Weekly Thoughts 7/29/23

You know that thing where you see something really good and think, “I want the discount version of that?” So anyway, after watching the Netflix Cowboy Bebop, I started reading Black Cat on my lunch breaks. It’s not, like, a good book. It’s pretty sloppy and mostly goes on vibes. The series is around two-hundred chapters, and about half of it is the final fight, somehow. And yes, a surprisingly large number of the specifics of the book are just Cowboy Bebop. It’s so much fun, though! The characters are great and there’s a lot of great lore floating around. There’s this untapped East v West conflict with the Numbers’ orichalcum and Taoist chi kung. At one point, I had notes about how to continue the series, and I realized they would make a great basis for an original work. Every story has the idea of our heroes’ past adventures in the background. Having something vaguely resembling the series as the backstory for my characters will be a good tool for practice, and I can play with the archetypes as much as I want while I learn more about planning a big series. I have a few ideas, and they’re already pretty cool.

Ok, so I’m writing a lot of this a week in advance after watching episode five of Secret Invasion, and I’ll come back to update with stuff about Fury once I’ve seen the last episode. I’m guessing you’ll be able to tell where that edit hits. There’s a lot about this show that’s riding on if and how Fury answers the charges the bad guys and his own allies have levied against him. As of right now, it doesn’t look like Secret Invasion is going to become a particularly great show, mostly because it refuses to do all of the things that make a story like Secret Invasion cool and interesting. Spoilers, if you care.

So, first off, the Skrulls are in a bad position at the start of this show. When they were first introduced in Captain Marvel, they started off looking like bad guys and then we found out they were good guys, refugees on the run from an evil empire. I liked that as a twist. It worked in the movie and it was an interesting way to make the MCU distinct. But now they’re the bad guys, and that requires some work be put in. There’s all kinds of ways to play it. For example, we don’t know how the Kree-Skrull war started in this world; maybe the Skrulls started it by doing a secret invasion of the Kree, and that’s why the Kree can detect Skrulls. I don’t like that option as much, but it’s out there. There was a line in Secret Invasion where one of the Skrull council members is like, “We were too eager for war.” That’s interesting; elaborate. In the West, alien invasion movies are always about colonization guilt. We were a technologically superior force that didn’t respect the personhood of the inhabitants of most of the world and killed a bunch of people to take their land and resources. We’re afraid of that same thing happening to us, because we would deserve it. So what if the backstory of the Skrulls leaving Skrullos is the same type of thing, where they were a big evil empire like from the comics, and then the Kree nearly wipe them out, and leaders like Talos say they need to change? Gravik would be their old, bad impulses coming back up, a return to form that can only spell doom. It would be more interesting than what we have. Personally, I think the Skrulls should have already found a homeworld, around the time the Avengers start up, and this is a detachment left behind by usurpers stealing the throne from Talos doing their own plot. At the end of the day, making the refugees the villains just makes them into every negative stereotype about refugees with no clear upside. This is a world with clear-cut good guys and bad guys, with no room for sympathetic antagonists that we can work things out with, despite trying to make so many antagonists sympathetic for the appearance of complexity; if the Skrulls are the poor, innocent refugees, they can’t also be the evil, all-powerful cabal. Pick a side, and write in one of many excuses for why a shift could happen.

Probably the biggest problem I have with the show, in terms of what it could have and should have been, is that they aren’t doing Skrull stuff. Skrulls are shapeshifters who can perfectly mimic anyone, down to their quirks. If they take someone’s form, you won’t be able to tell that they’re an imposter. Even other Skrulls wouldn’t know which is the real one or the Skrull. That’s the stuff of a great spy thriller. Everyone could be a double, triple, or quadruple agent, and there’s no way to know. There’s a far better show somewhere in the multiverse where Fury is constantly forced to rely on others for help, but he knows he can’t trust anyone, and even the audience is unsure if Fury is really Fury. Skrulls would be changing faces all the time, and we see our aging spymaster use nothing but, paraphrasing, the power put between his ears by a single mother and in his heart by a better woman than he is to uncover the truth. Instead, this show completely skips past shapeshifting, the main thing about Skrulls, as a threat. At no point is anyone worried about who is or isn’t a Skrull, and Skrulls aren’t doing constant misinformation. People just walk around, confidently and comfortably assuming that everything they hear and everyone they see is trustworthy, and the exactly one time that wasn’t true, Fury figures it out immediately and doesn’t doubt his instincts. Why are we doing a Skrull show where they aren’t doing Skrull stuff? Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One just did way more spy stuff and imposter tension using AI and masks; they should not be outdoing Skinwalkers. My brother pointed out to me that that movie is a perfect template for what Secret Invasion should be, and it’s true.

Mariah Hill shouldn’t have died. Fridging is in poor taste, and I don’t think it was needed or effective here. It is true that, despite appearing in so many movies, we don’t actually know much about Mariah Hill, so I can see an argument that she’s an easy character to kill for a show like this. However, I would have preferred that this show was used as a way to flesh her out and either never kill her, or at least save it for the end of the season, when her death can have some narrative and emotional significance beyond shock value and Fury being sad for two minutes. Fury was already sad. In the comics, she replaces Fury as the head of SHIELD. That’s what this show should be. Fury really doesn’t seem like the main character of this show, and they didn’t have to and shouldn’t have made him the main character. A much more interesting show looks at the whole situation, how there’s been a failure of leadership and a misalignment of vision, and how a new generation is needed. Mariah Hill teaming up with G’Iah as the new Fury-Talos would have been far more interesting. Like, it hurts a bit to make that argument, because I love Sam Jackson and he’s doing a fantastic job here, but the narrative would be stronger with a different focus.

I get why Super Skrulls exist and why they’re pivotal to this show’s plot, but they jump the gun on it. Super Skrulls should be a last episode twist, where the heroes have finally broken through the conspiracy and think they’ve cornered Gravik, and he reveals he’s now a Super Skrull. The Super Skrull formula they currently have is actually pretty good, even if they’re not confident they can beat Thor and Carol Danvers. It’s good enough that I’m sitting here wondering why they’re bothering with the Harvest (a DNA stash of all the Avengers’ blood). Obviously, the Harvest is still valuable in this context, but it hardly seems like the main thing the Skrulls need to win. They’re immune to radiation, and in a poorly done bit of foreshadowing, Fury says they like the cold. With current nukes, it only takes two strikes to instigate a nuclear winter that will wipe out humanity and most life on the planet. The Skrulls have every ability to infiltrate the governments of all the nuclear powers, so they could make that happen any time, and the Avengers couldn’t step in fast enough to stop them. That’s why this is up to Fury, or at least it should be. Gravik even abandons his original plan to start a war and instead threatens the lives of his entire resistance and potentially species to get the Harvest, when he doesn’t need it that badly, just to seem like tension is ratcheting up. Introducing Super Skrulls so early, before they make a play for the Harvest, makes it seem like the main reason the Skrulls are dangerous is that they’re eventually going to be Super Skrulls. It’s just so sloppy and misses so many opportunities. Anyone who has seen a monster movie knows that the conflict is human with human tools against monster with inherent monster abilities. The monster doesn’t pick up a gun until they’ve exhausted their monster abilities, as demonstrated by Gremlins. Gravik picked up his gun way too early, from a narrative perspective.

Ok, so this here is the real crux of the matter for why this show doesn’t work. As the show starts, the Skrulls are still refugees on Earth, and I’ve laid out some issues with that status quo. In the show, we learn more about how they’ve spent their time on Earth, and how different characters feel about it and react to it. At no point do we hear Fury describe his relationship with the Skrulls, so we only have the testimony of his allies and enemies. According to them, Fury offered them safe haven on Earth in exchange for doing spy stuff for him. It’s not clear how or why that works; no one in any government outside of Nick Fury knows about the Skrulls, and the Skrulls don’t need any offer of safe haven because they can hide perfectly, so I’m pretty sure he just used them. That happens to be the opinion of basically everyone, except Talos didn’t mind because they were friends. Talos also alleges that Fury wouldn’t have moved up the ranks without his Skrull agents. So all around, it seems like Fury either failed for three decades to find them a home and used them for his career, or he quit trying to help them and kept using them. And by the end of the show, what answer do we get? LITERALLY NOTHING!! We think we see Fury giving a pretty half-hearted apology to Gravik, where he explains that saving lives is easier than convincing humans to accept Skrulls; and like, when did Fury ever try to convince people to accept Skrulls, right? But turns out that wasn’t Fury, it was G’Iah in disguise, in an all-around good move to turn the tables on Gravik (which would have been cooler if she hadn’t already had the first version of the Super Skrull formula and did nothing with it before, but whatever). So we have no idea if her explanation of Fury’s actions reflects his actual reasoning, because we don’t see them prepare for the switcheroo; knowing Fury, who knows if he let her read his mind or if he just trusted her to have a good Fury impression. And at no point does Fury apologize to anyone for what he did to the Skrulls. If he did work to make Earth safe for Skrulls, like G’Iah said, and it was just really hard, then I’d like to see a flashback of that. Because the Skrulls weren’t a part of the MCU when Nick Fury was first introduced, there’s no record of anything relating to Skrulls before Captain Marvel. This means if Fury does actually think that “changing hearts and minds is harder than saving lives,” he was just using that as an excuse not to try. Or he was, like, talking to friends about a hypothetical situation to test the waters for two decades.

And the ending overall is just pretty bad. G’Iah kills Gravik, and it’s not really clear how. They both have the powers of Captain Marvel and the healing factor of the Hulk, and all she does is blow a hole in his stomach. I’ll grant you that they seem to only have the powers they actively think to have at any given moment, but we also saw Gravik regenerate half his brain when Fury shot him in the head, so excuse me for not accepting that she can just shoot him real good. In the conveniently empty Skrull compound, where we don’t get to see anyone in the resistance react to Gravik’s downfall. Not to mention that actually giving anyone the full Harvest powers is the worst of the Super Skrull problem I talked about; she’s both way overpowered compared to everyone in the universe, and having that be the finale makes it seem like Super Skrulls are the threat, not regular Skrulls. Oh, sorry, the show actually changes its mind on that by having the President of the United States declare open genocide on the Skrulls at the end. So that’s fun; the first time we see humans at large learn about the Skrulls, the main response is genocide. Kinda makes you wish someone high-ranking in a highly visible security agency leading a group of superheroes had spent the past couple decades talking to people about how the Skrulls are totally cool and safe, huh? It’s a cynically typical American response, but like, it would have been nice to have any kind of peaceful resolution or a hopeful outlook as the credits roll. This show is definitely not going to get a second season – it’s the writer’s and actor’s strike, they did nothing to promote this show, and it’s not gotten great word of mouth, which means not nearly enough are watching it – so this is just the status quo of Marvel now: Blatant anti-Skrull racism and genocide. Great job! Instead of showing the villain why he’s wrong, we prove him right in every way and just go to town murdering refugees, in the middle of massive, heinous real-world violence and cruelty against migrants and refugees. Unbelievable.

Structurally, the show was weak, too. Like several of these shows before it, it’s clearly a movie chopped into multiple pieces, with each piece expanded a bit and reworked in an attempt to feel like an episodic show. It fails to be an effective one. Like I said, we should have heard from Fury about his relationship with the Skrulls and why he did what he did. First episode, Fury explains what he was doing with the Skrulls all these years. Third episode he talks about having tried and failed to find them a home before the Chitauri attacked. Last episode, we hear his grand apology. Basic structure for a show. Also basic structure, seeing Sonya Falstaff every episode doing little things towards her goal, which we know about ahead of time. It looks like she’s going to kill all the Skrulls, until she doesn’t; further, she’s not in every episode, and half of episode five was a sloppy “let’s catch up on this subplot” thing. We should have heard more about the Gravik-Fury relationship ahead of time. If we knew from the first or second episode that Gravik walks around wearing the face of the first person Fury had him kill, that would have really sold him and his conflict with Fury, and could have led to a big payoff at the end. Only learning that in the final episode, and having it be G’Iah who hears it (and doesn’t know, so she definitely didn’t copy Fury’s memories?) really throws the whole opportunity. In general, there’s not enough of trying to figure out who’s a Skrull or how to prove someone’s a Skrull, and at the end they just start killing Skrulls. I feel like I’m rambling too much here, but you get the idea. There are a lot of potentially good plot threads that are placed out of order, skipped over, or condensed for this to be an effective show. They took a movie plot, chopped it into six pieces, then added a grab bag of fun add-ons that made it too busy, and didn’t put the pieces in the right order.

There are little things I didn’t like, too. Priscilla going to a safety deposit box for a gun was stupid. There’s no world where she has to hide her personal ownership of a gun from Nick Fury, especially since she used to be a spy in his employ. That house is loaded with guns, anyway, and she could have grabbed one of them. It’s such a waste of a scene. Like, in general, I don’t get their marriage. Are they happy no matter how far apart, or is she mad that he abandoned her, and is about to do it again? There’s no reason she should have faked her personality in their marriage, so I don’t get that “the real Varra” stuff, and they don’t really unpack her working for Gravik. It’s just kinda messy. Fury going to a Finnish tomb to retrieve a jacket and eyepatch was silly. Like, it’s fun and kinda cool and I like that kind of thing, it just feels too out of place. Fury isn’t a superhero, so he doesn’t need a suit-up montage. He can get those things anywhere, or keep going in what he was wearing through the whole show. The CGI for when Gravik first used Groot powers looked janky, and I don’t know why. The rest of the effects were good, including other uses of Groot powers. G’Iah didn’t use her Super Skrull powers when the agents came to kill Priscilla, and I don’t know why. Seems like they should have brought her along to save the president, so she could fight Gravik. Maybe then, Talos wouldn’t have had to die. Oh, yeah, the AI opening was pretty bad. They shouldn’t have used AI to make a title sequence at all, because AI art, at least right now, is intrinsically unethical, computer generated plagiarism. And beyond that, it’s just not that good a title sequence? It looks ok, but not stellar. It doesn’t fit the show at all. AI wouldn’t be ok if they had made a good sequence with it, but at least they could point to a good product. Falstaff was supposed to be a scorched Earth “kill all the Skrulls” person, but by the end, she’s trying to make the Earth safe for Skrulls and allying with them. What changed? Nothing that we see. What we do see is a vast underground bunker of captives in pods, like a big Skrull depot. But we don’t know where that is or who was using it; G’Iah freed the captives Gravik’s forces used from the Russian base. And Falstaff seems to be…about to use it? It’s a really weird cliffhanger. Plus, she should have killed Rhodey from behind the door. There was nothing stopping her, it’s what she came there to do, and the only way to get the President to call off the strike is to prove Rhodey’s a Skrull, which she can only do by killing him. I know that would have robbed Fury of his chance to do it, but the scene was written poorly, and Fury should have been in Russia confronting Gravik.

So yeah, just overall not a good show. There are fun moments and elements in it, and Sam Jackson is always great. But I don’t recommend checking it out. Let’s just hope The Marvels opens with the Skrulls going to New Skrullos and ignore everything else. Just go read Black Cat and enjoy how much of it is Cowboy Bebop.