'Secret Invasion' pits humans against alien impostors

‘High Desert’ spins a quirky murder mystery

Kirk Boxleitner | Jun 29, 20230

“Secret Invasion” began its six-episode run June 21 on Disney+, with new episodes dropping Wednesdays.

Welcome back, Nick Fury. The Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn’t the same without you.

While Samuel L. Jackson still brings the same fire to the role, he’s visibly a different Fury.

He walks with a limp. His beard has gone gray. And he no longer bothers to wear an eyepatch to cover his scarred face and cloudy eye.

These changes are verbally reinforced by the former spymaster being told he’s lost a few steps since his prime, by virtually everyone he meets, from longtime allies like the quietly bitter S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders very effectively radiates a sense of resentful abandonment toward Fury upon his return) to newly introduced MCU characters like the outwardly chipper Sonya Falsworth, who ranks highly on the MI6 totem pole (Olivia Coleman, a stalwart performer in British prestige dramas for years, dives into her first shared superhero universe with aplomb).

But my favorite performer in this pilot episode has to be Ben Mendelsohn as Talos, a pacifist member of a race of shapeshifting aliens known as the Skrulls, who are now threatening to use their powers of impersonation to overtake the Earth from humanity.

From “The Dark Knight Rises” to “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and “Ready Player One,” Mendelsohn has distinguished himself for his ability to play treacherous weasels across multiple franchises beloved by nerds, which was what made his debut as Talos in “Captain Marvel” such a subversion, because even though he was playing a shape-shifting, green-skinned alien with Vulcan-style pointy ears and a gratuitously ridged chin, Talos turned out to be a good guy.

For as often as MCU movies are accused of offering weightless blockbuster entertainment that’s divorced from the events or consequences of the real world, the Skrulls have always been, if anything, too acutely tied into the contemporary politics of their eras, dating back to their introduction in Marvel Comics during the Cold War.

For the comics readers of the 1960s, Skrulls could play on their fears of “sleeper” cells of secret Communist saboteurs, hiding out in the open in American society by posing as ordinary citizens, and 9/11 simply substituted “Communists” with “terrorists” in such xenophobic lore.

But the MCU took the innovative step of recasting the Skrulls, who have always been visibly coded as “The Other,” from villains to victims, and while “Secret Invasion” features Skrulls as foes, it maintains their more nuanced portrayals in “Captain Marvel” by depicting divisions between factions of Skrulls, rather than reducing them to a monolithic enemy.

So many of the MCU’s best tales, like “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” are little more than crackerjack 1970s-style spy thrillers with literal superpowers grafted onto them, and “Secret Invasion” is no different, because at its heart, it’s about refugees who are taken in by a larger power, and provided both sanctuary and the promise of a new homeland, only that promise has taken so long to be fulfilled that a militant faction of those refugees has concluded that they already have a perfectly suitable homeland, albeit one that’s already inhabited by their ostensible benefactors.

Talos wants peace, but he hates seeing Fury kill other Skrulls, even those conspiring to commit acts of terror, and his adult daughter G’iah (Emilia Clarke, showing she’s so much better than the material she was handed near the end of “Game of Thrones”) has allowed her emotional estrangement from her family to leave her vulnerable to the seduction of an extremist movement.

The trappings are space-age sci-fi, but the scenarios are all too reminiscent of what got “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh detained as an enemy combatant 22 years ago.

As glaringly obvious as the metaphors of “Secret Invasion” are — despite their penchant for subterfuge, the Skrulls have never been subtle, either in-story or as a metafictional vehicle for allegorical commentary — the MCU has continued to hire top-flight actors to animate its melodramas, and it employs innovative techniques to enliven sequences as otherwise routine as multifloor building chase scenes.

My only disappointment so far has been the use of AI-developed artwork for this show’s opening credits, which I can’t help but consider a bit unethical, especially given the ongoing entertainment industry strikes over matters such as not replacing human talent with computer-generated algorithms.

‘High Desert’

The full eight-episode first season is available on Apple TV+: Now there’s the Patricia Arquette I remember from my youth.

Arquette is one of those actresses who got pigeonholed by her good looks and a few notably quirky roles into being woefully underestimated for her acting range, so I was pleased to see her cast completely against type as the cold, sinister boss of “Severance,” another show executively co-produced for Apple TV+ by Ben Stiller (like “High Desert”).

But as brilliant and unexpected as Arquette’s performance in “Severance” was, I still found myself missing the Arquette of Quentin Tarantino and Tony Scott’s “True Romance,” the spitfire headcase who made me wish I was Christian Slater back in college.

While “High Desert” emulates a degree of the self-consciously convoluted plotting employed by Peacock’s “Mrs. Davis,” its clear inspiration is another Peacock series, Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne’s “Poker Face,” since “High Desert” also tasks a gal with a disastrous personal life with solving murders committed by small-time schemers.

Unlike Natsha Lyonne’s Charlie Cale, Patricia Arquette’s Peggy Newman is not living on the road to flee her pursuers, but both gals drive cars that can’t help standing out in any setting — Charle’s Barracuda is a sweet ride, while Peggy’s dune buggy is simply hyper fun — and they both start their journeys in the arid American Southwest, which popular culture has long since cemented as a mecca for sketchy scroungers.

Also, Peggy is an unrepentant drug addict, whose solvency owes almost entirely to her siblings’ willingness to let her live in the home they inherited from their dead mom (Bernadette Peters).

It’s her beloved mother’s passing that finally motivates Peggy to make something of herself, which she does by forcibly apprenticing herself to a failing private investigator (a hilariously glum Brad Garrett), and tackling every challenge with the same 55-going-on-15 energy she applies to every social situation in her life, which earns her the enmity and loyalty of others in equal measures.

Throw in a thoroughly reprehensible Matt Dillon as Peggy’s ex-con not-quite-ex-husband, plus a local news anchor turned spiritual guru, a collection of impressive forgeries of famous paintings, run-ins with the mob and a father-daughter collection duo, Peggy’s primary job as a pioneer village reenactor, and a cliffhanger first-season finale featuring a potentially lethal human cannon, and “High Desert” has me hooked enough to look forward to a second season.