“Harvest”
What They Say:
Fury gathers his allies. Gravik deals with unrest.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As we get to the penultimate installment of the series, and another episode that clocks in at about 35 minutes or so, Secret Invasion does some decent stuff and builds on all the foundation and setup. Still, it doesn’t feel like we got a fleshed-out story in the previous episodes but more of the Cliff’s Notes version of it and that’s hampering it from feeling fully invested in and keeps it from having the impact it should. But if you can manage with this kind of storytelling and mentally fill in some blanks yourself, you can enjoy it fairly well. But it does leave you wishing that more time was spent actually going into all of it a lot more because the payoff would be oh so much better because of it. Especially when you get people like Olivia Coleman being able to just have an absolute blast of a sequence or two and you’re left wishing there was so much more leading up to it.
On the hard side of things, G’iah ends up having to deal with the death of her father by ending up in one of Fury’s safehouses to converse with him a bit. The two have a brief conversation overall but she’s not interested in listening to him and he smartly knows to not push it at all and just let her cope as she needs to. All she wants is to bury her father and we see that he’s sensitive enough to that, even suggesting to go and visit his wife for help with it. There’s a kind of peace between those two after the previous episode and Fury knows she’ll help with Talos and bringing closure there for someone that they both know so well. That makes for a decent sequence in G’iah going to Fury’s home and engaging with Vaara on it – after the two put their guns down – but you’re again left wishing that so much of this was fleshed out more both between them and between G’iah and her father and Vaara and Fury. And the connections they all share. On the plus side, both get an action sequence at the end to enjoy as the walls are closing in on Fury.
Gravik is having a struggle as well because the President wasn’t killed and when he returns to New Skrullos, the other agents he has working for him to engage in the field aren’t too pleased by it. They see him as letting not just the President live but Fury as well and the true believers are wavering in their faith. And Gravik is playing a dangerous game as well by having Ritson live and putting Skrull-Rhodey in the position of amping up Ritson’s fears over Russians and Skrulls collaborating with each other and trying to get him to start a war with a strike on New Skrullos. It’s an interesting gambit but it comes as Gravik’s position is so weak that several of the Skrulls that he has working as field agents try to take him down – and hard. It’s interesting to watch play out because we get the briefest of moments where Gravik gets to use the Super Skrull abilities but we’re reminded how minimal his abilities are because Gravik could never find where Fury kept all the Avengers’ DNA that they wanted to incorporate.
Fury, for his part, is just trying to survive at this point. Initially, he’s protecting Ritson but that goes south with Skrull Rhodey shows up and reveals that the footage of Skrull Fury killing Maria is being released all over the world. Suffice it to say, this puts Fury on the run and using some of what he has accessible to him. It’s decent in the short term and seeing him going to where his grave is is amusing since the crypt nearby has a lot of his old gear – including the eyepatch – as he gets back into the groove to deal with the looking threat. That he gets to do so with Sonya is a plus and it comes after she does a little housecleaning at Mi6 with one of Gravik’s Skrulls that had infiltrated to the top. She’s fun to watch in all of this much as Fury is when he’s being proactive and getting things done, such as his pushback against Skrull Rhodey, but both just needed so much more time of good material prior to this.
In Summary:
While I have problems with the episode and series in general – this is the kind of project that needed a Tony Gilroy writing it – there are fun moments and small payoff bits that work well enough if you hand wave away the other things. And I totally get why some can’t and it leaves me frustrated with the potential of what we could have had. Heck, just the brief appearance toward the end of O-T Fagbenle as Mason, reprising his role of the Black Widow film, was nice. But it was just so out of the blue when it should have been woven into the show more as a whole. So many missed opportunities and so few “cool shots” to help balance out the weakness of the script and larger storyline. It’s an incredibly frustrating experience because what works does work well but thee’s so much waste and loss to what they have at hand that you just bang your head against the wall with it.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Disney+
