Secret Invasion, or: How Not To Do a Spy (or any other) Miniseries
So this year, instead of giving just one month to the Mouse, I decided to give more, because there were several ongoing shows I wanted to watch (up to and including Ashoka next month). This means I also got to see Secret Invasion, which just finished and works as a text book of how not to do a tv miniseries along with how to get the wrong creative lessons from the success of Winter Soldier and Andor, respectively.
Here's the irony: I didn't expect much of anything from the Hawkeye miniseries back when it got dropped pre Christmas and only watched it because Peter Jackson's Beatles three parter was released at the same time and that was why I went to the Mouse back then. But as it turns out, Hawkeye was great, and along with Ms Marvel probably my favourite of the Disney Marvel shows even several years later. Whereas I'm practically the target audience for what Secret Invasion (I assume) aimed to be - a spy story/underbelly take on the MCU. Plus going in to the respective shows, I was certainly more invested in Nick Fury than I was in Clint Barton.
Now, rather than going on a rant of how Secret Invasion is bad, I'd rather go for a bit of why it failed (and why Hawkeye did succeed) (for me, as always this is subjective). Because it's not that there are new characters with a narrative focus (both shows have those) and new relationships in addition to the movie established ones. Or the inherent clichés or sillness of the premise (part of the parcel).
1) To start with the blindingly obvious, strong emotional relationships helps your audience to invest. Hawkeye built up the central one between Clint and Kate; it also dealt with the fallout of Clint's and Yelena's grief for Natasha - thereby also addressing a fannish complaint about Endgame, that Natasha's sacrifice does not get much narrative space compared to Tony's - , and provided the antagonists (Maya/Echo and Kazi, Maya and Kingpin, and Eleanor vis a vis Kate, of course) with intense emotional texture as well. And then there's the new frenemies relationship between Kate and Yelena, which is just delightful.
Meanwhile, Secret Invasion killed off Maria Hill in the pilot and Talos just before the penultimate episode, i.e. the two people who have an established relationship with Nick Fury the audience cares about, but did not provide much if any narrative room for any grief from Fury. (Talos got grief from his daughter and Vara, but that's different.) There is no new central relationship build up, as there was with Clint and Kate in Hawkeye. There are several relationships teased at or focused on in several episodes - Fury and Sonya (Olivia Colman's character), Fury and Priscilla/Vara, Talos and G'ia, and on an antagonistic level Fury and Gravik as well as G'ia and Gravik - but the only one which gets something of an in depth treatment and an emotional resolution that makes it different from how it's introduced is the one one betwen Fury and Vara in the later half of the season. (She's hardly in the first half.) The lack of an consistent emotional thread (or several) through the entire season means the plot has to do the work of keeping the audience attention, and the plot isn't up to it, alas.
2) I can just see the bunch of executives who go "well, everyone loved that Winter Soldier was made in the tradition of paranoid political 1970s thrillers, and over at Star Wars, Andor was such a success, so let's make a grim political spy thriller, everyone will love it as well!" Except that the Disney Marvel shows have their strengths, but believable politics aren't among them. See also Captain America and Winter Soldier, the Flag Smashers, and yeah, no. Gravik was clearly meant to be a villain the Killmonger vein (ditto for Callie in the earlier series), i.e. someone who acts out of understandable motives and makes good points but whose methods are still beyond the pale, but the "oh yeah, and here's how I don't care about killing lots and lots of my own people in addition to other people" felt perfunctionary and not three dimensional, plus the miniseries couldn't decide whether Gravik's main antagonistic relationship should be with Fury or with G'iah. Both would have had narrative potential, but a different one. But the finale tried to have its cake and eat it in this regard, and thus there was no emotional depth to either. (With the added insult to injury that G'iah, who consistly made the good point to her father that there needs to be an alternate plan for the Skrulls than his idea that being good agents for Fury will somehow result in universal acceptance, after her defeat of Gravik ends up replicating that job with Sonya in the Fury position, and no, Sonya lamphading it in dialogue doesn't help.)
(Sidenote: I can think of one great example of how you can do a "villain has good motives and good point, is still villain as evidenced via methods" where it feels absolutely organic to the characters instead of a "here's why you shouldn't root for this person", and that's part of the big climax of the very first X-Men movie. Reminder: Magneto is about to use the MacGuffin Machine to turn a great many "normals" into mutants, thus hoping to end mutant discrimination (he thinks). To do this, he uses Rogue to power the device, which he knows will kill her. He gives her and the captured X-Men the speech of how this is necessary for mutantkind and the greater good. He undoubtedly believes every word, and also, Ian McKellen. And then Logan says two simple sentences: "You're so full of shit. If you really believed that, it would be you in that thing." Now, I love Magneto much more than Wolverine, but wow, was he ever right, and did these two simple sentences destroy all the previous rethoric.)
Back to my wrong lessons learned theory: part of the reasons why Winter Soldier the movie managed to replicate the 70s spy thriller kind of feeling so successfully isn't just the "Hydra was part of SHIELD this whole time" reveal. It's that we've seen the decidely not Hydra Nick Fury endorsing the movie's bad MacGuffins, the super surveillance-plus-murder spy drones carriers early on, and having a conversation with Steve going directly to the good old "liberty vs safety" dilemma. And because Steve at the end demands not just the end of the Hydra agents within SHIELD but of SHIELD for this very reason. In an era where constant surveillance was never so easy or so much a thing (not "just" by governments but by commercial cooperations) and where democratically elect4ed governments, not dictatorships, had been shown to regard assassinations and imprisonment without trial and torture etc. all as viable methods, the fears this movie tapped into and addressed were real and there.
Now, Secret Invasions could have tapped into something real, too. The brief montage near the end where because Ritson declared all aliens as free targets and everyone thinks everyone else is a Skrull, all the paranoia and pent up hostility of the populace and the unwillingness to hear each other out results in horrible violence - that would have been a great way to use the Skrull/Secret Invasion concept to address a current day state of affairs. But instead, most of the show went back to a standard decades old Bond movies plot (Spectre tried to frame the Russians a lot in the Connery and even the Moore era), and really, Nick Fury is not, nor should he be, James Bond). Without a Bond budget, too, because all those scenes with President Ritson in a hospital with apparantly only one or two bodyguards plus Rhodey were hysterical. You couldn't even pay for a few more extras posing as security, Disney? For someone supposed to be the POTUS?
Also: if you want to do a spy show, you need to deliver the tricks of the trade. Heists, intelligence gained via trickery or clever missions, near discoveries, finding out who's an ally and who's a backstabber, etc. Secret Invasions tried this with the Rhodey-a-Skrull reveal mid season, but look, given Don Cheadle was the only Avenger on the show, that wasn't much of a surprise. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy worked so well as it did among many other reasons because the identity of the mole isn't glaringly obvious from the get go. And the audience pretty much knew who was a Skrull and who wasn't in all other cases, who was a good guy or a villain. Shades of grey are the definition of a Le Carré like spy story which evidently this show wanted to be and just wasn't. I mean, yes, Fury using the Skrulls as his personal spies while knowing he couldn't deliver a home world was called out - but nothing changed, with as mentioned G'iah being essentially in the same position as her father was in at the end of the movie, and with Fury leaving the planet again. (The one big change for Fury and Vara was their relationship status, and them leaving together, but there's no sign Fury (when not played by G'iah) regretted what he did or learned anything from it.
(And let's not even start with what all of this says about Carol; after all, it wasn't Fury but Carol who was in a position to search and find a planet for the Skrulls in the last 30 years.)
3.) Again with the characters and emotions problem, as in, lack of same. Shock reveals, when they work in a story, work because the story allows for their impact, gives it breathing room. And lets the characters process, and/or change. The SHIELD = HYDRA reveal in Winter Soldier comes early enough we see not just Steve but also Natasha and Nick Fury to react to it emotionally and intellectually. Natasha at the start of the movie still is fine with using her particular skill set in the service of, as Loki put it in another movie, cheats and liars, because she trusts in the good intention of her bosses and trusts their moral compass over her own (due to her own backgrund). This is not true anymore for Natasha by the end of this movie. And Natasha is not the main character. Secret Invasion has far more screen time than a single movie offers while still managing to not offer any of this. Take the big Rhodey is a Skrull! reveal. Once that's out, there is no discussion among any of the characters what it means for them, or wondering when the change happened, or whether the real Rhodey is still alive. (I.e. an equivalent of the conversation between Natasha and Steve at Sam's house where we see the impact the SHIELD reveal had on Natasha as well as her and Steve's altered relationship showcased.) At the end, in the last episode, we see the real Rhodey, and there's a hint as to when he was exchanged (because he's wearing a hospital gown and has to be carried by two other people once freed - which would indicate it happened after his broken back in Civil War) - but he's not allowed to react beyond being confused, and no one, absolutely no character, gets to process what it means to them that someone they considered a trusted friend and ally was captured and imprisoned and replaced by a doppelganger and no one ever guessed.
(Also? By this miniseries' shaky timeline, this would have happened before Gravik was more than one of many Fury underlings, and if the Skrulls had any leader, it was Talos. So whose idea exactly was it to replace Rhodey?)
Again: if you don't treat your character as real people, if you don't allow them the time to deal with the emotional impact of a shock, then the shock twist doesn't land, it's just a storytelling gadget falling flat on its face.
To circle back to Hawkeye again, it's a fluffy Christmas show, but it still treats traumatic events that happened to its main characters as traumatic - Natasha's death for both Yelena and Clint, the death of Maya's father to Maya, Clint's time as Ronin, and Kate finding out at the end of the penultimate episode that her mother is working for the bad guys, the impact of which on her we see throughout the next episode. Hawkeye has no world saving stakes, the stakes are simply overtly "Will Clint get back to his family in time for Christmas?", "Will Kate find out the truth behind the murder of Armand?" and subtextually "Will Kate become the next Hawkeye? Will Clint face his deeds as Ronin and Natasha's death?". And all of this does get addressed, and them some. Thus, it's a satisfying narrative, and the characters feel emotionally real. Secret Invasion gives Fury the task of saving the world from WWIII and prevent a humanity/Skrulls slaughter, and he barely manages the former, then buggers off to the next movie just when staying and dealing with the mess would be instrumental. And no one ever feels emotionally real.
Here's the irony: I didn't expect much of anything from the Hawkeye miniseries back when it got dropped pre Christmas and only watched it because Peter Jackson's Beatles three parter was released at the same time and that was why I went to the Mouse back then. But as it turns out, Hawkeye was great, and along with Ms Marvel probably my favourite of the Disney Marvel shows even several years later. Whereas I'm practically the target audience for what Secret Invasion (I assume) aimed to be - a spy story/underbelly take on the MCU. Plus going in to the respective shows, I was certainly more invested in Nick Fury than I was in Clint Barton.
Now, rather than going on a rant of how Secret Invasion is bad, I'd rather go for a bit of why it failed (and why Hawkeye did succeed) (for me, as always this is subjective). Because it's not that there are new characters with a narrative focus (both shows have those) and new relationships in addition to the movie established ones. Or the inherent clichés or sillness of the premise (part of the parcel).
1) To start with the blindingly obvious, strong emotional relationships helps your audience to invest. Hawkeye built up the central one between Clint and Kate; it also dealt with the fallout of Clint's and Yelena's grief for Natasha - thereby also addressing a fannish complaint about Endgame, that Natasha's sacrifice does not get much narrative space compared to Tony's - , and provided the antagonists (Maya/Echo and Kazi, Maya and Kingpin, and Eleanor vis a vis Kate, of course) with intense emotional texture as well. And then there's the new frenemies relationship between Kate and Yelena, which is just delightful.
Meanwhile, Secret Invasion killed off Maria Hill in the pilot and Talos just before the penultimate episode, i.e. the two people who have an established relationship with Nick Fury the audience cares about, but did not provide much if any narrative room for any grief from Fury. (Talos got grief from his daughter and Vara, but that's different.) There is no new central relationship build up, as there was with Clint and Kate in Hawkeye. There are several relationships teased at or focused on in several episodes - Fury and Sonya (Olivia Colman's character), Fury and Priscilla/Vara, Talos and G'ia, and on an antagonistic level Fury and Gravik as well as G'ia and Gravik - but the only one which gets something of an in depth treatment and an emotional resolution that makes it different from how it's introduced is the one one betwen Fury and Vara in the later half of the season. (She's hardly in the first half.) The lack of an consistent emotional thread (or several) through the entire season means the plot has to do the work of keeping the audience attention, and the plot isn't up to it, alas.
2) I can just see the bunch of executives who go "well, everyone loved that Winter Soldier was made in the tradition of paranoid political 1970s thrillers, and over at Star Wars, Andor was such a success, so let's make a grim political spy thriller, everyone will love it as well!" Except that the Disney Marvel shows have their strengths, but believable politics aren't among them. See also Captain America and Winter Soldier, the Flag Smashers, and yeah, no. Gravik was clearly meant to be a villain the Killmonger vein (ditto for Callie in the earlier series), i.e. someone who acts out of understandable motives and makes good points but whose methods are still beyond the pale, but the "oh yeah, and here's how I don't care about killing lots and lots of my own people in addition to other people" felt perfunctionary and not three dimensional, plus the miniseries couldn't decide whether Gravik's main antagonistic relationship should be with Fury or with G'iah. Both would have had narrative potential, but a different one. But the finale tried to have its cake and eat it in this regard, and thus there was no emotional depth to either. (With the added insult to injury that G'iah, who consistly made the good point to her father that there needs to be an alternate plan for the Skrulls than his idea that being good agents for Fury will somehow result in universal acceptance, after her defeat of Gravik ends up replicating that job with Sonya in the Fury position, and no, Sonya lamphading it in dialogue doesn't help.)
(Sidenote: I can think of one great example of how you can do a "villain has good motives and good point, is still villain as evidenced via methods" where it feels absolutely organic to the characters instead of a "here's why you shouldn't root for this person", and that's part of the big climax of the very first X-Men movie. Reminder: Magneto is about to use the MacGuffin Machine to turn a great many "normals" into mutants, thus hoping to end mutant discrimination (he thinks). To do this, he uses Rogue to power the device, which he knows will kill her. He gives her and the captured X-Men the speech of how this is necessary for mutantkind and the greater good. He undoubtedly believes every word, and also, Ian McKellen. And then Logan says two simple sentences: "You're so full of shit. If you really believed that, it would be you in that thing." Now, I love Magneto much more than Wolverine, but wow, was he ever right, and did these two simple sentences destroy all the previous rethoric.)
Back to my wrong lessons learned theory: part of the reasons why Winter Soldier the movie managed to replicate the 70s spy thriller kind of feeling so successfully isn't just the "Hydra was part of SHIELD this whole time" reveal. It's that we've seen the decidely not Hydra Nick Fury endorsing the movie's bad MacGuffins, the super surveillance-plus-murder spy drones carriers early on, and having a conversation with Steve going directly to the good old "liberty vs safety" dilemma. And because Steve at the end demands not just the end of the Hydra agents within SHIELD but of SHIELD for this very reason. In an era where constant surveillance was never so easy or so much a thing (not "just" by governments but by commercial cooperations) and where democratically elect4ed governments, not dictatorships, had been shown to regard assassinations and imprisonment without trial and torture etc. all as viable methods, the fears this movie tapped into and addressed were real and there.
Now, Secret Invasions could have tapped into something real, too. The brief montage near the end where because Ritson declared all aliens as free targets and everyone thinks everyone else is a Skrull, all the paranoia and pent up hostility of the populace and the unwillingness to hear each other out results in horrible violence - that would have been a great way to use the Skrull/Secret Invasion concept to address a current day state of affairs. But instead, most of the show went back to a standard decades old Bond movies plot (Spectre tried to frame the Russians a lot in the Connery and even the Moore era), and really, Nick Fury is not, nor should he be, James Bond). Without a Bond budget, too, because all those scenes with President Ritson in a hospital with apparantly only one or two bodyguards plus Rhodey were hysterical. You couldn't even pay for a few more extras posing as security, Disney? For someone supposed to be the POTUS?
Also: if you want to do a spy show, you need to deliver the tricks of the trade. Heists, intelligence gained via trickery or clever missions, near discoveries, finding out who's an ally and who's a backstabber, etc. Secret Invasions tried this with the Rhodey-a-Skrull reveal mid season, but look, given Don Cheadle was the only Avenger on the show, that wasn't much of a surprise. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy worked so well as it did among many other reasons because the identity of the mole isn't glaringly obvious from the get go. And the audience pretty much knew who was a Skrull and who wasn't in all other cases, who was a good guy or a villain. Shades of grey are the definition of a Le Carré like spy story which evidently this show wanted to be and just wasn't. I mean, yes, Fury using the Skrulls as his personal spies while knowing he couldn't deliver a home world was called out - but nothing changed, with as mentioned G'iah being essentially in the same position as her father was in at the end of the movie, and with Fury leaving the planet again. (The one big change for Fury and Vara was their relationship status, and them leaving together, but there's no sign Fury (when not played by G'iah) regretted what he did or learned anything from it.
(And let's not even start with what all of this says about Carol; after all, it wasn't Fury but Carol who was in a position to search and find a planet for the Skrulls in the last 30 years.)
3.) Again with the characters and emotions problem, as in, lack of same. Shock reveals, when they work in a story, work because the story allows for their impact, gives it breathing room. And lets the characters process, and/or change. The SHIELD = HYDRA reveal in Winter Soldier comes early enough we see not just Steve but also Natasha and Nick Fury to react to it emotionally and intellectually. Natasha at the start of the movie still is fine with using her particular skill set in the service of, as Loki put it in another movie, cheats and liars, because she trusts in the good intention of her bosses and trusts their moral compass over her own (due to her own backgrund). This is not true anymore for Natasha by the end of this movie. And Natasha is not the main character. Secret Invasion has far more screen time than a single movie offers while still managing to not offer any of this. Take the big Rhodey is a Skrull! reveal. Once that's out, there is no discussion among any of the characters what it means for them, or wondering when the change happened, or whether the real Rhodey is still alive. (I.e. an equivalent of the conversation between Natasha and Steve at Sam's house where we see the impact the SHIELD reveal had on Natasha as well as her and Steve's altered relationship showcased.) At the end, in the last episode, we see the real Rhodey, and there's a hint as to when he was exchanged (because he's wearing a hospital gown and has to be carried by two other people once freed - which would indicate it happened after his broken back in Civil War) - but he's not allowed to react beyond being confused, and no one, absolutely no character, gets to process what it means to them that someone they considered a trusted friend and ally was captured and imprisoned and replaced by a doppelganger and no one ever guessed.
(Also? By this miniseries' shaky timeline, this would have happened before Gravik was more than one of many Fury underlings, and if the Skrulls had any leader, it was Talos. So whose idea exactly was it to replace Rhodey?)
Again: if you don't treat your character as real people, if you don't allow them the time to deal with the emotional impact of a shock, then the shock twist doesn't land, it's just a storytelling gadget falling flat on its face.
To circle back to Hawkeye again, it's a fluffy Christmas show, but it still treats traumatic events that happened to its main characters as traumatic - Natasha's death for both Yelena and Clint, the death of Maya's father to Maya, Clint's time as Ronin, and Kate finding out at the end of the penultimate episode that her mother is working for the bad guys, the impact of which on her we see throughout the next episode. Hawkeye has no world saving stakes, the stakes are simply overtly "Will Clint get back to his family in time for Christmas?", "Will Kate find out the truth behind the murder of Armand?" and subtextually "Will Kate become the next Hawkeye? Will Clint face his deeds as Ronin and Natasha's death?". And all of this does get addressed, and them some. Thus, it's a satisfying narrative, and the characters feel emotionally real. Secret Invasion gives Fury the task of saving the world from WWIII and prevent a humanity/Skrulls slaughter, and he barely manages the former, then buggers off to the next movie just when staying and dealing with the mess would be instrumental. And no one ever feels emotionally real.