Imagine my surprise to find last night's new Secret Invasion was pretty good. Suddenly, the tension was real, threats to characters' lives felt dire, and even some of the humour landed. What changed? There's a new screenwriter, Roxanne Paredes, who, like most writers for Disney+ shows, has a very short and undistinguished filmography. She did write five episodes of a series called FBI: International, which seems to have prepared her for this kind of material.
A lot of the dialogue still felt like it was running in circles. But in one such scene, the conversation between Nick Fury and Talos actually got a laugh out of me when Fury blew his top at the end after Talos' "We did this" rant. This is the value of having two actors of the calibre of Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn, particularly Jackson, who seems to be channelling Pulp Fiction more and more.
Mendelsohn isn't so good at action scenes, I noticed, which makes sense considering he's never been known for that kind of role. But he is really good at putting a lot of menace into his voice, which mostly makes up for it. I expect him to unleash hell next week when he finds out his daughter's dead.
Killing off G'iah in this episode was more effective than killing off Maria Hill in the first episode. She feels like she has a lot of unfinished business and one would assume Emilia Clarke would be sticking around a bit longer. I wonder if she feels cheated at all for cashing in her MCU card so fast. Not that I think she'd be right for Sue Storm or Rogue or whoever else she might've been. Maybe she could've been a good Emma Frost. But now I really want to see the fallout from G'iah's execution.
Secret Invasion is available on Disney+.
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