Tear Jerker / Secret Invasion (2023)

Episodes

Episode One: Resurrection

• Agent Prescod's death in the opening scene. He worked so hard to uncover the Skrulls' infiltration of Earth in an effort to warn someone, and it turns out that the first person he could find to seemingly trust with this information still turned out to be a Skrull imposter, who promptly kills Prescod in a scuffle. It's No Good Deed Goes Unpunished and Shoot the Shaggy Dog all in one. The only Curb Stomp Cushion is that his murderer doesn't get away, and falls to his own death after being pursued by Talos and Maria Hill.
• It's revealed that Soren was Killed Offscreen prior to the events of the series... by the very same people that G'iah now works for. G'iah herself was unaware of her death and when Talos breaks the news to her, she's visibly shocked and later breaks down crying. Her death is a catalyst for G'iah performing a Heel–Face Turn.
  Talos: Her last words were "Find G'iah".
• Maria Hill is clearly upset with Nick for not contacting her in the three years he was gone. While she seems to understand why he did it, she's still visibly hurt her closest friend never bothered to reach out to her.
• Talos' despondant reaction to Fury gunning down the Skrull impersonating Poprishchin. Nick had a very good reason, but Talos simply sees it as another unnecessary death of one of his own people.
  Talos: I said no...
• Fury's clear trauma stemming from being dusted during The Snap. He clearly has flashbacks to it and it's all but stated to be the main reason he's lost his touch so much in recent years. His current state is quite sad too, given what an absolute badass he was prior to the Snap, only to see him more unfocused, less engaging and far less strategic and aware than before.
• The death of Maria Hill. She's caught in the crossfire of the sudden explosions around the town centre, trying to help as many people as she can get to safety. Nick then calls her name and she looks up hopefully to see her friend has come to give aid... only to find a bullet in her chest. Fury's Slasher Smile makes it apparent that this is not Nick Fury. The real Fury comes along, shocked and distraught, as the victorious Gravik flees and leaves her to die. Maria uses her last breath seemingly asking if that is the real him who is cradling her in his arms, before slowly dying of her wounds.
  • Talos has to pull Fury away from her body as the explosions continue to sound throughout the city. Even with all the carnage and loud sounds, you can still hear Fury's anguished cries.
  • Hill's death is also the fifth time overall, six if we count Wanda, that a victim of the Snap dies not long after they had been resurrected. With the way things are going, one has to wonder if it’s somehow vindication of 2018 Thanos’s defiant claim that he was "inevitable".

Episode Two: Promises

• The opening of the episode serves as this given the Foregone Conclusion in the previous episode. Back in 1997, Talos, Gravik, and numerous Skrulls put their faith in the younger Fury to make Earth a new home for their people, even willingly accepting to work as Fury's agents in his missions and shed themselves of their Skrull skins and live as humans. All these sacrifices because they trusted Fury to keep his promise...which he could not decades later. No wonder why Gravik and many other Skrulls became so jaded and hated Fury so much.
• Fury and Talos have a falling out as they're traveling on a train, with Fury calling out Talos for lying about just how many Skrulls have been living among humans for decades, while Talos rightfully calls out Fury for all the promises he couldn't keep to the Skrull people. Fury eventually snaps and outright tells Talos that humanity and Skrull coexistence is an impossible prospect since even humans can't live together in harmony themselves, culminating in Talos abandoning Fury to be on his own, with Fury anguishedly blaming himself for losing yet another ally.
  • To preface his argument, Fury brings up how he and his family were forced to ride the train in a dilapidated, poorly run colored car, without functioning bathrooms and access to the dining car. Fury knows humanity likely can’t tolerate the presence of Skrulls because within his own lifetime, he experienced proof the United States wouldn’t even tolerate colored human beings.
• Elizabeth, Maria's mother, angrily demands to know the real reason why her daughter died from Fury, who has no choice but to admit that he is the reason why Maria was killed.
• Later on, Fury sets up a meeting with James Rhodes, who might possibly be the only ally he can still call upon for help, only to be met with a cold reception and a brutal yet honest "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Rhodes denouncing his catastrophic failure in Moscow. With Rhodey not helping, Fury is left with nobody he could turn to anymore.
• Gravik chooses to pull a callous You Have Failed Me on Brogan after the latter gives up vital information to Sonya. G'iah's visibly Trying Not to Cry throughout it all, and even Pagon (who oversaw Brogan's initiation) is resignedly grim as he takes Brogan away to do the deed.

Episode Four: Beloved

• Despite surviving thanks to her quick thinking, G'iah still has no faith in Talos and his vision of living in peace with humans. She outright calls him delusional for thinking it could actually happen, before leaving him behind once again.
  G'iah: Once and for all, Dad, what is your plan for finding our people a home? Because Gravik has already implemented his, and it works.
  Talos: Okay. First, we take down the insurgency. You, me, Fury. Once that's done, we go to the President. And we have a big bargaining chip. And we tell him, "Guess what? Just saved your planet. Now give me a little something in return." And we wait and see what can happen next. All right? And I believe that I can secure an amnesty for the one million of us to remain.
  G'iah: Don't you want to live in your own skin?
  Talos: Of course I do. But we have to deal with reality. G'iah, we're a people without a planet. We depend on the goodwill of our hosts. We just have to keep showing them who we are. We just keep contributing, show them our hearts. They will see us.
  G'iah: You are delusional. That's not who we are. And that is not who I've become.
  • This is also the last time she ever spoke to her father before his death. One can only imagine the guilt she'll be carrying when she finds out about this.
• The story of Priscilla Davis, who Varra impersonated for years: she was a kindly family woman who was diagnosed with a terminal illness, but never wanted her family to find out because she loved them too much to hurt them. When Varra propositioned her to take over her identity after being informed she had mere hours left to live, she made Varra promise her to bury her at sea, remain a good daughter to her parents and to never hurt Nick Fury (and considering she never actually met him, should tell you what a good woman she was). Varra kept all those promises except one: she hurt Nick Fury.
• Fury and Priscilla sitting down and confronting her status as a double agent for Gravik. It's clear she was sent to distract and/or kill him, but she genuinely loved him and even now can't bring herself to follow orders. For his part, Fury has her dead to rights and even admits falling for her was the biggest mistake he ever made, but he loves her so much he'd do it all over again. They then quote a book of poems she read on their date in Paris shortly after the Avengers saved New York.
  Nick: And did you find what you wanted from this life, even so?
  Priscilla: I did.
  Nick: And what did you want?
  Priscilla: To call myself "beloved". To feel myself beloved on the Earth.
• Talos' death. Fury quickly notices the soldier carrying the injured Skrull is an imposter (because this is the same soldier who had freaked out when Talos began reverting to his Skrull form after Pagon shot him). He swiftly shoots him... at which point the soldier instantly reveals himself to be Gravik, who with one defiant glare, stabs Talos in front of a horrified Nick, who can only yell out a distraught Big "NO!" as he watches his friend fall to the ground.
  • To make it worse, like with Maria, Fury has no other choice but to leave Talos's body behind, and focus on evacuating President Ritson from the kill zone.

Episode Five: Harvest

• Pagon's death. Despite being his right-hand man and complicit in a lot of Gravik's crimes, Pagon was a loyal soldier who genuinely wanted to help his people. He also genuinely admired Gravik and followed him far into the fray. What caused him to die? He stood up to Gravik when it became clear even to him that his leader was Jumping Off the Slippery Slope. True to form, Gravik has no remorse for it.
• When Fury somberly reports Talos's death to G'iah, she's clearly Too Broken to Break to emotionally lash out.
• G'iah and Priscilla try to give Talos a Meaningful Funeral by burning his corpse and offering Soren's ring at his pyre. Throughout the sequence, G'iah is visibly struggling with her worldviews faltering, the fact that her father (previously a Skrull general) deserved more than this humble sendoff, and her understandable guilt at walking away from her father just before he died.

Episode Six: Home

• The ending:
  • Despite Talos saving his ass in episode 4, Ritson declares anti-alien protocol and, as expected, montages between Fury and Ritson's phone call shows both Skrulls and humans getting killed indiscriminately without any consideration.
    • While the only alien species shown is the Skrulls as per the show, this also means Asgardians will definitely not be safe from potential war being declared.
  • Sonya and G'iah make a Realpolitik deal to protect both humans and Skrulls from Ritson's idiotic stance against Skrulls and aliens at large. Ignoring Sonya's uncertain moral alliance and G'iah's clear anti-heroism, this serves as the brutal reminder that the idealistic dream of harmony between human and alien species that Talos and Fury tried to reach will never come true, only barely tolerable mutual manipulation will do the job like how the world actually works; very fitting for a darker MCU project.
• As G'iah enters New Skrullos while posing as Fury, she briefly pauses when she comes across Beto's corpse, still lying in the dirt where Gravik cut his throat after his attempted mutiny failed. She's clearly shocked and saddened to see that the relatively innocent Skrull that she brought into Gravik's organization way back in the first episode has met such an unceremonious death. This feeling is only amplified when she glances into the cafeteria and notices the corpses of Zirksu and the other mutineers.
• G'iah (disguised as Fury) telling Gravik that the reason they were never able to make Earth a planet where humans and Skrulls can coexist is because they were brutally aware that humans' Fantastic Racism can never really be eliminated.
  G'iah: I knew within a few years of searching that there was no other planet out there for you. I knew the only way to keep my end of the bargain was to build you a home here.
  Gravik: [visibly upset] So why didn’t you do it?!
  G'iah: Because it’s much easier to save the lives of eight billion people... than to change their hearts and minds.
  • The simple fact that it is G'iah saying this is saddening in two possibilities: the first one is that, if she met up with Fury before this to discuss the plan of stopping Gravik (which she'd have to have done in order to obtain the Harvest vial) and is going off a script Fury gave her, then Fury still entirely believes all this after everything that has happened over the course of the series. Alternatively, these are G'iah's own beliefs, and while still willing to fight to save the lives of innocent Skrulls and humans, she has become bitter enough that she still believes Gravik's ideology, and only is willing to stop short of agreeing with his methods.
• Just the fact that Talos' beliefs, which he kept to even at the cost of his own life, that humans and Skrulls could coexist are proven wrong — with the very man whom he sacrificed his life to save now orchestrating a planetary ban on all extraterrestrial life.