Though the official reveal happens a little later in the episode, it’s pretty clear from his familiarity with Varra, and the orders he gives her, that this Rhodes is a Skrull who answers to Gravik, not the president or the ghost of Tony Stark or whoever. Or can we?!?) She has Fury participate in a reading of Carver’s “Late Fragment.” (Nice touch that Fury is, boring-dad-style, “more of a history guy.”) The poem, structured as a fragment of dialogue between two people, is short enough to reprint in full here:Ĭut to the present, where Varra attends the meeting she arranged at the end of last week’s episode with, as several commenters heard correctly, Colonel James Rhodes. (We can safely assume he is not a Skrull. When they meet for dinner, Varra is reading a book of Raymond Carver poetry, almost certainly Carver’s MCU debut.

This week’s flashback takes us to 2012, when the Battle of New York (that is, the climax of The Avengers) has just made headlines, and which Priscilla/Varra recognizes, somewhat dubiously, as Fury’s handiwork. In theory, “Beloved” should get to the juicy stuff: the state of the marriage between Fury and Priscilla the revelation that a key character has been a Skrull for an indeterminate but presumably substantial amount of the time and that action-movie standby, an attack on the president’s motorcade. It’s an example of the corners Secret Invasion keeps backing itself into there will be another one before this week’s 30 minutes sans credits are up. When the newest episode of Secret Invasion opened with a lingering shot of G’iah lying on the ground in the aftermath of her fatal-looking shooting, I had to laugh: at my own naïveté in assuming the show had killed her off for a cheap shock last week at how a mere moment of her body on the ground immediately indicates that the death was a fake-out and at the old-fashioned serial shamelessness of knocking off a character, then immediately doubling back to explain that, actually, she hastily infused herself with the Extremis formula Gravik used to make himself a Super Skrull and therefore is able to instantly (but not too instantly? Can you hold in Extremis?) heal herself once Gravik is out of sight, after he conveniently abandons her body.

Dead space: aftermath tv trope