YMMV / Secret Invasion (2023)

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Rhodey being a Skrull imposter, this puts forward a retroactive case, as the series does not specify how long ago he was replaced, only that he has his paralytic injury from Civil War, thus allowing all of Rhodey's behavior in several works since then to be colored in a different light. Furthermore, how much of Raava's portrayal of Rhodey is based on her actual personality? Outside of her brief shower sequence, we don't see much of how much of how she acts when not disguised as him, so how she really is when being herself is still a mystery.
  • Is Gravik actually a dangerous Big Bad who is a Blood Knight eager for war with humans and driven by Fantastic Racism or is he actually just a complete poseur Big Bad Wannabe? Gravik never fought in the Kree and Skrull wars and has a seemingly incoherent grasp of both his as well as humanity's backstory. Is he even actually in charge of the resistance or are the Skrull Council members using him as a figurehead? The show presents him as a charismatic leader and big threat but some viewers think he's just a Smug Snake Bad Boss who makes numerous mistakes at every turn.
• Applicability:
  • It's not wholly difficult to read the competing perspectives of the Skrull factions as a commentary on both immigration, multiculturalism and the ability of societies to integrate their cultural minorities. Talos's perspective is consistent with "model minority" behaviors and presentation, while Gravik's faction is synonymous with extremist minority terrorists seeking to build their own territories in defiance of nation-states. Fury's cynicism about the limits of tolerance and cultural coexistence (especially as he is a Black man who grew up under segregation)—as well as G'iah's being pulled between these differing views also highlights the murkiness of the whole situation. Furthermore, G'iah's struggle to remember the appropriate prayers at Talos' funeral is something immigrant children and third-culture kids can relate to, as many try to maintain a connection to the traditions and cultures of their parents but eventually realize much of that is actually quite foreign to them.
  • The Skrulls just want to live as themselves but feel societal pressure to hide their inner selves out of fear of societal judgment and persecution, similar to how gay and trans people do in real life. Notably Asgardians who are better able to pass as human face far less discrimination than Skrulls, despite both of them being alien migrants.
  • The contrast between how Skrulls and Asgardians are treated speaks to the double-standard of how many countries are when it comes to migrants. With their superpowers and advanced technology Asgardians are more akin to wealthy or "high skill" migrants many countries fall over themselves to attract, whereas the Skrulls have more in common with poor refugees fleeing conflict zones and are shunned and dehumanised.
  • Gravik himself plays into the stereotype of the "evil foreigner" who aims to sow chaos and destroy the homeland. However it's gradually revealed that he really doesn't care about conquering Earth, and is mainly motivated by a personal vendetta. He's only using colonial rhetoric as a recruitment tool and to stir up extremism among his people.
  • The show effectively demonstrates how youth fed up with ways of the world move from questioning authority to disaffected to angry to radicalized.
• Badass Decay: Nick Fury in this show was criticized for being nowhere near as competent as he was in Phases 1 and 2, where he always planned several steps ahead of the villains. The show even retroactively undermines his achievements by revealing that he had the Skrulls acting as his personal spies by leveraging on their desire to find a new home, something that he fails to uphold. While this was intentional on the showrunners' part, with Fury's eventual comeback being the payoff, many felt that the execution fell flat given that Fury does not have a final standoff with Gravik (instead working with Sonya to expose and kill the Skrull impersonating Rhodey, while G'iah takes Fury's appearance to approach and kill Gravik to avenge her parents) and ultimately fails to resolve the Human-Skrull conflict.
• Base-Breaking Character: G'iah has this in spades. Some people consider her to be the worst character on the show due to her hypocritical actions, general selfishness about her feelings on humanity and for gaining a massive amount Story-Breaker Power in the climax on a whim. Others find her to have potential to be an interesting character, but is bogged down by a mediocre story and a lack of focus.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Quite a number of viewers have suspected since episode 3 that Rhodey was actually a Skrull due to his sudden level in jerkassery, which included jokingly suggesting carpet-bombing a country because one of its representatives gave him the stink-eye.
• Continuity Lockout: Perhaps even more than any other MCU product, Secret Invasion demands viewers essentially do their homework of watching the majority of phases 1-4, including the TV shows just to be able to understand the chaotic events of the show.
• Designated Hero: This is how many see Nick Fury. In the series, he commits many actions that would be morally dubious at best like using Skrull refugees as his personal spies, breaking his promise to find a new homeworld for Talos and his followers, refusing to call in the Avengers to stop Gravik's insurgency, harvesting the Avengers' DNA to create super soldiers and abandoning Earth without resolving the Human-Skrull conflict. While Fury is supposed to be an anti-hero, what makes Fury rather unlikable is that he never properly fixes and/or is held accountable for the problems that he caused.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Even detractors of the show agree that Sonya Falsworth stole the show thanks to her being one of the few competent characters in the show as well as Olivia Colman's enjoyable performance.
  • Beto has a decent amount of popularity, mainly due to being one of few genuinely nice Skrulls on the show, and for instigating a rebellion against Gravik once he realizes how far gone he is. Many fans were disappointed that he was killed at Gravik's hands.
• Epileptic Trees: During the build-up for Secret Invasion, many Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fans began to suspect that Daisy Johnson / Quake would appear in this series, due to cryptic statements released by Chloe Bennet on social media, as well as the suspicious fact that she had to drop out of a live-action Powerpuff Girls movie to work on another project - heavily suspected to be this miniseries. Ultimately, Daisy did not appear.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: This show indicates that the reason Nick Fury became such an important figure at S.H.I.E.L.D is because he had a secret network of Skrulls working for him ever since the late 90s, and they helped him accomplish missions he never could hope to complete on his own. Many fans aren't fond of this reveal, as it not only takes away much of Fury's mystique, but makes him seem even less competent in retrospect.
• Fan Nickname: Raava, the Skrull masquerading as Rhodey, is sometimes referred to as "Skrhodey" online.
• Fanon Discontinuity: A lot of viewers prefer to ignore director Ali Selim's interpretation that Raava had been impersonating Rhodey since the events of Captain America: Civil War, as it undermines many of the emotional moments Rhodey had been involved in since then, which includes Tony Stark's death in Avengers: Endgame. Not to mention, he was shown being injured more than once during Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, and his blood wasn't the distinctive Skrull green, plus Skrulls start to revert to their actual appearances if they're injured too much, as Brogan, Talos, and the Skrull impersonating Sonya's boss demonstrate during this very series.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • Fans unhappy about Secret Invasion (2008) being reduced in scale to a six-episode series need only look at Captain America: Civil War for a similarly compressed In Name Only Pacified Adaptation of a major Marvel event, focusing only on a handful of characters rather than the entire Marvel roster. Unlike Secret Invasion, Civil War's conflict was handled better than its original source material^note To this date, fans don't hold the event in high regard for making Captain America the bad guy when Iron Man literally imprisoned his fellow heroes in the Negative Zone and committed dubious acts to make himself seem right, as Steve's points about the United Nations only using the Avengers when its convenient for them and Tony's points about keeping the Avengers from making a massive mistake like Ultron were treated as both of them having good reasons despite Tony's guilt complex and Steve's savior complex keeping them from stopping the conflict. Despite the changes, it made the event more engaging, and gave everyone present (Black Widow, Falcon, Black Panther, Spider-Man, etc.) a personal motivation for being there beyond simply agreeing with either side.
    
    On the other hand, fans weren't so forgiving with Secret Invasion because the Skrulls, though justifiably angry that Fury broke his promise to find them a home, went from living amongst humans to deciding to commit genocide of them, and Fury, though justifiably pointing out that humanity won't accept the Skrulls, commits just as great a sins for having used them as his personal spies and stealing the entire superhero community's DNA, making it hard to root for either side and thus have little justification for scaling things down.
  • After the show's conclusion, many complaints arose about the excessive amount of characters that were Adapted Out from the original comic, despite being the central players in the original story. However, removing major characters from the comics for film adaptations has been Marvel's bread and butter for the past few years, with series such as WandaVision completely removing any mention of the X-Men, Avengers or Spider-Man despite being a House of M adaptation, Captain America: Civil War refusing to bring in any of the Defenders despite their involvement in the original comic, and Avengers: Infinity War similarly omitting the Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer and other cosmic-level characters from its plot due to being Screwed by the Lawyers at the time. This worked well previously because Marvel managed to improve upon the overall concept of each story (i.e: superheroes fighting each other over political issues, Wanda having a witchcraft-induced mental breakdown, and the entire universe trying to stop Thanos), while making the characters they did use easy to identify with or root for, regardless of whether they were heroes or villains^note another point in WandaVision's favor is that it wasn't billed as a straight adaptation of House of M, drawing elements from The Vision and the Scarlet Witch and The Vision (2015) as well. With this show however, the lack of big-name superheroes outside of War Machine made the Skrull invasion seem far less menacing than it's supposed to be, and the morally-gray actions of Nick Fury and his limited supporting cast made it quite difficult for people to support him. Subsequently, this made the absence of Adapted Out characters far more noticeable and displeasing for people who were familiar with the original comic.
  • By far the biggest issue fans had with this series was its attempt to depict the Skrulls as being Truer to the Text, bringing them back to being Scary Dogmatic Aliens who use shapeshifting to cause chaos and take over the Earth. Yet Marvel Studios' previous works had previously attempted to make things more accurate to the comics, especially after initially depicting certain characters in a way that wasn't traditional to what the source material was. In this case however, the Skrulls' previous depiction as refugees from an imperialistic Empire flies in the face of their more villainous depiction here, making their more comic-accurate depiction seem off-putting at best, and downright xenophobic at worst.
• He's Just Hiding: A fair number of people were quick to conclude that G'iah wasn't actually dead after being apparently shot and executed by Gravik at the end of the third episode ("Betrayed"), a viewpoint egged on by the fact that due to the shape-shifting nature of the Skrulls, any one of them sympathetic to her and Talos could have potentially impersonated her and made a Heroic Sacrifice on her behalf. Or that she was just shot non-fatally, and returned to her natural face to sell the "death". Both of these were bolstered by the fact that Emilia Clarke was billed as a series regular, as opposed to special guest stars Cobie Smulders and Martin Freeman in the series premiere. Sure enough, the fourth episode opened with G'iah healing, having infused herself with Extremis prior to fleeing the compound.
• Ho Yay: Fury and Talos due to them bickering Like an Old Married Couple. Sonya Falsworth says their big mistake was not leaving "love and friendship" out of their working relationship.
• I Knew It!:
  • Quite a number of people suspected that Emilia Clarke would be playing Talos's daughter from Captain Marvel as an adult, given the amount of time passed in-universe since the character was last seen. The fact that Monica Rambeau had just played a big role in WandaVision after also being introduced as a child in Captain Marvel made people suspect something similar would happen with G'iah, which was proven correct.
  • A number of fans correctly predicted that G'iah would survive being shot by Gravik in Episode 3, based on her status as a series regular and the number of scenes with her in the trailers that hadn't happened yet. Significantly fewer predicted that she would survive by infusing herself with Extremis beforehand.
  • The idea of Rhodey being replaced by a Skrull impersonator has been floating around the internet for years, though mostly as a joking explanation for an In-Universe explanation for the recast from Terrence Howard to Don Cheadle.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: One of the biggest complaints against the series is that it leaves little breathing room due to its six-episode format, the last two being barely longer than half an hour which results in an extremely rushed climax.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Some fans were less than pleased to see the climax of the series's finale feature yet again a Mirror Match between a hero and villain with the same powerset, due to it being a frequent staple of the climax of various MCU works and/or uninteresting on principle.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Very few people suspected that G'iah's death in Episode 3 was actually going to stick, given how strange it would be to kill off a character played by a big-name actress like Emilia Clarke so early in the story. Sure enough, she turns out to have injected herself with Extremis, and the next episode opens with her healing herself after Gravik drives off.
• Love to Hate: Gravik is a terroristic Skrull bent on removing humanity from Earth to make it a new home for the rest of Skrullkind, but his ruthless and power-hungry nature, combined with Kingsley Ben-Adir's performance, make him an engaging and compelling villain to watch. Many fans have even gone on to say that he was a better-done villain than Karli Morgenthau and the Flag-Smashers, especially as both antagonists carry out plans related to allegories to refugees.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Many fans felt that Maria Hill didn't really do much in the decade (in real world time) she had been in the MCU before her death, and Talos's sacrifice to save the President and give the Skrulls a good impression ended up being for nothing when Ritson decides to order the Skrulls' extermination anyway. This led to jokes that their lives and deaths didn't really mean anything.
  • Despite this series being about the character himself, Nick Fury has fallen into this for many fans. Due to his lack of relevance in the MCU after Phase 2, as well as how he's shown to be past his prime and struggling to achieve any kind of lasting victory both in the short and long-term, many fans have come to see Fury as a Failure Hero who causes more problems than he solves. This wasn't helped by the show indicating Fury had a secret network of Skrulls working for him, accomplishing missions he couldn't on his own.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Marvel's Andor.^ExplanationEarly on, the series was praised for being grounded, dark, and gritty like Andor. This description became ironic when the series devolves in its final episode into standard MCU fare, complete with it ending with a normal superhero fight.
  • You're making She-Hulk be in the right!^ExplanationSome fans critical of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law were dismayed that this series ended with a normal superhero fight, as they noted that was exactly what the She-Hulk finale was making fun of about the MCU.
  • Marvel's Caulifla vs Piccolo. ^ExplanationBetween Carol's Binary Mode; Ghost's Flash Step; Hulk's Super-Strength; the Extremis' Healing Factor; Thanos', Cull Obsidian's, Hulk's, and Abomination's durability; and the Skrulls' natural form resembling a Namekian, the fight between G'iah and Gravik looks like a real-life fight between a Super Saiyan and a Namekian.
  • Skrhodey has been under our noses the entire time.^{Explanation (spoilers)}It's ambiguous when Raava replaced Rhodey, though the latter being in a hospital gown and having trouble walking suggests as early as immediately after the events of Captain America: Civil War, where he got a paralytic injury. Thus, people have joked that the famous change between Terrence Howard to Don Cheadle has an actual in-universe reason. This led to a further mutation about how utterly stupid everybody is for not noticing Rhodey suddenly looked completely different beyond a brief Leaning on the Fourth Wall joke in Iron Man 2.
  • Morbius has a higher score than Secret Invasion^ExplanationOn Rotten Tomatoes, Morbius has a 15% critics' score while the episode "Home" has the even lower 7%. Considering Morbius's infamy on the Internet, with its "fanbase" being nearly entirely ironic, people have joked how the day has finally come that an MCU work is genuinely considered worse than Morbius. Of course, this meme is ignoring that the series as a whole has the much better 55% critics' score.
  • Peacemaker is a better Secret Invasion^ExplanationMany are of the opinion that Peacemaker executed the "aliens secretly invade the world by infiltrating humanity" plot better than Secret Invasion. Again, like the Morbius example above, the DC Extended Universe has not had the best reputation compared to the MCU, which has led to some stating the day in which the DCEU scores a victory over the MCU has come.
  • 212 million dollar budget ^ExplanationThe revelation that Secret Invasion had a 212 million dollar budget left many baffled, as it would make the show one of the most expensive MCU projects to date, especially considering the show's mixed reception and criticisms directed at its AI-generated opening sequence, unpolished set pieces and special effects. For comparison, Season 1 of Loki had a budget of $141.3 million despite having an equal number of episodes as Secret Invasion. While many have speculated that the reshoots the series underwent were the main cause, there are some who joked that most of the budget instead went to Samuel L. Jackson's paycheck.
• Memetic Psychopath: While Rhodey had been given this treatment before when he infamously suggested strangling Thanos as a baby, him jokingly threatening (off-mic) to carpet bomb Slovakia because its representatives gave him a dirty look just cemented this. Though considering this Rhodey is really a Skrull infiltrator working under Gravik...
• Moral Event Horizon: Gravik takes a flying leap past this in the first episode as he sets off several bombs in Moscow, killing or maiming thousands of innocent civilians present, and then to Kick the Dog even further, he fatally guns down Maria Hill while disguised as Nick Fury.
• Narm:
  • The stand-off between Gravik and Fury, which results in the former fatally stabbing Talos, is intended to be a tense and shocking scene, but the moment becomes undercut by the soldiers literally a few feet away from them showing no reaction even as Fury shoots Gravik several times.
  • The scene where Skrull Rhodey insults a British military official who was trying to persuade President Ritson to not take action against Russia by sardonically asking her if she took "a stupid pill for breakfast" would elicit a few chuckles not only because how juvenile said insult was, but such an action is so blatantly unprofessional and out-of-character for a consummate officer/government official like Rhodey that it leaves one wondering how anyone could fall for their ruse.
  • In the finale, G'iah shows off her newfound absorbed strength by transforming her arm into Drax's. Unfortunately, because Drax's arm is such a different size and shape than the rest of G'iah's bod, it unintentionally makes her look ridiculous. What makes the scene even sillier is that she had Captain Marvel's powers as well, which includes super-strength that far outclasses Drax, making his powers—and that ridiculous arm—completely redundant.
  • For that matter, the whole final battle becomes hard to take seriously when one notices that whenever G'iah and Gravik use their newfound powers, they also replicate their genetic template's cosmetic features, such as Hulk's pants or Ebony Maw's rings. This led to many comparing the battle to the final showdown of Free Guy, a movie that isn't really meant to be taken all that seriously.
• Salvaged Story:
  • After many years of having Nick Fury Demoted to Extra for much of Phase 3 and not even showing up in Phase 4 (aside from his multiverse variants in What If ...?), this show gives him A Day in the Limelight that fully explores him as a character and his role within the MCU.
  • Captain Marvel's decision to remain uninvolved with Earth affairs for decades after her solo movie was seen as a weak Hand Wave for her absence in the overall MCU up until now, with many people expressing grievance with how her actions seemed callous in the grand scheme of things. This show addresses the problem by having Carol's lack of involvement with Earth outright criticized by Gravik and the Skrulls under his command, with them explicitly singling out her broken promise to give them a home.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: Despite Valentina Allega de Fontaine not appearing once during this show, a lot of fans like to imagine that she and Sonya Falsworth would be Friendly Enemies if they met each other due to having many shared characteristics.
• Spoiled by the Format: The opening credits do not list Martin Freeman or Cobie Smulders, implying that their characters won't stick around for long. They don't, with the Ross seen at the beginning of the series being revealed to be a Skrull impersonator and the real Ross only appearing at the very end, and Hill killed at the end of the first episode.
• Strawman Has a Point: While President Ritson's declaration of a manhunt on all alien outsiders is meant to be presented as villainous, there are some who felt that his knee-jerk reaction was understandable. The Skrulls had infiltrated various governments by kidnapping and impersonating high-ranking officials with no one the wiser and came extremely close to instigating a nuclear holocaust on a global scale, and said impersonators made a couple of attempts on Ritson's own life. It's also rather more understandable to view the Skrulls as a hostile race when, throughout the entire show, there were at best two 'good' Skrulls actively working to stop Gravik (being Talos and post Heel–Face Turn G'iah), with all of the others seemingly being on board with Gravik's plan to wipe out humanity or doing nothing to stop it until he started killing his own supporters and thus threatening them.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • This was the reaction to the show's portrayal of the Skrulls from both MCU fans and fans of the original comic.
    • For MCU fans, the Skrulls being shown as terrorists trying to take over Earth didn't feel congruous with their prior portrayal as refugees fleeing from the fascistic Kree empire beforehand in Captain Marvel. Making matters worse is how many Jewish viewers saw them initially as allegories to them fleeing Nazi oppression, only for the later reveal in Secret Invasion to throw that out of the window.
    • For comic fans, the change from the Skrulls carrying out the invasion due to religious motivation to them being radicalized by Gravik did not go down well. Many felt it robbed the story of interesting drama, with most of the Skrulls at large essentially being whitewashed of their crimes.
  • Some fans were not happy that the Avengers were cut from the show. Instead of being a crossover of Avenger characters (similar to Captain America: Civil War), the only associated Avengers characters that appear are Fury, Maria, Ross and Rhodey.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: One of the biggest criticisms of the show is how it underutilizes many characters by either killing them off or having them replaced by Skrulls offscreen for the sake of shock value.
  • Soren is revealed to have been Killed Offscreen by Gravik in the first episode of this series. Seeing as though Spider-Man: Far From Home had established she was a skilled fighter and Skrull agent (to the point of impersonating Maria Hill, a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, with relative ease) who worked very well with her husband, the fact that we never even see her onscreen (discounting a flashback from The '90s) before unceremoniously dying is nothing short of disappointing.
  • Maria Hill looks to be part of the main cast based on the promotional material, yet she's killed at the very end of the first episode when she's shot by Gravik in the stomach before she even has time to react.
  • Everett Ross is revealed to have been replaced by a Skrull in the Cold Open of Episode 1, yet the show doesn't do much with this twist. Said Skrull ends up dying during a Chase Scene with Talos, and the real Ross only has a short scene when G'iah liberates him from his fracking pod in New Skrullos at the end.
  • It is revealed that Rhodey has been replaced by a Skrull named Raava. If you thought that meant we would see a Skrull using the War Machine armor in an action scene, you would be wrong, as the character in question is purely there to be The Mole and doesn't participate in any action scenes at all. Furthermore, Raava spends most of her screentime acting like the person she's impersonating, meaning that we don't get to see much of her true personality, or even hear her speak in a voice that isn't Rhodey's.
  • Despite being advertised as one of the secondary protagonists of the show, Talos is killed by Gravik at the end of the fourth episode without getting much of a chance to fight back against him. Seeing as though Talos was a fairly popular character who is established to have been a Hero of Another Story by using his shapeshifting to help Fury with undercover S.H.I.E.L.D operations, many fans were upset to see him killed off just as the show finally began to focus on him again.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Upon learning about the Skrulls and their plans to wipe out humanity, President Ritson declares all Skrulls on Earth to be enemy combatants that are to be executed on sight. This leads to a wave of paranoia among the public that results in the deaths of both non-hostile Skrulls and regular humans, which includes the British Prime Minister. However, this only happens in the last ten minutes of the final episode and is mostly glossed over in a montage. Given the show heavily deals in paranoia and geopolitical conflict, many fans were disappointed the show didn't use this plot point until after the main conflict was over.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • Despite the show's poor reception amongst critics and fans, it's widely agreed that many of the actors attached to it gave very strong performances all the way through. In particular, Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn's banter together playing Fury and Talos is considered one of the series' best highlights, and quite a number of fans were devastated to see the latter killed off midway through the show.
  • Olivia Colman as Sonya Falsworth has also been well-received, as she embraces the character's Sugary Malice personality, and is clearly enjoying acting out the character's morally ambiguous actions whenever she's onscreen.
  • Despite the criticisms regarding Gravik's motivation, Kingsley Ben-Adir still manages to make him a genuinely menacing villain with a deliciously stoic Cold Ham persona.
• Uncertain Audience: The premise suggested it would go a Darker and Edgier, subdued spy thriller route in the same vein as Andor, but the final product mixed in the set pieces and Bathos that were normal MCU fare. The result was the target audience of either approach were both so dissatisfied Secret Invasion would end up the lowest-rated Marvel Disney+ show released on the platform.
• Unexpected Character: Episode 5 gives us the return of none other than Rick Mason, the man Natasha Romanoff contacted to help her disappear off the grid in her solo movie. Given how minor his role was there, very few people expected him to return.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: President Ritson is treated like a monster by Fury for initiating a world-wide manhunt to kill every Skrull on the planet, warning his actions will make him a one-term President. To Fury's credit, Ritson's reaction is knee-jerk, highly xenophobic, and likely illegal, yet it isn't entirely unjustified; only recently did he learn that a race of shapeshifting aliens had infiltrated every single level of government in the world, including his own attache that also happened to be the operator of one of the world's most powerful weapons, and all of the other Skrulls except Talos and later G'iah^note keep in mind she only betrayed Gravik when Talos told her his faction killed her mother were content and perfectly fine with letting Gravik kill every human on the planet by starting World War III. The fact that Fury was responsible for driving the Skrulls towards that goal by failing to give them a new home only makes his criticisms of Ritson seem hollow, since Ritson wouldn't have had to resort to such drastic measures if Fury actually followed through on his promise.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • The show presents the Skrulls as mostly living in poverty and forced to keep their identities secret as reasons why they might be lured to Gravik's cause. However, them jumping from being upset at humanity's racism and bad conditions to deciding to Kill All Humans to take over Earth with little in-between can leave viewers less-than-interested about their POV. It's especially worse when it's revealed that the Kree-Skrull war was started by them, ironically painting them as a disturbingly warlike race who choose to conquer other planets even when taken in as refugees, much like how the Kree's propaganda stereotyped them as in Captain Marvel.
  • Nick Fury in the third episode receives a brutal verbal lashing from Talos who points out how much of Fury's rise to the position of S.H.I.E.L.D. Director was largely thanks to the contributions of Skrulls he had working for him as part of a secret spy network. Fury stops the argument when he points out they’ve arrived at their destination, and Talos sheepishly backs down for not realizing it, and Fury gaslights him for going after him in his tirade. The show presents this as a moment where Fury gets Talos back, but this is in no way a good counterargument against Talos, as he was responding quite understandably to Fury comparing the Skrull refugees to dogs needing to be taken care of.
  • While Fury's initial reason for not getting the Avengers involved (his reasoning being that it increases the possibility that they might get replaced by Skrulls and therefore escalate the conflict) does hold some valid points, his second reasoning in the fifth episode does not. He argues that humanity cannot always rely on superheroes and that the personal nature of the conflict makes it an issue that he has to settle himself. Not only does it come off as Fury putting Earth at greater risk out of petty pride and revenge, but his reasoning gets undermined come the finale when he has G'iah essentially use the powers of all of Earth's past heroes and villains alike to stop Gravik which makes him even more of a hypocrite and trying to avoid admitting to the Avengers that he stole their DNA without their permission so they wouldn't get so justifiably pissed at him for it.
  • G'iah's Heel–Face Turn after learning that her mother was killed by Gravik is supposed to make the audience empathize with how she was used by him for his own evil deeds, and to show that she's ultimately a good person at heart. However, the fact that G'iah was more than willing to murder innocent people and spread terror throughout Earth simply because she's tired of living on the planet instead makes her defection from Gravik seem motivated by self-preservation and personal suffering rather than because it was the right thing to do. The fact that G'iah continues to demean humanity throughout the series despite trying to help Fury further makes her look selfish and uncaring. Her motivation for siding with Gravik in the first place, that the Skrulls do not need to hide their true identities, gets undermined by the fact that she is always in her human guise even when it's not necessary, which makes her come off as a Hypocrite who does not practice what she preaches.^note In fairness, this is not because of the writing but because Emilia Clarke disliked the makeup process for her Skrull form.
• The Un-Twist: Because Gravik's behavior and goals seem so detached from how the Skrulls were depicted in Captain Marvel, some fans suspected that he was secretly a Kree defector, or otherwise a Boomerang Bigot who was intending on trying to destroy his own species. While Gravik does become increasingly callous towards his fellow Skrulls during the course of the show, his ultimate motivations are nothing more than simple revenge against Talos and Nick Fury.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
  • The first episode centers around Skrulls pretending to be an American extremist group attacking Russia to instigate a war between the two countries. While the series was released during the ongoing Russian invasion in Ukraine, the writing and production happened before the conflict began. Some of the aspects about the Skrulls' stay in Russia, such as them living in an abandoned nuclear plant, also seem like symbolism for the Ukraine-Russia struggle,^note as the war raised various concerns related to nuclear plants in the area, including fighting taking place in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and the state of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant after being captured by Russia, when it's really just coincidence.
  • The series has been accused of playing into far-right anti-refugee bias (the Skrulls being refugees that have decided to start a genocidal plot against their host nation (Earth) for seemingly no reason) as well as mirroring a number of real-life anti-semitic Conspiracy Theorist views (them wielding vast political power by infiltrating groups like the UN as well as NATO).

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