This week on Marvel’s Secret Invasion, Nick Fury is on a quest to figure out who he can actually trust. It’s not an easy question for a spy like Fury to answer on a normal day, and this certainly ain’t a normal one. This time, the spy game is happening inside his very own house.
Warning: This article is full of spoilers for the third episode of Secret Invasion, “Betrayed.”
Fury begins this episode where he ended the last one: at his secret home in Great Britain, with his secret Skrull wife. When he left Earth after the Blip to go live in space, he left her behind too–she’s not happy with him, and he suspects she’s a part of Gravik’s forces bent on ending humanity. She doesn’t look all that innocent right now, but the obvious answer probably isn’t the right one on this show.
Talos, meanwhile, is having a bad time. His daughter Gi’ah is with Gravik, but her loyalty may be wavering. And not a moment too soon.
Talos and Fury spend this episode chasing a new lead: Rebel Skrulls will use a British nuclear submarine to destroy a commercial airliner. After some clandestine maneuvering which involves Fury taking a rebel’s son as a hostage at gunpoint, Talos and Fury still can’t get what they need to stop the plan–and so Talos burns his last option, using Gi’ah to help stop the plot. Unfortunately, Gravik notices Gi’ah’s betrayal, and he kills her.
That wasn’t the end of the episode, though. In the final scene, we seemingly get confirmation of what we feared about Fury’s secret Skrull wife–along with a major clue about the rebels’ plans. But we’ll come back to that. Let’s check out this week’s Secret Invasion Easter eggs.
1. Super-Skrulls
Last week we got hints at Gravik’s plans for new Super-Skrulls, and this week we both got a brief demonstration of their new powers and an instance of Gravik actually saying “Super-Skrulls” out loud. Not many actors could have pulled that off, but Kingsley Ben-Adir managed it.
In the comics, the Super-Skrulls use the powers of the Fantastic Four, but on Secret Invasion it’s a completely different set of powers: those of Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, a Frost Beast from the Thor movies, Thanos’s lieutenant Black Dwarf (aka Cull Obsidian) from Infinity War, and the Extremis-powered baddies from Iron Man 3. In this episode we only get to see Gravik using his Extremis healing ability, which he demonstrates after Talos stabs him in the hand during their sit-down.
2. Varra the Skrull
Nick Fury has two scenes with his wife in this episode: the morning after the end of last week’s episode, and a flashback set in 1998. We learn that when he left Earth after the Blip, he left her behind as well, and Fury is worried that that fact might have driven her to join with Gravik.
In the present, Fury calls her Scilla, which is not a reference to anything. But in the flashback we learn that her original Skrull name is Varra. In the comics, Varra is not a regular Skrull, but a Skrull-Kree hybrid who belongs to a group called the Knights of the Infinite, who wanted to bring the Kree and Skrulls together instead of warring with each other forever.
It’s not likely that this version of Varra is half-Kree. Instead, the use of that name is more likely a thematic parallel. Being a Skrull married to a human, she’s in a position to help arbitrate this budding conflict between humanity and the Skrull rebels on Earth. If, indeed, that’s what she wants to do. More on that shortly.
3. Dreykov
During Fury’s meeting with Varra, she gives him an envelope and tells him: “This should put Dreykov’s men on their heels.” Dreykov is the creator of the Widows, and the villain of the Black Widow standalone film. But this is not a reference to any specific, previously established mission–we don’t know what Dreykov was doing in 1998 beyond training Natasha Romanoff and Yelena Belova to be new Widows.
4. Old-school texting
At one point during the episode Gi’ah uses an old-style phone with physical buttons to send a text message about Gravik’s activities, giving us a very rare example of a character in a movie or TV show using a numerical keypad to text, which was a bit less straightforward than texting on a smartphone is these days with full on-screen keyboards. This is not a meaningful Easter egg, but it’s always nice to remember this kind of nonsense that used to be part of our daily lives–especially when it’s something like that that nobody misses.
5. Statesmen of World War I
Gravik spends a whole scene making fun of this very large, century-old painting by James Guthrie. Just so you appreciate the size of this thing, the painting stands 13 feet tall and 11 feet wide. Guthrie spent more than a decade painting this, and he actually died before it was 100% completed.
6. Talos promises retcons, but only vaguely
There’s a scene where Fury makes a comment about how he’s been cleaning up the Skrulls’ mess for 30 years. And while that’s not completely inaccurate considering their refugee status both then and now, it’s also not the full picture. The Skrulls have done a lot of work for Fury over the years, and Talos rubs that in his face a little bit.
“Every time you were promoted within S.H.I.E.L.D., we did that. Every terror attack you prevented, we did that. Every enemy you sabotaged and ally you leveraged with dirt no one else in the world had access to, we did that.”
If this is a true characterization of events, then it means that Talos and the others have been around actively participating in the MCU since day one, probably in major roles. Certainly you would think that the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which involved a lot of Nick Fury spy intrigue, would have involved their help somehow. Unfortunately, Secret Invasion hasn’t specifically retconned any past MCU movie with Skrulls yet, so we can’t say for certain what those Skrulls did. But they clearly did many things in many Marvel movies.
7. Who was that voice on the phone?
At the end of the episode, Nick Fury’s Skrull wife tries to call Gravik. But Gravik doesn’t answer–instead, it’s the voice of Don Cheadle, who plays James Rhodes, aka War Machine. So there are two things going on here.
One of them is very obvious: The Skrulls have a fake War Machine that they’re about to use to do some false-flag crimes against humanity. Was Rhodey a Skrull when he met with Fury during last week’s episode? That we don’t know.
The second thing concerns the loyalty of Fury’s wife Varra. I think the suspicions about her loyalties are a red herring, and that she was calling Gravik as the first part of some kind of spy maneuver. While she was evasive when Fury was asking questions earlier, I think it’s because she’s in the middle, not on anybody’s side but her own right now. And I think she’s going to be important to resolving this whole deal because of that.