Secret Invasion Creates The Most Powerful Character In The MCU (And We May Never See Them Again)
This article discusses major spoilers from the "Secret Invasion" finale.
Remember those innocent days when we all thought that "Secret Invasion" would actually be Marvel's most grounded and nuanced story since "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"? Well, we may have spoken much too soon. The sixth and final installment of the series, titled "Home," brought things to a very familiar, Marvel-typical end (you can read my recap for /Film here) despite the previous five episodes taking great pains to tell a slow-burn plot that cribbed from countless espionage thrillers that came before.
Well, all that went out the window once Gravik (Kinglsey Ben-Adir) began to throw down in his Super Skrull form against G'iah (Emilia Clarke), who was gifted the same powers taken from the vial of Avengers DNA that Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) recovered at the end of last week's episode. Suddenly, this down-and-dirty series brought us back to reality and cruelly reminded us that, when given half the chance, a Marvel Disney+ show will always revert back to an orgy of unconvincing VFX fights and a rote obsession with power levels. It's that latter aspect, however, that raises all sorts of implications for the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. When G'iah kills Gravik at the end of their battle and walks away, it's hard not to be distracted by the fact that we've just watched the origin story for arguably the most powerful character the MCU has ever seen ... and "Secret Invasion" doesn't seem all that aware of it, either.
As demonstrated by her fight, G'iah is now imbued with the powers of Captain Marvel, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, freaking Thanos, and many more MCU characters. Yet after all that, she's just going to become ... some British secret agent? We should probably unpack this.
Who needs Avengers when you can have Super Skrulls?
When you look back at how the MCU has progressed over the years since 2008, it's pretty impressive how Marvel President Kevin Feige and his cohorts steadily built up each superhero and sub-franchise from the humblest beginnings (remember, 2011's "Thor" chalked up its title character's powers to science, not magic or the supernatural!) to one that could plausibly sustain characters as overpowered as Thanos, Kang, and many, many others. It truly felt like a significant amount of thought was put into how, say, Iron Man would measure up to his tech-based enemies or just how much strength the superhero serum ought to bestow upon Steve Rogers. By the time Captain Marvel arrived on the scene in "Avengers: Endgame" and wrecked Thanos' spaceship singlehandedly, it seemed as if this was the absolute pinnacle of what a Marvel superhero could aspire to be.
Until the finale of "Secret Invasion" completely turned that on its head, at least. Now, we know that G'iah and Gravik (until he got speared through the chest, that is) have been given the power of the gods, essentially. The computer readout in Gravik's Russian hideout spells it all out, running through dozens of names and creatures contained within that single vial. If you thought that "Hey, why don't they just call in the Avengers?" was already a valid complaint for every movie or show to this point, well, we might as well get used to saying the same thing about G'iah, who by all accounts ought to be more powerful than all the Avengers combined.
She did manage to kill Gravik, so it's not like she's invulnerable, either. But one can't escape the feeling that Marvel didn't fully think through the consequences of introducing someone as enhanced as G'iah.
The adventures of G'iah and Sonya
So what does one do with a character who's able to shift the balance of power in the MCU all on her own? Well, according to "Secret Invasion," you pair her up with a spy she's never even interacted with before and let them ... do vague spy stuff, I guess? There is some lip service paid to the idea of both G'iah and Sonya Falsworth (Olivia Colman) working together to advance their own interests and that of their respective species, but all that seems like a waste of G'iah's potential. Wouldn't that be a job better suited for someone that Fury literally called "the best diplomat the Skrulls have ever had" — his wife Varra (Charlayne Woodard)?
In any case, it might not even be worth stressing about this too much anyway. It's no secret that "Secret Invasion" hasn't exactly made any major waves on social media or, anecdotally, among general audiences, either. Will the mysterious case of G'iah and her godlike abilities simply go the way of that frozen Eternal Tiamut currently sticking out of the middle of the Indian Ocean, never to be remarked upon again? Marvel could easily get away with just ignoring her existence altogether, seeing as how distracting it would be to pause any future movie or show to reexplain where G'iah came from and how she became so overpowered. But what future property would even make sense for her to return? There are currently no plans for season 2 of "Secret Invasion," and it's hard to imagine that Emilia Clarke would want to devote several more years in another big franchise after only just getting out of "Game of Thrones."
So that leaves us where we started, marveling over the existence of the MCU's most powerful hero.