Gravik's getting greedy.
Last time on Secret Invasion,
Director and Dr. Fury faced off. Nick Fury’s wife, Pricilla Davis aka Varra,
was given orders by the Skrull posing as James “Rhodey” Rhodes to kill her
husband. They met back at their home and had a little verbal face off that
ended with both trying to shoot each other but missing by at least a foot. They
part ways on good terms, Varra asking if Fury would have loved her had she not
“become” Pricilla Davis, to which he said, “I guess we’ll never know.” Fury
meets with Rhodey Skrull and seems to try to get his job back by Blackmailing
them with the info that he knows Skrulls are in the Government. Rhodey Skrull
tells shows him the tape they have of Gravik as Fury killing Maria Hill and
tells him to back off. Unbeknownst to the Skrull, the real point was to get
them to drink some bourbon with a liquid tracker inside. Fury and Talos follow
the signal to the President’s motorcade being assaulted. They back up the
Secret Service agents and get some more troops in the form of the UK Army.
Talos is shot in the attempt to save President Ritson, and then murdered by
Gravik before the Skrull General escaped. Fury was able to drive away with the
president. Enough recap. Let’s get to it.
Ep 5: Harvest
We open with Fury rushing President
Ritson into surgery with several doctors. He dos his best to tell the injured
and unconscious Ritson what happened, the Russians didn’t attack him and not to
trust Rhodey specifically, but he’s pulled away into surgery. On the news, Fury
sees that they’re reporting about footage of Gravik and natural form Talos, and
speculating on the nature of the shapeshifting aliens. Fury sets a chair in
front of the OR and sits with his gun out.
At New Skrullos, Gravik and his men
return to base. He orders the operatives to be assembled. Pagon tries to earn
brown nose points by saying that they killed Talos, but Gravik is angrier about
the president surviving the attack. He is getting desperate to set World War
III in motion. He blames Pagon for not getting something he ordered him to
find, and that’s the last straw for Pagon. He starts yelling at his boss about
how he keeps failing to kill Fury; Telling Varra to do it when he knew she
wouldn’t, not shooting him when he had the chance and so on. He says that Fury
has what they need, and we finally learn what the Harvest is. According to
Pagon, it’s a registry of the DNA of the Avengers that Fury procured, for some
reason, before hiding it. Pagon begins to question why they’re following him,
and Gravik executes him with a root arm. He reminds his people that they’re
nameless, faceless agents of his will. He orders Varra killed and the soldiers
head out. All except Beto, who lingers a few moments before following. Gravik
when alone calls Rhodey Skrull and tells him to keep Ritson alive and to tell
him that this was a joint mission by Russia and the Skrulls. Rhodey Skrull, who
we learn is named Raava, tells him that that’s nuts, but Gravik believes this’ll
give them leverage over Fury.
Raava comes in and is immediately
apprehended by Fury. Fury tells Raava that he’s not going to let them anywhere
near the President. Raava tells him that they sent the video of Gravik
murdering Maria Hill to the news outlets and he’s about 60 seconds away from
becoming the most wanted man in the world. Fury hits him in the head and heads
out, but not before Raava calls in their hit squad and warns Fury he’ll get the
“full show” if he comes near the president again.
In London, Sonya Falsworth goes
into see he boss Derrik Weatherby. He is watching the footage of the attack on
President Ritson and asks her if she thinks Skrulls are everywhere. She does
and puts a gun to his Skrull head and asks him for the location of Dr. Rosa
Dalton. She shoots him in the thy when he doesn’t react, forcing him to revert
to Skrull form. She warns him that there’s no policy on killing Skrulls so he
best tell her what he wants to know before she decides.
Beto tries to confront Gravik about
what he did to Beto. He plays it off by saying he failed them. He gets a call
from Raava confirming that the President is coming out of surgery and that
they’ll order an airstrike when they’re ready. Beto and all the soldier Skrull
suddenly attack Gravik and try to kill him. They do a good job, getting a
plastic bag over his head and trying to suffocate him, knowing that he’ll
regenerate from any other kind of injury, but he overwhelms them with his
powers. Beto is the last to survive, calling him a monster before getting his
throat cut.
Fury returns to his safehouse and
meets with G’iah. She’s already aware that her father died, she claimed that
she left him because she knew he’d lose. Fury says he chose the path of
struggle, he didn’t lose. He asks her about the Super Skrulls. She reveals that
Talos only has a few kinds of DNA, Cull Obsidian and Groot, but says he’s still
looking for the “Harvest.” She asks for time to bury her father, Fury giving
her the keys to his car and saying to take Talos to Varra who will know what to
do. He runs as sirens start blaring, someone having tipped the cops off to his
safehouse. He tells G’iah he’s headed to Finland.
We shift over to Sonya, who has
tracked down Dr. Rosa Dalton and her husband, or more accurately their Skrull
impersonators. They try to threaten her with a shotgun but her own goons arrive
and have them at gunpoint. She interrogates them on what they’re working on,
telling her to not leave out a decimal point. Later, she has the lab torched.
Victor Dalton Skrull grabs a gun and threatens to shoot Rosa Dalton Skrull’s
brains out if they’re not released, saying he’ll kill her before letting her
betray Gravik. Sonya believes him and nonchalantly blows his head off before he
can react.
G’iah arrives at the Fury house and
breaks in looking for Varra. She finds her in the kitchen and they both have
guns out. Varra asks if she’s here to kill her, and G’iah tells her she’s here
to get help burying her dad.
At the hospital, Raava enters the
President’s room. They tell Ritson about he Skrulls and lies about how Russia
is working with them. They show him blueprints of New Skrullos and says that
they need to do a strike, now, and that England is for sure backing them and
the rest of NATO will fall in line. Ritson says that this will start WWIII and
Raava says that they’d rather face that than a Skrull invasion.
On the drive to Finland, Fury gets
a call from Gravik. Gravik tells Fury to bring him the Harvest, if he does,
he’ll make sure Ritson’s attack on New Skrullos is called off. He also tells
him to bring Iodide pills, as the reactor can be aggressive. Fury boards his
small plane and relaxes for a minute. Rick Mason, the guy who helped Natasha
out in Black Widow, comes out from the cockpit to give Fury a fake id and tell
him that it’s impressive that Interpol put him on a red tag list. Fury misses
his Helicarrier and Mason points out those have all been mothballed. He advises
Fury to take a nap before they head out, saying he looks sleepy.
Varra and G’iah prepare Talos for
cremation. G’iah believed her father, as their general, deserved more than
this. He deserved a full funeral procession, but Varra says he wasn’t much for pageantry.
G’iah gives the body an offering, a ring from her mother and lights him up as
Varra makes a Skrull prayer. She ends it by saying “Travel well to your beyond,
father’ in Skrullese. After, G’iah laments that she called him a failure. She
asks what daughter says that to their dad. Varra says the kind that would try
to make it up to him the next time she saw him. She goes onto say that her last
words to Fury before the Snap were “If you keep spending all your time chasing
aliens, you might lose the one you married.” G’iah asks what she did to put her
on the hit list. She said insubordination, and G’iah is shocked that she’s
following the order to stay in place to wait for said execution. She admits
that it’s because she loves her house and doesn’t want to give it up. She says
that she chose the house with Fury in mind, saying she picked it because It had
the three things he cares about most, privacy, security and light. Varra admits
she could lose hours just watching Fury read a book in the right light. G’iah
makes a crass comment about if Fury ever admired her as a Skrull. She tries to
walk it back, but Varra isn’t having it, saying that she did mean to offend
because she’s young and doesn’t know what it takes to build a life with
someone. She says that she wants to meet her executioner in the middle of her
happiness than in running down a dark alley. They start getting shot at and the
Skrulls fall back to her private garden where she stockpiled guns and gear.
They kill the first hit squad but more drop in from the roof. They kill them
too.
In Finland, an old white man goes
through customs. It’s Fury in a wig and the “widow’s veil” that mesh that lets
people change their face from The Winter Soldier. He joins up with
Sonya. They drive off while listening to rap music, Sonya’s choice.
Back with Varra and G’iah, they
part ways. Looks like G’iah’s got a plane to catch.
As Fury and Sonya drive, Fury
ponders why Rhodey is in charge of this play. Sonya says that Rhodey asked for
cooperation in investigating New Skrullos, Fury is incredulous that she gave
that info to him, and only then drops the truth bomb that Rhodey has been
replaced with a Skrull. Sonia makes a very apt comment, “Well, who in the hell
isn’t a Skrull these days?” Fury knows that Gravik is doing all this to
pressure Fury to give him the Harvest. Fury explains that the Harvest is a
collection of DNA taken from Earth’s heroes and villains from the Battle of
Earth. Even some Captain Marvel blood is mixed in with it. He had Skrulls go in
and collect that DNA and claims the only one that knew about it was him and the
collectors. Gravik lead the collectors and he believes that’s where he got the
idea for the Super Skrull machine. Sonya points out this is all Fury’s fault,
and he agrees, saying why do you think I came back. They exit the car and head
into a graveyard. Fury leads her to the grave of Col. Nicholas J Fury. Sonya asks
why he hasn’t called in a single Avenger for help, and he gives a speech about
how they can’t keep relying on heroes with special powers to fly in and save
the day. Sonya asks if he has other graves like this, and Fury says yes, that
he has them all over the world. He chose Finland because this is where he had
his honeymoon and Skrull’s like the cold. He opens his headstone, turns out it
is in fact a high tech safe, and gets the vial. He then entered a mausoleum,
opens a few more safes that look like headstones, and pulled out his trench
coat, eyepatch, and gun. He radios into someone saying it’s time to finish
this.
As far as penultimate episodes go,
this is fine. I can’t help but feel that they haven’t built up to the points
they’re trying to make land, though. Gravik has gone in an episode from
respected leader to the dude that slaughtered most of his operatives. It feels
like there was an episode or two between 4 and 5 where Gravik had a few more
major setbacks that could have further pushed the Skrull operatives to rebel.
The Harvest is definitely one of those items that feels like Fury should have
known to destroy immediately for this very reason of “someone could try to
manufacture superpowers from this.” Just seems dumb to keep it is my point.
Also, it feels weird that this is the point of the whole series but we’ve only
heard about it in a line or two of dialogue across four episodes. Granted, it
was the master stroke of the plan, but at the same time it might have been nice
to see Pagon going on a search for it with G’iah, maybe, or give us some other
indications of why Gravik wants it so bad before now. The plan to force Fury to
give him the Harvest or watch innocent Skrulls get killed is legit terrifying
and heartless, I will give Gravik that. Oh, and I liked Talos’ funeral and the
interactions between G’iah and Varra. G’iah has very much been struggling this
entire season, so getting to talk with as levelheaded a person as Varra seems
like it’ll only benefit G’iah. I’m curious to see how it’ll all end but I’m
prepared to not be wowed. See you tomorrow.
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Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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