Can ‘Secret Invasion’ Finally Fill the Hole Left by One of Marvel’s Most Underrated Shows?

Disney+’s latest Marvel series, Secret Invasion, is due to premiere on the streaming service on June 21, 2023. Am I excited? Of course! I’m always thrilled when new MCU content comes my way. I might, however, be more excited for Secret Invasion than usual—not just because the trailers make it look really good, but because I’m hoping it will fulfill a need of mine that hasn’t been fulfilled since Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ended after seven seasons on ABC.

While Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. may or may not be canon in the MCU, there’s no denying the connections it has to the continuity. The first few seasons, especially, take considerable care to match the storyline of the movies, and plenty of MCU movie characters show up throughout the series—Jaimie Alexander’s Lady Sif, Cobie Smulders’ Agent Maria Hill, Maximiliano Hernández’s Jasper Sitwell, Captain America: The First Avenger’s Howling Commandos, Hayley Atwell’s Peggy Carter, Henry Goodman’s Dr. List, and William Sadler’s President Matthew Ellis, to name a few. Most importantly, of course, Clark Gregg’s Agent Phil Coulson and Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury are in attendance, too.

One of my favorite things about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was its dedication to expanding the audience’s understanding of the MCU. Every Earth-shattering event in the movies would undoubtedly have far-reaching consequences, but few of those consequences were ever actually shown within the MCU’s biggest projects. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., especially in earlier seasons, remedied that oversight.

Hydra’s resurgence in Captain America: The Winter Soldier was already a great twist, but it was made even better by S.H.I.E.L.D.’s continuation of the storyline, watching how one relatively small team worked diligently to clear up the rest of Hydra’s bases. Steve Rogers and co. might have exposed the truth, but Agent Coulson and his team cleaned up the mess.

Honestly, I just really love Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and I miss it. I consider season 4 to be a masterpiece (and the LMD invasion will likely share interesting parallels with Secret Invasion’s Skrull takeover), and I firmly believe it should have been referenced in WandaVision, especially with the Darkhold in play. I’m still irritated that Disney never released seasons 6 and 7 on DVD (at least, not in the U.K.), and I therefore haven’t been able to complete my set—and with the recent purge of content on Disney+, which includes several Marvel productions, I’m even more concerned about it.

My biggest hope for Secret Invasion is that it fills the gap that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. left behind—that it becomes the show that portrays what happens behind the scenes, so to speak, and that it explores how the Avengers’ decisions can come back to haunt the world in ways they never anticipated and that the general public has no idea about. The ramifications are what interest me the most.

As Olivia Colman says in the latest Secret Invasion trailer, “Very few of us know about the wars fought in the shadows that have raged on this planet.” That’s definitely a good sign, and while I realize that Secret Invasion will specifically deal with the Skrulls’ invasion and not the entirety of Phase 4’s storytelling, it certainly holds a ton of promise.

(featured image: Disney+)