Secret Invasion recap: Did you get what you wanted from this life?
Lives and friendships are lost as Nick Fury starts to get his act together
TV Reviews Secret Invasion
And thus, the old “everybody calls me Fury, not Nicholas, not Joseph, not Nick” rule of Skrull identification maintains its (more or less) perfect record, with this episode of Secret Invasion confirming what particularly paranoid viewers have suspected for a couple of episodes now: Don Cheadle’s James “Rhodey” Rhodes is a Skrull. How long has he been a Skrull? Is the real Rhodey still alive? We have no idea, and Secret Invasion has no interest in answering any questions… at least not in this episode.
What we do know is that Rhodey Skrull is the one who contacted Priscilla Fury in the last episode, because he meets with her at a church here to give her some new orders: kill your husband. It’s fun seeing Cheadle go full mustache-twirly in this episode, though it doesn’t really escalate until later, and—if nothing else—it’s nice that Secret Invasion is giving some underrepresented MCU actors opportunities to stretch their muscles a bit beyond what the movies let them do.
Unfortunately for Rhodey and Priscilla, Fury has bugged… something (weird that they didn’t explain it after all the hullaballoo with the owl, unless I missed it) and has been listening in on their conversation. That means he knows Rhodey is a Skrull and that his wife has been ordered to kill him, even though she tries to get out of it by reminding Rhodey that Fury has lost his edge and will probably just die on his own soon enough (as you may recall from every previous episode of this show).
Meanwhile, we see in some quick flashbacks that G’iah used the Super Skrull machine on herself before being shot, so she recovers from last week’s seemingly lethal injury with the help of Iron Man 3’s Extremis tech. She and Talos later have a conversation on what appears to be a legally distinct version of the Avengers: Endgame bench, with G’iah refusing to turn her back on the fight and pleading with her father to tell her what his plan is, because Gravik actually has a plan and it’s probably going to work.
And, unfortunately for her and for him, Talos’ plan sucks shit: He and Fury will single-handedly stop Gravik and the Skrull rebellion somehow, then they’ll go to President Dermot Mulroney to ask for a prize, at which point he will graciously allow all one million Skrull refugees to remain on Earth—disguised as humans—forever. Talos figures that if the Skrulls keep doing nice things, humanity will accept that they’re nice. G’iah rightly tells him this is stupid and storms off.
Back at the Fury household, Priscilla comes home to find Fury making tea and acting kind of weird. He tells her that she was the biggest mistake of his life, but even knowing that, he probably wouldn’t have done anything differently. It’s sad and sweet, especially because he knows she’s there to kill him. The two talk through their relationship a bit, revealing (to the audience at least) that their whole marriage was a scheme for her to get close to him, and together they recite her favorite poem, Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment,” before pulling out their respective guns and firing.
They both miss on purpose, with Fury joking that he doesn’t know if that means they should get a divorce or renew their vows, and before he leaves—warning her that Gravik will come after her now—Priscilla asks Fury if he still would’ve loved her if she had been “her true self.” Fury says “I guess we’ll never know.” Samuel L. Jackson plays it very nice, though the moment does feel a bit rushed. We’ve only just met Priscilla, but clearly she means the world to Fury, a character we obviously love if we’re watching this thing, and it would’ve been nice to sit in his devastation a bit.
Fury, newly single and ready to party, grabs a $5,000 bottle of Pappy Van Winkle and meets up with Rhodey at his hotel room claiming he wants to settle their beef. Rhodey, freshly showered, doesn’t really buy it, especially when Fury starts telling him that Skrulls have infiltrated the U.S. government and that there’s even one with a close relationship to President Mulroney (I don’t care what the character’s real name is, even though I know it’s Ritson). Rhodey, lulled into a false sense of security by the knowledge that Fury has lost his edge (as you may recall from every previous episode of this show), laughs it off and threatens to release security camera footage of Gravik shooting Maria Hill while disguised as Fury if the real Fury doesn’t drop his conspiracy theories. Rhodey then chugs the rest of the bourbon as Fury leaves, revealing to Talos in a car outside that it contained a “liquid motion tracker.”
Talos and Fury tail Rhodey to a meeting with President Mulroney (who smells the booze on Rhodey’s breath, which is a nice little detail), who is getting ready for some kind of big conference with the Russians about the terrorist attack in the premiere. But, on the way, Rhodey calls in Gravik’s goons and they attack the president’s convoy, making a point to yell a bunch of things in Russian so any survivors will think it was a Russian attack.
I thought this shootout was well-staged, with the various helicopter crashes all seeming like a tangible part of the action and not just obvious CG stuff, though it felt a little weird to see such a protracted gun battle in an MCU thing. Anyway, Fury and Talos show up with some soldiers and save President Mulroney, but Gravik sneaks in close and stabs Talos as Fury tries to escape. Unless he also used the Super Skrull machine at some point when we weren’t looking, that might be it for Ben Mendelsohn and Talos, which should hit harder than I think it does.
Maybe it’s because this is turning into a show where not much happens for 2/3 of the runtime and then someone gets killed or we find out that someone has a secret wife (the two ways a Secret Invasion episode can end), which is beginning to seem a bit rote since we have no real sense of how Fury intends to save the world. He’s just kind of drifting through each episode, doing his best, which is fine because Jackson is always compelling in every role, but I’d like to get some real meat at some point.
Stray Observations
- I am, again, dropping the episode a full letter grade over the A.I. intro. I think artificial intelligence is a plague that must be eradicated immediately if we value art and culture at all, because even if something like this didn’t (or isn’t meant to) “replace” the work done by a human, it’s only a matter of time before the option to do that becomes more and more enticing to greedy executives who hate the thing that makes them rich. I continue to be appalled that this company, by which I mean Disney, would ever insist on using a technology that is so inherently toxic to the very work that it produces, and I can only hope that sanity eventually prevails in the face of this stupid, stupid snake oil tech fad.
- So when did Rhodey become a Skrull? His last appearance before this was in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, where I believe he was already working in some high-level government position. Before that he was shooting Thanos’ army while a raccoon was riding on his back. It would be cool and crazy if we find out that the switch happened a long time ago, but I don’t think that will happen. As it stands, though, I have a hard time really caring about this without knowing when he was replaced (just like with Martin Freeman in the premiere).
- This was a weirdly short episode, coming in a full 20 minutes under the nearly hour-long second episode. I wonder if something was cut? There’s a lot of stuff here about Russia and the U.S. potentially going to war, and we never do see any Russians. Marvel will probably never admit it if something was cut, like the rumors about a virus storyline being removed from TFATWS, but it is a bit odd.
- And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
123 Comments
Was the fight well-staged? I dunno, just rolling up in your car to the very edge of a firefight and grabbing your guns out of the trunk seemed a bit odd. Also, I presume the writers are aware the actual US president travels the world in a 747 and a tank-limo? Maybe this is supposed to be some sort of covert last-minute-planned thing, but that would make the Secret Service even more paranoid and he’d probably just be in a tank-tank. This is supposed to be a world on the edge of conflict, right? Like the sub thing last week these set-pieces are just lazily and cheaply set up like it’s an episode of NCIS or something. We should be spending time with the bad guys seeing how clever they are and how they have their agents everywhere to set these things up.
I mean, given the level of technology that is possible in this world, that SHIELD lost control of, the Suburbans that weren’t hit should have immediately TAKEN OFF, actually showing us what was implied to exist in The Winter Soldier. That might have been cool.
Yeah, in the world of the MCU, with the tech that would be available to the US government, the President would be riding in a 10x better version of the presidential limo. Not to mention, where every the president goes the skies are locked down. There’s no way helicopters would get anywhere near the transport.
Or, you know, showing how those measures are all overcome would be INTERESTING in a spy thriller!The real world present day Secret Service would have brushed off that attack. It’s just, I dunno like this is a cheap episodic show where they just don’t have the time or budget to make anything like that really good.
I’d fully expect the MCU US President at this point to be protected by “shields,” however little sense they make. This is a world where Pym Particles are being openly exploited for crying out loud it should be unrecognizable!
On this new episode of Marvel’s Watching Paint Dry…The Paint continues to Dry.
Well, it would get tiring if absolutely everything ended with an M. Night Shyamalan-style twist.
I mean, there’s a lot about the US and Russia going to war…but it’s only because the Skrulls pull the opposite of a “No Russian” in their attempt to kill the President.
Nick FuryEdge Lord
This was another good episode and it’s astounding to me that it’s still getting a D+. I find it highly unlikely that the episode is shorter because Marvel was worried about impacting diplomatic relations with the US and Russia Lmao. Every Disney+ show has had episodes that were much shorter. And how did people really not know that was Don Cheadle on the phone?
His grade is actually a C+. He’s just artificially tanking the score over the opening credits controversy.
I am no fan of AI but designers and storyboard artists still had to plot out the intro, tell the program what to render, and put it all together. Unless the title sequence is painted frame by frame, by hand, computer automation was involved somehow.Anyways, another solid episode. They seem pretty confident in their execution so I’m going to give it some slack and not jump to any story conclusions yet.
Sam sticks it to Disney for using AI by dropping their review grade but doesn’t resign in protest over this site using AI articles. The outrage seems so performative and disingenuous.
Yes. Why on earth wouldn’t the entertainment writer give up their income to make a point? I’m sure they can find plenty of other avenues for gainful employment in 2023’s flourishing journalism and entertainment industries…Look, I’m all for saying “fuck you” in every way possible to the ghouls who have ruined these sites (so interesting that they forced everyone to move to Hollywood for “better industry reporting” and have so few articles on the strike…), but you can’t blame the writers here for giving up what could be the only steady job they’ll find for months just because their bosses suck.Don’t blame labor for the bullshit decisions of management. That’s 100% NOT the same as criticizing one of the richest corporations in the world for cheaping out and jumping on the AI bandwagon so that they could churn out butt ugly garbage for less.
The outrage seems performative and disingenuous- The AV Club
Also, I don’t remember outrage about the lost wages when Falcon and Winter Soldier just didn’t have an opening credits sequence.
So if Talos is dead, will there be equal outrage as there was to Hill dying?And you continue to be hopelessly flawed in your thinking about AI and technology advancement in general.
Sam will eventually age into the sort of person that yells at kids to get off his lawn lol. Raging against AI will get you nowhere except on our eventual AI overlord’s list of humans suitable for cancelation.
“You hate the exploitative nature of AI under Late Stage Capitalism? Then you must hate TECHNOLOGY!”Dime store techbro futurism is increasingly interchangeable with religion at this point.
The demonization of AI is equally religious.And they didn’t say “hate”. But opinionated people are woefully uneducated about how it works, what it can do, and what can be done with it.
Mostly because it hasn’t been used for anything other than stealing artist’s work while putting them out of it.
no, because Talos isnt a woman. He wasnt “fridged”, which is whats outraging people about Hill’s death.
Hill’s death is pretty much the same as Talos. They were both friends and colleagues of Nick Fury who had been in multiple other MCU projects before they were killed by Gravik. Both deaths will primarily serve to motivate Fury, Talos’ likely also will impact Gi’ah.The focus on “fridging” in comics was because it was disproportionately women who were killed unceremoniously to further the mostly male protagonists’ stories. But that isn’t the case with this series and it hasn’t been the case with the MCU as a whole. The whole outrage is from people who don’t bother to understand or care about context.
There’s a weird thing about western culture , in that killing off a woman character has a lot more gravity attached to it than a man and is a bit more shocking , I mean this purely in a writing situation , not in a one gender is better or worse than the other . It didnt used to happen as much in media (basically the male character bodycount would be higher than the female one ), and take for example the hostage situation in your average 70s /80 action show or movie …the bad guys shoot a guard to show they’re serious , but when the pretty teller gets next in line to get a bullet , they’ll be saved.By the 90s /2000s it changed a lot partially as some writers reversed it to be edgy ( “they go to shoot the guard , but the teller gets killed instead to show how hardcore this is ).Also maybe this balance is based around whether your’re a straight guy or not? I think as more women writers and non cis people became involved in shows they changed the balance . (“the good looking security guard us way more interesting to keep around than that catty bitch we saw earlier).I had a theory that if you had two X chromosomes and were a side character in RTD era Dr Who you were doomed , but I think someone counted the numbers up and that may have been an exaggeration on my part)It’d be interesting to do proper research on it .or rather someone who knew what they were doing do a paper on on it.
You skipped past the whole “character received no development prior to being killed,” which is why Hill fits more than Talos.
If you’re considering Secret Invasion in a vacuum on its own – sure. But Hill has been around since the first Avengers movie and had several appearances since, more than Talos has had.
Appearances aren’t development. Many fridged female characters “appeared” a lot before conveniently dying. She received exactly zero development in any of those appearances. Can you say what drives her? Share anything about her personal life? Her ethos? Other than “loyal to Fury,” what do we know about her?
Tough-minded, capable, reasonable, personable, and loyal. She’s not the most developed character but she certainly has qualities that are consistent from movie to movie. But besides all that, a character being well-characterized and / or three-dimensional has nothing to do with fridging, which is entirely about a character being killed off solely to push the main character’s story along. If you don’t like Talos as a comparable, Coulson almost certainly is one as his characterization was the same as Hill’s. And the controversy around fridging wasn’t that it happened, but that it happened disproportionately to female characters. Which isn’t the case with the MCU.
Thank you.
We need an article how Marvel and movie need to stop killing male character to motivate another character. Uncle Ben, Coulson, Yinsen, Three warriors, Odin, Vision and now Talos.
Also Erskine in Captain America and Quicksilver in Age of Ultron
Don’t forget the guy with Tony in the cave in Iron Man.
Quicksilver’s death doesn’t motivate the heroes – it demonstrates that he was at heart a hero, and was motivated by the Avengers to change.
Are you suggesting that men and women have always had equal stuff? Do you not see a problem with fridging…? Woof that’s an ignorant statement. One time a white guy told me he doesn’t think racism exists cuz he’s never seen it. You guys should be friends.
Are you suggesting that men and women have always had equal stuff? Do you not see a problem with fridging…?No…my comment is specific to the MCU. And yes, I understand the issue with fridging, I just don’t think that is what happened here. The MCU puts many of its characters in perilous situations and they have had quite a few deaths. And there have been as many male heroic characters who have died as female. Even before Talos, you could have argued that what happened to Hill is pretty much exactly what happened to Coulson in the first Avengers movie. One time a white guy told me he doesn’t think racism exists cuz he’s never seen it. You guys should be friends.What’s the point of this comment? I hate that people argue this way and see people as either great because they 100% agree with their opinion or 100% awful. I do not see me pointing out that the MCU has killed off male and female characters alike as akin to someone ignoring racism as a whole exists.
Coulson’s death in the Avengers was the technical definition of fridging. They specifically say his death was used to motivate the heroes.
If they bring Maria back to life and make her the lead of a fun action adventure spy show for seven seasons, that’ll be great.
Fury suddenly having a wife only makes Hill’s death worse. There’s no reason she couldn’t have been that one person Fury trusted who’s betryal here was a breaking point.Wouldn’t have even needed to be romantic. A trusted confidant…
No, Barsanti’s actually right about AI. He’s just wrong (& IMO unethical) to keep docking the scores over it.
Is it possible Rhodey’s just become a bit of a dick, and the fact he’s a human turncoat is the big misdirect?
Disney still exists, Sam. Maybe try two letter grades?
Also, patiently awaiting the fridging conversation about Talos?
RIP Talos, your plan sucked shit but you were a pretty good guy for a Skrull and I did appreciate you taking the piss out of Nick FuryThanks for showing the death of Maria Hill again & freeze framing on it. Appreciate that, it didn’t hurt enough already
Have to get her those residuals somehow.
Exactly what I was thinking but it most likely is reduced due to screentime. This was most likely equal parts a cost-cutting measure. She’s probably been shifted to a variable fixed rate for each recap appearance.
I do notice her end credit in each episode so maybe not far off.
I remember after her death in the first episode someone posted here that they checked IMDB and she was credited for every (?) other episode this season, so they assumed she was not actually dead. It would be funny if she was credited in the rest of the episodes this season because they keep showing her death scene.
He punched that window good, too.
Some of the best non-Hulk window punching in the MCU so far.
I don’t think Talos understood what a bargaining chip is. You don’t hold it over someone’s head after you’ve done the thing for them.
“I crushed *that* insurgency, but you’d better believe I could lead a more effective one.”
it’s extremely funny that barsanti’s stance is rallying so many ‘well actually’s about AI.
To be fair, he’s the writer most threatened by being out-performed by a chatbot.
I dont think at this point a chatbot could get me as angry as his articles do . Actually I think I enjoy them now honestly. The style is fine , its just the takes are the complete opposite to mine. Like totally opposite , but I cant stop reading them.Is this Stockholm syndrome !?!I dont care! Marry me Sam!!!
ZING!But yes, no lies detected in your comment.
All due respect, the whole dropping a letter grade for each episode thing comes off really petty and makes it kind of hard to take your reviews seriously.I agree with your overall point, but that’s not the way to go about this. You’re not “taking a stand” against the threat of A.I. by doing this; you’re just sticking it to everyone else that worked on this show, many of whom are on strike right now. That letter grade is supposed to be an overall reflection of the whole body of work. If the quality of the show merited those grades that’s fine, but you’re docking the product as whole for a 90 second intro. It’s a little disingenuous. You could have just as easily docked the final season grade once the whole thing came out and made your point while still grading each episode objectively.A.I has become a worrying trend and again, no one is knocking you for wanting to take some of the piss out of Disney- lord knows they’ve made enough questionanable decisions to deserve it. I would just caution you to keep in mind Disney is more than the suits that signed off of this; it’s also thousands of underpaid writers and actors, many of whom need our support right now.
I haven’t taken AV Club’s reviews seriously for about three years. I read them now for the LOLs and to see how many errors I can spot.
IMO he could give every episode an A+, and that does nothing to support the thousands of unpaid writer and actors. Writers especially are likely to read the review, see why he gave it the grade he did, and probably agree with him.My issue is, Disney’s the one that will probably never read these recaps. It’s so toothless.
Also – he is LITERALLY a writer also – and likely has sympathy for the WGA right now (and add SAG-AFTRA to the list as of this morning apparently)… He explained his position, and why he did it – you can adjust your mental map accordingly based on that.
It’s completely stupid.
“I am, again, dropping the episode a full letter grade over the A.I. intro” – so you’re denegrating the work of all the actual artists, writers, actors, crew etc who worked hard on the show over a terrible corporate decision?Feels like that’s adding to the problem, not highlighting and detracting from it.
No, it’s not. The letter grade docking in all likelihood won’t change anything, but the only way to stop corporations from serving us AI gruel is by vocally deriding it until the backlash costs them money.Were all the AI evangelists in these comments also eager when corporations tried to shove NFT’s into video games? We were almost stuck with that moronic crypto garbage until the public turned against it thanks to the outcries from fans, journalists, and, yes, lowly entertainment bloggers.The money people will shove trash down our throats until we speak up to tell them to stop.
Because these corporations famously take the hits on their profits themsevels and never pass it on by cutting jobs, cancelling shows, or say… underpaying writers and actors?
So, we have to allow them to get rid of people’s jobs because, if not, they’ll… get rid of people’s jobs?This is the kind of righteous inaction that leads to the world slowly getting worse and worse, step by step.
Actual Russians wouldn’t communicate in Russian while attacking POTUS.
They might if they were drunk!
Yeah that’s the sorta laziness that permeates the show.
I mean …have they ever played Call of Duty MW2?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Russian
I am, again, dropping the episode a full letter grade over the A.I. intro.
That’s really stupid. The intro sequence has nothing to do with “Was the episode any good?” You don’t like it, that’s fine. But it’s also irrelevant.
I don’t know what I think about the storyline with Fury and his skrull wife, but I will say their final scene at the dining room table was well done, I really appreciated the maturity of it.
SLJ sitting at a table and talking with someone is generally good. See also both his big Cheadle scenes, the firing one and the one in this ep. “Acting!” [makes Jon Lovitz arm-sweep but is also serious]
The whole show could have just been Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Skrull with Jackson as Alec Guinness and Ben Mendelsohn as Ian Bannen. That miniseries was six hours of mostly just people having conversations but it was gripping.
“Genius!”
“Thank you!”
“Thank YOU!”
This doesn’t read like a C+ review. Also, I continue to argue the grade drop is churlish and unprofessional especially given that anything Marvel does these days already gets an unspoken grade drop because “Hey, it’s fashionable to shit on these days”.
Another D. This is pretty unprofessional Barsanti.
That is some hardcore insecurity in the Stray Observations coming from someone whose job is first on the AI chopping block. Be more confident in your writing, Barsanti.
This is a good argument in favour of recaps. I’ve fallen asleep three times attempting to watch this. It’s just so boring. But I also need to know everything that happens in the MCU. Thanks for making the content of this episode digestible for me!
I think artificial intelligence is a plague that must be eradicated immediately if we value art and culture at all, because even if something like this didn’t (or isn’t meant to) “replace” the work done by a human, it’s only a matter of time before the option to do that becomes more and more enticing to greedy executives who hate the thing that makes them rich.Almost as if the problem is Corporate America and capitalism, not any one technology… I realize capitalism isn’t going away and that not enough politicians are refuse to accept corporate donations to change that, but I don’t see how “eradicating” a technology is any more likely or productive. As for knocking every episode a letter grade in protest… I mean, you do you. I think a more effective form of protest would be to boycott covering the show altogether, but gotta have your cake and eat it to, I guess.
Presumably if he boycotted, someone else would cover it. At least this way he gets his message out. And I support it!
I’m not so convinced. Writers for this site across the board seem upset with A.I. and rightfully concerned that corporations will use it to replace them. None of them seem to have any problems inserting a snarky line here or linking to an article about how awful A.I. is there, so I’m extremely skeptical that by refusing to cover Secret Invasion, Barsanti wouldn’t “get his message” out.I would also more broadly challenge the editorial team that assigns recaps to boycott the show entirely (strength in solidarity and all that). Coverage helps the show. Not covering the show certainly hurts Disney (and I really like to see Disney hurt) more than docking each episode a letter grade.
if you’re an adult and you watch stuff like this you shouldn’t be allowed to vote or drive a car
A spy thriller with a coat of MCU paint is a perfectly cromulent form of entertainment. In theory, this is not good.
If you’re an adult, you should know basic capitalization and punctuation.
You are a very boring person.
And sullying the good name of Timothy Dalton, to boot.
If you’re a child you shouldn’t be allowed to comment on Barsanti articles unsupervised.
Once again, I’m not convinced we watched the same show, since clearly there’s a lot of good spy stuff happening here and your response is “I want it all explicitly spelled out for me.” … Maybe you just don’t like spy stuff?
This whole thing might go down better as a binge. There’s a bunch of great acting scenes with actors acting with good, chewy dialogue. I think acting can gut-it through an average comic book story, but it needs to accumulate so that by the end the character work sort of bowls over the plot. Hawkeye is a great binge, unspooling week-to-week didn’t do it any favors. WandaVision and to a lesser degree Loki work because they reset every episode – WV with the Classic TV format, and Loki because they portalled to a new setting every episode. Moon Knight worked episodically, Ms Marvel should have been a binge. And, yeah, after the first go, the show can be binged from now until the next future upheaval. But the long game gets hobbled if the real-time weekly model sours word of mouth. So idk. Don Cheadle is killing it. He’s a female Skrull? Interesting. Jackson has always been good at one-on-one, across-the-table scenes. No one is on autopilot. The good shit needs to accumulate.Maybe D+ should keep their subscription at $79 a year (which is an ok deal imho) and offer a $5.99 one-time fee per series – after episode 2 – to get the remaining series in one go.
I’ve watched.. every Marvel TV show? I think? But this one is wearing on me. I agree it would be better as a binge. Or a miniseries (like 3 hour long episodes or something) – or you know, a movie. What’s really the difference between these shows and a movie besides milking them out for six weeks?And having to do cliffhangers at the end of every episode doesn’t do the story any favors.
It feels like these “retreats” or whatever con-fab these guys went to was really just a meet-and-greet for agents, producers, project titles, and package deals. The Russos left and Favreau jumped over to Star Wars, they needed some solid mid-career guys to pilot the ship and not 3 dozen “jump balls” for bargain strivers with one-surprise hit under their belts. And I don’t have anything against “strivers with one-surprise-hit under their belts” but here’s how it goes: A) They hit Big: Jackpot! (Think the “Everything Everywhere” guys rn)B) A hot agent jumps on them C) Nutso hot agent works themselves near to death (or Nepo-babies it) and gets them a deal at Marvel (cattle call for inexpensive Young Talent)D) Young Strivers are so blown away by working at Marvel (Marvel!!) – they get freaked out that they might failE) Disney insists on crazy production timelinesF) The combo of overworked exhaustion and fear of failure causes the Young Strivers (yes even them) to pull their punches and play it safe.
I see you took my comment into consideration regarding downgrading it a whole letter every episode and where the score would be at. It would be an F+ by now and that would be the same grade for the last But it also is limiting your critique. That said you could’ve made this a D- instead of a repeat of last week’s score.It would be better if there were a separate bias score perhaps number based.Just admit it Barsanti the letter grading system in and of itself does not allow much leeway for personal bias. There’s only 5 of them A, B,C,D, and F.
Did you get what you wanted from this life?I don’t know. I’m not done with it yet.
“that might be it for Ben Mendelsohn and Talos”No point in watching any more of the show , as he was the only remotely interesting thing in it .This Show Is Just …The Worst.
So whether Talos is dead or not, how does Fury “win” this? Is he gonna pull the helicarrier out of mothballs and drop it on Gravik? Is he going to make an impassioned speech that will turn the tide? Is some overpowered special guest star gonna show up? Are the communist space ants going to show up and save the day? Will KANG, as part of some weird long play?
I mean Captain Marvel would make sense, but….I don’t expect it to make sense.
Why did we need Fury’s wife? Couldn’t we have done this whole song and dance with Maria?Doesn’t need to be a romantic relationship, but we’ve known Hill longer as an audience so the sting would have been more genuine rather than a hastily thrown together side note.
Remember when Secret Invasion was a badass comic storyline where superheroes were replaced with impostors?
I mean, I’m not one of those pedant, “IT WASN’T FRAME FOR FRAME THE SAME AS THE COMIC IT WAS BASED ON, SO IT’S SHIT”, but…there IS something to be said for having a perfectly good storyboard from which to spin a show/movie and ignoring the bulk of it to produce a far inferior product.
(Qualification: I’ve been saying this since they shit-canned two brilliant storylines in favor of a handful of weak-ass movies – the Walt Simonson run of THOR…and the ACTUAL Civil War run, which started because some reality-show TV superheroes accidentally blew up an elementary school full of children.)
I saw the top part of this image and thought “Oh, this looks cool” and then saw the Slott credit at the bottom and realized “Oh, this is probably terrible.”
Slott’s run on Avengers: The Initiative was actually a ton of fun. Slott in his wheelhouse writing a bunch of teen characters at a superhero academy, where all the teachers are ex-teen heroes like the New Warriors. Highly recommend!
When people tell you they’re feeding you a nano tracker, believe them.Just as replacing artists with AI is unethical, taking points off of your review scores multiple times for the same offense is also unethical, Sam.
“I am, again, dropping the episode a full letter grade over the A.I.
intro. I think artificial intelligence is a plague that must be
eradicated immediately if we value art and culture at all”Jesus Christ, Sam, read a book. There are more things in heaven and earth…
I think artificial intelligence is a plague that must be eradicated immediately if we value art and culture at all, because even if something like this didn’t (or isn’t meant to) “replace” the work done by a human, it’s only a matter of time before the option to do that becomes more and more enticing to greedy executives who hate the thing that makes them rich. I continue to be appalled that this company, by which I mean Disney, would ever insist on using a technology that is so inherently toxic to the very work that it produces, and I can only hope that sanity eventually prevails in the face of this stupid, stupid snake oil tech fad.You sound silly. AI isn’t a “tech fad.” AI in some form or another has been used in the sciences for well over a decade. It’s been integral in astronomy particularly. Even in creative fields like CGI AI algorithms have been used to connect keyframes, model explosions, etc. for ages now. Oddly nobody complained that Westworld’s opening credits were made with AI assistance, mainly because they had no idea. On the contrary, the were often lauded for how cool and creative they were. The backlash only started when AI programs became more easily accessible for everyone. Don’t get me wrong, like any tech, AI has the potential to be detrimental. For instance, having models scrub the internet and vacuum up copyrighted works without the consent of the artists as is happening. Potentially worse, getting so good that they can be used to spread convincing disinformation on a large scale. Also things like allowing AI to make autonomous decisions in warfare, which every major power is already experimenting with. Point being, AI isn’t going anywhere, so calling it a fad is silly.
So many of these comments are so funny. It’s “unethical” to drop the grade a letter, as if the grade means absolutely anything. Y’all, this is boring Disney schlock being reviewed by a former B-string/current C-string-on-a-good-day entertainment blog. The stakes could not literally not be any lower, let the man have his symbolic gesture.
Whoa! This maverick renegade TV critic doesn’t even care WHAT the characters name is! Can he do that?? 🤯
What I want to know, is why is Rhodey still a colonel? There are about 900 people in the military that have at least 1 star, and the president’s closest military advisor doesn’t have one, or probably 2 stars? It makes no goddamn sense.
I think it only makes sense if he’s no longer in the military, which would explain why he’s always in suits and not in uniform. More likely is the writers just don’t do their research.
Yeah, because even a cursory knowledge of how the military works in the US would tell you that it is top-heavy with flag officers in peacetime. You either move up or out. If you are a colonel for 10 years, you are being given a clear message: “You are done here”.
This show has its moments and some of the actors are pretty good in it, but largely it just feels like its stuck in 2nd gear. It’s not bad, but we’re now 4 episodes into a 6 episode run and it feels like its just there. The stakes don’t seem near as important as they should be. The spy stuff, what little there actually is, seems rather pedestrian. Right now it has the looks of what I call the Disney+ curse; where a 6 episode series would either be better served as a movie or a full 10 episode series. If this were cut down to a movie, maybe it would move quicker and things would have more impact. If it had a full 10 (or 12) episode run, maybe it would have time develop more characters, more emotions, plots, etc. Instead, its just stuck in the middle, touching on different things but never really fully connecting. The whole series just feels perfunctory.
The problem with the entire shootout is that there isn’t going to be a single Russian corpse left on that battlefield — but it’s going to be absolutely littered with Skrulls. Either the writing is about to plumb new depths of stupidity, or the entire “false flag trick everyone into going to war” op has just been completely blown by the op’s own creators.
Oh my God I can’t believe I didn’t think of that already. And Gravik’s been really reckless with the lives of his people—like they’re nameless mooks who don’t matter—when yeah he should be exceedingly careful. And if he just has so many people embedded anywhere that it’s not really a problem, then…well they’ve won?
I was confused about this as well. In the attack in the first episode, they had infiltrated a real terrorist group and just replaced the leadership. But I don’t see how they could have gotten a real Russian attack group with helicopters and all into England.
Well, to be fair, there were already Skrulls littered on the grounds of the British general’s estate.
Really, the problem isn’t that, it’s the detail that Skrulls revert when they die, yet just live among us. So if a Skrull gets hit by a truck in a random accident, there’s a dead Skrull in the middle of a crowd of people. And so on.
Frankly, by now they could have settled a ghost town or a dying town. No need for a planet, there are a whole swatch of towns in the USA that have infrastructure but are inaccessible, which seems like a good thing. Give them some Wakandan cloaking tech or whatever Stark has along those lines, and boom, now they’re on Earth, have a haven where if they’re the only ones there, then no need to wear human disguises, and they can just keep any random visitors out. Hell, put them in fucking Wyoming.
It’s at least better than the Asgard thing which is absolutely ridiculous. But Marvel Asgard has always been ridiculous.
And I’ll end my rant by saying that this is why Dire Wraiths were better than Skrulls.
Unless the bulk of them are hired mercenaries and the only Skrulls are Gravik and his right-hand man. It’s stretching things a bit – what mercenary company would accept a job of “come with us to attack the President of the United States” – but unless they were incredibly confident or all of them have Extremis healing powers it’s the only thing that makes sense.
Really seems like Fury should have killed Skrhodey in the shower
Maybe they should have paid the writers some of the 212 million they spent on this series, because I don’t see it on the screen. Four episodes of mediocre television. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was better written, especially the pod years. The Ghost Rider / Framework pods in season 4 were some of the best superhero media ever put on film.I think that a D+ is far more than this show deserves.
You’re little letter grade protest is hilarious! It’s OK for self-checkouts and other machines to replace workers, but you draw the line at opening credits! Ha! It’s called technology and progress. Should print writers penalize your work because your Internet reviews have replaced their print reviews? Get over yourself!
Wouldn’t it be interesting if Rhodey’s been a Skrull since before Iron Man 2? Like the replacement happened when the actor replacement happened?
A funny gag, maybe. He’d be the worst Skrull infiltrator in the world!
Maybe someone noted this, but Gravik uses a Groot arm during the battle in this episode, right? They’re not just using Extremis, but the other ‘samples’ they have access to
It’s fun how people are so upset about the dropping of the episode a letter grade, as if the letter grade of the review means absolutely anything to anyone anywhere.
“I am, again, dropping the episode a full letter grade over the A.I. intro.”Repetitive, redundant, and childish. Because how he keeps harping on this, it’s actually making me start to side with the AI.
“I hate that you keep telling me not to jump off a cliff, so I might just JUMP OFF! That’ll show you!”
Funny thing about Raymond Carver. That famous brevity came from his editor. His maunscripts were often quite verbose.