to say to your wife, especially considering she’s given no indication in the five minutes you’ve been home that she’s in on Gravik’s plot. Of course, Priscilla firmly denies it and throws the accusation back at Fury; she grieved for him after the Snap, and just when she thought she’d finally worked through losing her husband, he was suddenly back – and then he left again, this time for three years. It’s a fair point, and it fits with the idea that Fury used his work at SABER as a mask for his fear of getting involved in spying and superheroes again; I also like that she understands she married Nick Fury, superspy, and he’s going to be away a lot. She then gets a mysterious phone call and is so cryptic to the caller that she’s obviously an enemy spy working for Gravik before the “big reveal” at the end that tells us this for sure.  

This is where the trouble starts in “Betrayed;” this isn’t a bad plot point, but it’s rushed and poorly executed. We don’t know Priscilla well, and aside from two scenes, we haven’t seen much of her and Fury as a couple. There’s no foundation on which to build Fury’s suspicion of her, so it comes out of the blue and feels like he suspects her because the script needs him to suspect her. And the phone call is so badly masked that it answers the question immediately. A smarter script would have had her use a mundane phrase, like “Yes, they arrived yesterday,” or something, in as natural a voice as possible, before using it again at the end to a caller who was revealed to be Gravik or one of his lieutenants. There are seeds planted, like her rule-ignoring initiation of their romance and the possibility that she was the female Skrull who introduced Fury to Gravik. But it’s happening too fast for the show, and this has been one of the problems with Marvel’s Disney+ output: it doesn’t know how to pace a miniseries. The more leisurely pace of the first two episodes was great, and it fit with a spy story of this sort, but now they’re throwing in so many plot points that they don’t have time to properly develop that they’re zipping through them to fit the six-episode frame.

The new, rushed storytelling pops up elsewhere in “Betrayed.” G’iah is now a double agent working with Talos to stop Gravik. Again, this is a good plot point and a reasonable arc for her character, but it happens with no preamble. The first two episodes set up G’iah having doubts about Gravik and growing closer to her father, but she betrayed Talos in the premiere when she set him up to find decoy bombs. I’m fine with her turning towards him again, but that has to be dealt with; these two need a heart-to-heart, an apology, an explanation, something. But I guess it happened off-screen, which is the new way Marvel does character development, so she’s a good guy now – except she gets killed at the end, so unless they’re about to pull a switcheroo on us (which, considering this is Emilia Clarke, one of the show’s main selling points, is entirely possible), nothing will come of this. G’iah started as a compelling character with a lot to say about how fanatics recruit their followers; she ended as a trite plot convenience.

How convenient is it? Pretty damn, because when Fury and Talos find the secret Skrull in the British Navy, who gives the order to fire on a United Nations plane and start World War III, Talos kills him before he’s able to get the abort code, which G’iah is able to uncover lickety-split. Damn, it’s a good thing that not only is your daughter completely on your side and not only in a position where she’d be able to access that information, but she’s able to get it and send it to him in the two minutes it takes to stop the attack. You’d think an experienced spy and soldier like Talos would maybe wait to make sure G’iah could get him the codes before killing the only other guy who has them, but nah. If they were taking their time, they could have let this go on a little longer, built some suspense, maybe had Fury start torturing the Skrull or threaten his son again (although it’s probably the real Navy guy’s son, but whatever; threatening him seemed to work the first time). As it stands, this plotline has no tension.

Aside from the plotting issues, “Betrayed” does something many accused the first two episodes of doing, and about which I disagreed with them: it’s ruining Nick Fury’s character even further than Captain Marvel did with that stupid cat scratch. When Fury reunites with Talos, Talos demands an implicit apology where Fury admits he’s nothing without Talos; I get why he wants to humiliate Fury, and I also get Fury doing it out of desperation (Fury telling Falsworth that he won’t be apologizing a second time is great and completely in character for him). What I don’t get is why Fury didn’t demand a similar apology from Talos for helping the Skrulls infiltrate the planet. What he did to the people trying to help him and his race borders on unforgivable, and I do think there are ways to redeem his character, but being a self-righteous jerk isn’t one of them. I liked this development last week because Fury hit back and let Talos know how wrong and disastrous his actions were, but now the show is implying Fury was in the wrong, and he wasn’t.

But that’s not nearly as bad as what follows. Talos tells Fury that he only advanced in his career because of the Skrulls spying for him, that he was a “benchwarmer” before Talos and his invaders came into his life, and that everything he’s achieved is because the Skrulls did the work for him. Excuse me very much, but FUCK YOU! Nick Fury is “the spy,” the guy who essentially made SHIELD what it was (minus the Nazi infiltration), who had plans for every contingency, who had gone on so many missions and adventures that his career was a legend. Alexander Pierce told the story of Fury saving a bunch of hostages in an embassy using creative, out-of-the-box thinking, and things like that were why he was made the director of SHIELD. Even in Captain Marvel, with its “kitty’s got claws” retcon of the eyepatch, Fury was not riding a desk; he was an important part of SHIELD, important enough that he began the Avenger Initiative, and that was when he first met the Skrulls before he took them on as his spies. The pandering little “Don’t get me wrong; you’re good” or whatever Talos says to placate the fans doesn’t make up for this. It’s also kind of funny that, in light of the racial stuff between Fury and Rhodey last week, the show is now saying Fury didn’t earn his position in SHIELD but had it handed to him. Nick Fury isn’t even a has-been; he’s a never-was.

Now, there are some good elements to “Betrayed.” The scene between Talos and Gravik is excellent, and it sets up a much different story for the show and character arc for Talos. He’s angry because Gravik is showing Earth that the Skrulls are monsters, and he’s determined to counter that narrative by exposing Gravik’s plan. It works so well because there’s an element of guilt at its heart, an element the rest of the episode dispenses with to knock Nick Fury. It’s implied in Ben Mendelsohn’s terrific performance that he knows he contributed to this, and now he’s trying to make up for it. And his anger at Gravik for using his daughter as a weapon is perfect, including Talos’ reaction. The reveal that everyone in the cafeteria is a Skrull is chilling; it’s unlikely, sure, but it works as a visual of how powerful and dangerous they are. I also still enjoy some of the spycraft, like G’iah slipping Talos the information on the attack via a feigned accident involving a dropped cell phone or Gravik giving the information about the missile strike only to G’iah to flush her out as a traitor. (And it’s stone cold to risk a nuclear war just to find out if you can trust one of your people.) And it’s cool that they’re officially doing Super-Skrull, even if it’s coming before the Fantastic Four. But this is the first time what works is outweighed by what doesn’t.

“Betrayed” makes me so angry because I had high hopes for Secret Invasion. I liked the first two episodes a lot, and I was okay with saying Fury had lost a step because it indicated he was going to get it back or at least prove that he hadn’t. But they’ve stopped that now, and they’re humiliating Fury, retconning him into a useless bureaucrat who piggybacked on the Skrulls to get ahead. It’s also excusing the Skrull infiltration of Earth, likely because they’re planning to make some half-assed illegal immigration argument with it. It’s a shame; for two episodes, Secret Invasion was on the right track.