Marvel’s Secret Invasion Series Actually Sounds Kind of Fascinating -Et

Occasionally, people will (incorrectly) insist that Marvel comics and the movie stories inspired by them would be better off if they were somehow devoid of political themes or ideas. But in a recent interview with vanity fair, secret invasion Executive producer Jonathan Schwartz compared the series to John le Carré’s classic Cold War-era spy thrillers and pointed to more recent shows, such as FX’s. The Americans and Showtime’s Homeland, as sources of inspiration.

“We often see Nick Fury doing the right thing,” Schwartz said. “We don’t always see him doing it in a perfectly morally correct way. All of those things have ramifications. Without getting too specific, the things Nick Fury had to do to protect Earth come at a cost.”

set some time later Avengers Endgame, secret invasion tells the story of how Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) finally comes out of hiding to deal with a long-standing problem involving shape-shifting Skrull refugees first introduced in 2019. captain marvel. The last time we saw the Skrulls in Spider-Man: Far From HomeMany of them, like Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), were still willingly living as humans and working as secret agents for Fury while he worked to find them a suitable new homeworld somewhere in space. However, according to Jackson, Fury’s inability to keep his word is a big part of what he establishes. secret invasion in motion, and the series will focus on what happens when some of the aliens decide to take matters into their own hands.

“Nick had a whole Skrull spy network because they could shapeshift and go places people couldn’t go,” Jackson said. “They kept their word. They worked for him, but he hasn’t done what he said he was going to do. They want a home. They want to live. They want to live as they are. They want to live in their skin. They don’t want to live in ours.”

Jackson said that the concern of not knowing “who is friend, who is foe” is what animates secret invasion and described the show as tapping into our own current political moment by asking, “What happens when people are afraid and don’t understand other people?”

Obviously, Fury will have more than enough reasons to distrust secret invasionThe main antagonist of Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir), the Skrull separatist who leads the charge to infiltrate the world’s governments by posing as ordinary humans. But the story is likely to be a lot more complicated when it comes to Gravik’s fellow Separatist, G’iah (Emilia Clarke), who also happens to be the estranged daughter of Talos.

“There’s kind of a punk feeling you get from this girl,” Clarke said. “She is a refugee girl who has had Talos for a father, you know what I mean? Maybe the fact that we didn’t know that she had a child until this moment she tells you everything you need to know about their relationship.

In the past, Marvel’s reluctance to spend time digging into the ramifications of things like the displacement of the Skrulls in captain marvel has had a way of making the films’ attempts at political commentary feel pretty flat, which might have been the point. But secret invasion sounds very interested in picking up on those threads and really pulling on them with some intent, and that might be what it takes for the series to land with some weight when it premieres on June 21.