This discussion and review contains minor spoilers for Secret Invasion episode 5, “Harvest,” on Disney+.
In “Harvest,” Secret Invasion barrels towards the finale in the way that these shows often do.
Like many of these penultimate episodes, “Harvest” spends a lot of time grinding through the sort of exposition that should have been established much earlier in the season, setting up stakes for the grand finale that would make more sense if they had been established from the beginning. Most obviously, the show makes its MacGuffin explicit. The eponymous “harvest” is a collection of blood samples taken from the Avengers during “the Battle for Earth.”
As with so many twists in these recent Marvel Studios productions, this reveal has a sense of desperately wanting to reassure viewers that this story unfolds within the same world as the movies that they like. It has big “Whenever Poochie’s not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, ‘Where’s Poochie?’” energy. The show can’t afford to have actors like Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, or Robert Downey Jr. appear, so tying the MacGuffin to them gives the illusion of that connection.
It’s hardly a sharp left turn for the show, which was obviously heavily tied to the continuity of movies like Captain Marvel and Spider-Man: Far From Home. Still, the early stretch of the season made an effort to suggest a story unfolding in a world at least somewhat disconnected from the epic battles of superhumans, focusing instead on the machinations of operatives like Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), Everett K. Ross (Martin Freeman) and even Mason (O-T Fagbenle).
To be clear, the show wasn’t very good at this. It dressed itself up in the tropes and conventions of espionage thrillers like The Americans and 24 like a child with access to their parents’ wardrobe. Nothing fit right. There was a clumsiness and an amateurishness to the show’s use of these narrative elements. Still, it was at least something novel within the framework of this gigantic shared universe. Inevitably, gravity exerts a force that pulls Secret Invasion back to the superhero template.
This gravity is obvious in other ways. Secret Invasion never presented Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) as a nuanced or sympathetic character. The shared universe has, in the past, been able to generate some empathy for monsters like Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) in Black Panther or Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in Thor. On paper, Gravik should be a sympathetic antagonist. He is a radicalized refugee fighting for nothing more than the right to be “home in (his) own skin.” The show has no interest in this.
As with the final episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, “Harvest” yanks Gravik even further into the realms of cartoon villainy. Early in the episode, his loyal lieutenant Pagon (Killian Scott) publicly challenges him. This rift comes from nowhere. It is a transparent plot machination, providing justification for a scene where Gravik brutally executes Pagon, a character who was already established as a hardline fanatic, to establish himself as even more hardline.
One of the central tenets of the espionage thriller is the idea of moral ambiguity, the question of whether the heroes are really heroes and the villains are really villains. Publisher Hannah Griffiths has argued that the appeal of the spy thriller to audiences is that they are “not as straightforward as right and wrong, good and evil, which means they can find their own way morally and make up their own minds.”
Even just conceptually, that is a very interesting thing to attempt in a superhero universe. Indeed, that is the central appeal of a comic book like Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Sleeper or even Jonathan Hickman and Stefano Caselli’s Secret Warriors. However, as with any number of other genres that the Marvel Cinematic Universe tries on for size, Secret Invasion cannot meaningfully commit to the central appeal of the espionage thriller as a mode of storytelling.
There’s a laziness to Secret Invasion, a recurring sense of “good enough” that permeates every level of the production. The show began filming in late 2021 and continued into the middle of 2022, with additional reshoots into the second half of the year. As such, Secret Invasion is an obvious pandemic production, starring an actor in his 70s. There are points where the show can disguise this, such as the crowd scenes in “Resurrection,” but there is a more general vibe that permeates the series.
This is obvious at several points during “Harvest,” an episode that largely seems to unfold in wide-open spaces and empty offices. When President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney) is rushed to the emergency ward following the climax of “Beloved,” the corridor is strangely empty. Nick Fury is the only person carrying him. There are a few doctors and nurses. However, there is no security detail waiting, no administrative aides working on paperwork, no other patients.
There is something very small-scale about all this, particularly given the bombastic action climax of the previous episode. There is no sense of how the world is reacting to the attempted assassination of the president of the United States, no mention of whether or not plans are being put in place to deal with the possibility of Ritson’s death — or even the chain of command while he’s under anesthetic. There are no shots of him in surgery. There’s no mention of his family. It’s very small.
This emptiness is also apparent at MI6. Sonya Falsworth (Olivia Colman) can just walk into Derrik’s (Tony Curran) office and shoot him with a gun. Sure, two armed operatives rush into the room after the gunshot has gone off, but there is no sense of this space as a place that actually exists. This isn’t even a dramatically compelling scene. How did Falsworth know Derrik was a Skrull? It’s a plot beat on a piece of paper that could have been turned into something interesting, but instead it just plays out in the blandest way possible.
There were probably ways that Secret Invasion could have folded pandemic restrictions into the plot in a way that was interesting and compelling, emphasizing Fury’s relative isolation in much the same way that the pandemic restrictions on the filming of the third season of Succession fed the sense that the lead characters had always been living in an isolated and hermetically sealed bubble. There’s a potentially fascinating version of Secret Invasion told in empty offices and through phone screens.
However, that would require Secret Invasion to make deliberate aesthetic choices, to choose to be a particular kind of show that is different in its tone and its mood than the shared universe around it. Instead, Secret Invasion just trundles along, hitting all of the predetermined plot beats without ever acknowledging the fact that its world looks curiously haunted and empty. It makes a show that cost $212 million look surprisingly cheap.
With all this in mind, there are moments when Secret Invasion threatens to veer into camp. It’s a massive-budget streaming show in which one of the biggest movie stars on the planet pulls up a chair to a set of double doors in a big empty hospital corridor set to stand watch over the president of the United States, played entirely earnestly and straight. It is incredibly goofy and only more surreal for the fact that the episode plays it entirely straight.
As Susan Sontag noted in her landmark essay, “On Camp,” there is some debate about the question of intentionality when it comes to notions of camp. “One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp,” she argued. “Pure Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (‘camping’) is usually less satisfying.” That shot of Samuel L. Jackson sitting in a chair in front of a double door, guarding the president in a strangely abandoned hospital, is Pure Camp.
In contrast, there are a couple of actors who understand the assignment, such as Olivia Colman. This makes sense. Colman is an actor with extensive comedic and dramatic experience. She was nominated for Academy Awards for her dramatic work in movies like The Lost Daughter and The Father but won for a brilliant supporting turn in the farce The Favourite. Her television work runs the gamut from gritty crime drama Broadchurch to comedies like Fleabag and Peep Show.
There is an interesting disconnect between how Secret Invasion seems to think of Falsworth and how it actually presents her. The show thinks of Falsworth as a chess master but presents her as a gun-toting psychopath. To her credit, Colman understands exactly how seriously she should play a scene where she walks into an empty office and shoots her boss in the leg, or where she monologues about podcasts before shooting another man (Mark Bazeley) in the head.
The only other actor who seems to be operating on this wavelength is Don Cheadle as Raava, the Skrull impersonating Rhodey. Cheadle is stretching the broad comedic muscles that he employed on films like Ocean’s Eleven, which is probably the only way to make that character work. “Harvest” finds Rhodey bursting into a hospital, asking where Ritson is, and then loudly complaining, “Damn people just giving out classified information all the time.” It’s a big and goofy performance.
Watching the penultimate episode of Secret Invasion, it is remarkable that anybody working at Disney ever realistically believed that this show could be Marvel’s answer to Andor, a gritty espionage thriller that offered a fresh and grounded perspective on the shared universe, anchored in compelling dramatic performances. “Harvest” suggests that the best that Secret Invasion could ever have hoped for would be to embrace heightened camp.
With one episode left to go, the large hams are the only appealing things that Secret Invasion has left on the menu.
