How Long Has [SPOILER REDACTED] Been A Skrull In The MCU? An Investigation
This post contains massive spoilers for "Secret Invasion" episode 1.
With "Secret Invasion," one of the biggest storylines in the history of Marvel Comics has finally been adapted into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. On one hand, it's kinda weird that one of the most epic superhero crossovers ever — the comics featured the Illuminati, comprised of the likes of Iron Man, Namor, Black Bolt, Doctor Strange, and Professor X — is being done as a television series on Disney+. But on the other hand, it's rather appropriate that a tale of espionage plays out in a serialized fashion, à la classic shows like "24," "Alias," and "Mission: Impossible."
All spy stories are about subterfuge, so it's extremely common for characters to betray each other, and reveal that they're working for the so-called "bad guys." Marvel's "Secret Invasion" is no exception — it begins with a pretty major twist that calls a lot of MCU history into serious question.
Everett K. Ross, the CIA agent played by Martin Freeman in "Captain America: Civil War," "Black Panther," and "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever," is seemingly revealed to be a Skrull in "Secret Invasion" episode 1. After killing a fellow agent who has uncovered a Skrull conspiracy, Ross then dies in the midst of his getaway while being pursued by Talos (Ben Mendelsohn).
And while the rest of the first episode is more about setting the stage for future events than questioning the past, it got our gears turning. We just gotta know. Was Ross always a Skrull, is someone pretending to be Ross in "Secret Invasion" while his human counterpart is busy elsewhere, or was he a real CIA agent who was replaced at some point after we met him in the MCU?
Theory #1: Everett Ross was always a Skrull
If there's one thing we know for certain after the first episode of "Secret Invasion," it's that there's actually nothing we know for certain about the Skrulls in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They've been off-camera for decades, and although Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) promised to find the refugee species a new home in the 1990s at the end of "Captain Marvel," it doesn't seem like they've made much headway. Talos, his family, the new rebel Skrull leader Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir), and apparently quite a few other Skrulls have been on Earth for quite some time, presumably incognito, blending into the human population.
Given they've been around for so long, that means they could be pretty much anywhere by now. They could be doing harmless data entry or situated in prominent positions throughout law enforcement, governmental bodies, any number of prominent corporations, you name it. And you clearly wouldn't have to tell Gravik that it would be a good idea to embed a Skrull sleeper agent within the ranks of the CIA — if Everett Ross was always a Skrull, as the first theory goes, then he thought of it years ago. The only real question is when?
Were the Skrulls secretly working through the CIA to build diplomatic ties with Wakanda, since that's mostly what Everett Ross had been doing in the MCU movies? It'd be a smart plan since the Wakandans are not only diplomatically and scientifically powerful but also — as we saw in "Wakanda Forever" — prone to making deals with superhuman societies living secretly on planet Earth. But there are a lot of holes in that theory...
Theory #2: Everett Ross was replaced by a Skrull after The Blip
If Talos is to be believed, then Gravik didn't ascend to power in Earth's secret Skrull colony until after The Blip (in the 2020s), and after Nick Fury's return. And since it sure seems like Talos was, if not the leader, then at least an important figure to the Skrulls in all that time, and since Talos hasn't betrayed Fury, it stands to reason that the Skrulls probably didn't start thinking of any serious invasion plans in the 1990s, the 2000s, or during the first few phases of the MCU.
After all, if the Skrulls wanted to invade Earth decades ago, that would have been the time to do it. Earth wasn't crawling with superheroes then, and the world was already divided by paranoia and war. Heck, if the Skrulls really wanted to, The Blip would've been an even better time to attack, since Earth was in disarray and half the heroes were missing for five years. (Although then again, a lot of Skrulls may have gone missing too.)
It may also be useful to look back at the events of 2014's "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," the first time we found out the American government had been infiltrated by clandestine secret agents with a green scaly motif over several decades. If there were Skrulls in the mix back then, that would've been a prime time to strike, but then again it also would have been a prime time to help Nick Fury out. And if, in the ensuing shootouts, any of the fallen soldiers had been Skrulls, they would have reverted to their original forms and surely somebody would have noticed.
Theory #3: This hasn't been thought out very well
It's tempting to look at a long-running serialized franchise like the MCU and assume that there's always a plan, but the simple truth is they aren't always playing three-dimensional chess. Sometimes stories change course over time. (Remember in "The Incredible Hulk," when Tony Stark invited General Ross to be an Avenger? This was ultimately forgotten and retconned.)
It's possible that Everett Ross was a Skrull the whole time but that wasn't always the plan, so it just doesn't perfectly sync up to the canon. Or maybe he was supposed to be replaced relatively recently and they made the reveal a little confusing.
Example: In the first episode of "Secret Invasion," we learn that when Skrulls replace a real person, they prefer to abduct that person and use advanced technology to (apparently) download their memories. So you'd think that, if the writers wanted to be clear about this, they'd have shown Ross inside that Skrull compound, hooked up to one of their machines. But they didn't, either because Ross was always a Skrull, or because they only had Martin Freeman for a couple of days of filming and didn't think to get any shots of him inside a sci-fi stasis unit.
The fact that the episode continues apace and every single one of the main characters drops the subject, instead of talking about how they need to find out if Ross was always a Skrull, or if they need to rescue him, suggests that "Secret Invasion" doesn't want us to wonder either, which in turns hints at a very unsatisfying answer. As always with serialized stories, we just have to wait and see. Hopefully, they get around to this eventually, because we want to know. And I'm sure Ross's ex-wife Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) — the CIA director in the MCU, as of "Wakanda Forever" — probably does too.