What you’ll need to remember from the MCU before ‘Secret Invasion’
As someone who still hopes Samuel L. Jackson In An Eye Patch will show up in the end credits of every single Marvel movie, it’s simply delightful to ponder the imminent premiere of Secret Invasion on Disney+. And it’s not just because Olivia Colman is joining the MCU.
Jackson’s Nick Fury is the single most constant element of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, dating all the way back to 2008’s Iron Man, and in Secret Invasion — based on one of the most iconic Marvel Comics story arcs of the last 25 years — the former S.H.I.E.L.D. director and Avengers founder finally gets the showcase he deserves. As a weary, aging Fury returning to Earth to clean up a mess decades in the making, Jackson’s lived-in performance shows that the weight of all that’s happened to him is, well, weighing.
So what’s happened? Well, Fury’s appeared in 11 MCU films (plus two episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). But for the story ahead, based on the limited peek Disney allowed critics at Secret Invasion, you’ll get a combo of Fury’s personal journey and the latest developments on Earth in the still-roiling aftermath of the Blip/Snap. There’s some significant Fury plot points in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (which still absolutely whips); Captain Marvel is the most Fury you can get so far, and probably the single most important refresher for the story’s start, if you can handle that digital de-aging. And WandaVision has no Fury except that of a woman bereaved — but from episode 4 onwards sets up both the organisation that’s replaced S.H.I.E.L.D. and Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau, who’ll be a central figure in the upcoming The Marvels.
And if you don’t have time for that, fair enough. Everything happens so much. Here’s an imagined dialogue to help you remember the basics before Secret Invasion drops this week.
Where’s Nick Fury been all this time?
On a space station — for at least some of the time, probably on the SABER station we saw in the trailer for The Marvels. But let’s backtrack a bit first: Fury and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) were both dusted in the Blip.
Five years later, when Fury was restored by Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) actions in the battle against Thanos, like a lot of folks, he apparently struggled with his place in the world. Fury took what appeared to be a sort of working holiday in space, surrounded by Skrull refugees. That vessel was the orbital lab of Mar-Vell (Annette Bening), a non-evil Kree scientist and Carol Danvers’ (Brie Larson) former mentor.
Who are the Skrulls again?
A displaced race of people, originally from a planet destroyed by the Kree. Skrulls can take on the appearance, voice, and mannerisms of just about any life form, including humans.
Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) did once ask Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) whether they could take on the appearance of a filing cabinet, and she never got a straight answer. Trust no office furniture.
Are the Skrulls baddies?
Like humans, some are lovely, and some less so. But in Secret Invasion, that question gets even more complicated. It’s thirty years on from when we first met Skrulls in Captain Marvel, and the political situation has… developed somewhat.
Wait — what year is it in the MCU timeline now?
The MCU’s “present day” — so after the five-year Blip — is in 2025. (As far as we can tell, other MCU stories that are more or less set in present-day-2025 include She-Hulk, Ms Marvel, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Werewolf By Night, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.)
The Marvels will be set after the events of Secret Invasion, whatever they may be.
OK, I’m with you. But has Fury been in space this whole time? Wasn’t he on Earth during Spider-Man: Far From Home?
Nope. That was Talos in Spider-Man: Far From Home. It’s handy to have a couple of shapeshifting friends you can trust when you need a mental health space holiday.
So who’s been running S.H.I.E.L.D. while Fury was away?
Nobody! Cast your mind back to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and all the “Hail HYDRA” memes it sparked.
S.H.I.E.L.D. was disbanded after the decades-long infiltration by HYDRA. You might be thinking of S.W.O.R.D., which was founded by Maria Rambeau sometime after the events of Captain Marvel and ran under her direction until her death from cancer in 2020, during the Blip. (Her daughter Monica was dusted and missed her mother’s illness.) It was run by acting director Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg) from then until the events of WandaVision, after which he was taken into custody by the FBI for… basically being a dick. It’s not that important. Just remember: Friendship ended with S.H.I.E.L.D., now S.W.O.R.D. is my best friend.
Oh, and as far as we know, most people in government and the super-criminal underworld still think Fury was killed by the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan). He’s been keeping a very low profile.
How long was Talos pretending to be Nick Fury?
For now, according to Far From Home director Jon Watts, it’s MCU canon that it was mainly just for the events of Far From Home. (As with all comic book storytelling, the Marvel story overlords reserve the right to retcon anything they like at any time.)
Why does Talos have an Australian accent?
Ah! I’m so glad you asked, mate. Talos is played by Australian national treasure Ben Mendelsohn. American audiences might know him from Netflix’s Bloodline, where he plays a character from Florida — with an accent I presume was passably Floridian — or from Ready Player One or Rogue One. Because some Americans sometimes forget there are at least a dozen other countries that aren’t America, some of them might have assumed he was putting on a remarkably good Aussie accent as Talos for some reason.
That didn’t answer my question.
Sorry. The short answer: It’s funnier when he says “Flerken”.
The long answer: Mendo (that’s what we call him in Australia) has spoken about this before, briefly mentioning the “earthy directness” of his native accent — but the decision to make him sound Aussie still sits oddly given that he’s the only one doing it. He’s the Skrull we get to know the best in Captain Marvel and beyond, and while the accent’s a tough one to get right, the rest of the Skrulls (or even just his wife Soren and daughter G’iah!) could have canonically sounded Australian instead of variously British and North American.
Meanwhile, Thor and Zeus get to sound like a couple of blokes smashing schooners and doing bad celebrity impressions down at the North Bondi RSL in Thor: Love and Thunder, and Korg sounds undeniably Kiwi because Taika Waititi does whatever he wants.
The real answer: There’s no good reason. Choose your headcanon — mine is that, just like on this version of Earth, no matter where you go, even to the farthest reaches of the galaxy or the multiverse, you’ll eventually hear a bloody Australian.
