Yes, Marvel, Give Me More of The Blip!
Marvel’s latest Disney+ series, Secret Invasion, has finally premiered, and it’s time to focus on Samuel L. Jackson’s Marvel Cinematic Universe mainstay, Nick Fury. Set some time after the events of Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home, Secret Invasion sees Fury and his band of covert rebels try to stop an imminent Skrull takeover on Earth. Fury first made contact with the shape-shifting aliens 30 years earlier in Captain Marvel, as he promised to find the displaced Skrulls a new home. Now, however, the Skrulls are done waiting, and Fury is forced back into the fight despite wanting to do the exact opposite. At least, that’s what the first Secret Invasion episode implies.
The post-credit scene for Avengers: Infinity War showed Fury and his right-hand woman Agent Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) getting dusted as a result of Thanos’ Infinity Stone-powered Snap. The Snap, and the subsequent Blip, are two of the most important events in the MCU’s timeline. Half of the universe’s population vanished in an instant, destroying families, civilizations, and entire planets in the process. People disappeared for five years, only to be brought back to worlds that had tried to recover without them. And yet, despite the monumental impact of The Snap and The Blip, the MCU has arguably done too little to discuss the ramifications of these key historical moments.
Spider-Man: Far From Home made a few general jokes about it, and the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier made a valiant attempt to understand how the people who came back to totally different lives were affected by the changes in society. But these are examples of a more general approach to discussing the consequences of Thanos’ initial victory. It wasn’t until WandaVision and Hawkeye that we truly got to see how The Blip may have affected some of our favorite heroes on a more personal, visceral level.
WandaVision included an excellent sequence of Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) being revived in a hospital five years later only to discover her mother had died of cancer while she was gone. The panic that erupts around her, the pain you can see in her eyes as she tries to desperately find out what happened was incredibly poignant and moving. It perfectly exemplified the chaos of being brought back into a world that was forever changed, the loneliness, and the confusion.
Similarly, Hawkeye featured another compelling scenario, this time focused on Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh). That scene demonstrated how those who were dusted experienced the passage of time. Yelena comments that she was in that bathroom for five seconds, and yet she comes back to an unrecognizable house, her friend suddenly has a family, and Natasha Romanoff, the person she loved most in the world, had sacrificed herself so that Yelena and everyone else could be brought back to life. How does someone deal with that knowledge? How can anyone?
But aside from those few instances and a couple more references, the MCU has largely ignored the consequences of The Blip, and the storytelling has suffered for it. There’s still so much left to explore but as the MCU moves further away from Thanos and delves deeper into the multiverse, the less chance we have of those stories being told. I’m hoping, though, that Secret Invasion can provide us with more.
Secret Invasion‘s first episode makes a point of having multiple characters acknowledge that Fury was changed by The Blip. After being brought back, he headed into space and refused to come back down, until the Skrulls started to take over and he had no other choice. There’s even a scene during which Fury reflects on the moment he turned to dust, and I’m hoping that this means there’s more to come.
Fury is the man who had all the answers, and who knew all the secrets. He brought the Avengers together, and was instrumental in taking down HYDRA once and for all; there is very little he couldn’t anticipate or solve. And yet, he was one of the people who disappeared, helpless to stop the biggest threat the galaxy had ever seen. Of course that would affect a man like him—a man who has survived every other alien and human threat Earth has ever seen.
I want to know if he had sleepless nights, if he obsessed over reports and documents trying to figure out where it all went wrong. I want to know if he discussed The Blip with any of the other heroes who were affected—Wanda Maximoff perhaps, Peter Parker, or Bucky Barnes. I want to see the exact moment he came back and understand how he perceived this new world that surrounded him, a world he didn’t know anything about and thus couldn’t control.
Secret Invasion may be about the Skrull’s infiltration on Earth, but it is Nicholas J. Fury’s show, and after fifteen years of being in the MCU, he deserves to be given more depth and have his very understandable trauma explored. Please, Marvel, give me one last full-fledged Blip story before we dive into the Multiverse forever.
(featured image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
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