Home is where the heart is but there’s little heart to be found in Secret Invasion’s series finale. Secret Invasion Episode 6, “Home” brings a losing battle to a close.
Fury’s showdown with Gravik brings some emotional gravitas to the show, as he finally admits he made a mistake with how he treated the Skrulls. It doesn’t do much to quell Gravik’s rage, and Kingsley Ben-Adir gets to chew on some more meaty monologues that attempt to make this show more Shakespearean than it deserves.
Still, there is something satisfying about a hero owning up to his mistakes as he’s dying of radiation poisoning…Oh, wait!
Just kidding, because it’s not even Fury it’s G’iah pretending to be Fury. When Gravik takes the Avenger’s DNA that G’iah-Fury offers she also gets transformed by the Project Extremis machine.
So instead of one insanely overpowered Skrull, you get two! If you are only here for a slugfest where Gravik is unceremoniously disposed of then you might be satisfied with this ending.
If you ever wondered, “Gee what would Emilia Clarke look like with Drax’s arm CGI’ed on?” you might be satisfied with this ending. Nothing says we couldn’t afford the real Avengers like a mess of miscellaneous limbs and powers being CGIed onto an MCU newcomer.
I am guessing, however, that a very small subset of fans were satisfied by Gravik’s arc.
The showdown in the hospital where Sonya tricks Skrull-Rhodey into moving the President so that Fury can get to him is a little bit more exciting just because there are real stakes behind whether the President will launch a nuclear attack. Thank goodness he doesn’t, he just ends up announcing an all-out war on the Skrulls anyway.
In the end, neither Fury nor Talos or Gravik got what they wanted, just a brand new problem to beleaguer this population of refugees. Not to mention all the humans killed by the lunatic hit squads inspired by the president’s speech to hunt Skrulls.
Usually, I’d be the last person to complain about shorter episodes in a world where every drama thinks it needs 65 minutes. However, the runtimes on Secret Invasion combined with the anticlimactic ending seem to support the good old “this could have been a movie” complaint.
Would the movie version have been any better? Maybe not, but it’s hard to think it would have been much worse.
There is a small amount of promise at the end of the series, which could lead to better things for the characters who survive.
Sonya proposes she and G’iah team up to save the rest of the captured humans and fight the President’s war on Skrulls. A team-up of Olivia Colman and Emilia Clarke (an underrated comedic actress herself) could provide some real fun in the future.
Rhodey and Ross are both released, with it already confirmed Rhodey will star in Armor Wars (and then maybe we’ll get confirmation on when he was captured instead of just clues.)
Finally, Fury survives Secret Invasion and flies off into outer space with his wife to work on a peace treaty with the Kree, which means there is still time for Marvel to give Samuel L. Jackson a worthy send-off from this franchise. What’s next for him only Kevin Feige knows.