The following gets into massive spoilers for the finale of Secret Invasion, so you might want to bail out now if you haven’t yet seen the last episode of the series.
Marvel’s latest series, Secret Invasion (which is available to anyone with the Disney+ subscription), trained audiences not to trust anything they were being shown. Identities were mistaken. Crosses were doubled. And we learned that two key members of the “Good Guys” in the MCU have been Skrulls for an undetermined amount of time: James “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle) and Everett Ross (Martin Freeman). These heroes were being detained in a holding cell with some of the smartest people on the planet, while shape-shifting Skrulls pretended to be them.
By the end of the Secret Invasion finale, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) had figured out how to save President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney), while Gi’ah (Emilia Clarke) faced off with Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) in a CGI fight that showed off the full powers of the Super Skrulls. When Rhodey was rescued, however, it was asked how long he had been detained … but no answer was given. Luckily, we got to sit down with Secret Invasion director Ali Selim, and when we asked him how long James Rhodes had been held captive, he told us:
Well, it's no secret – and I don't hold the secret – I do think there's a really strong reference that he's been there since he was kidnapped from Captain America. And after saying that, I think it's a great opportunity for fans to revisit every Rhodey moment and unpack it in a new interpretation that he was actually a Skrull in that moment. But I don't think there's anything definitive. I think it's just something to explore.
There were some people on social media who recognized the hospital gown that Don Cheadle was wearing in the scene, saying that he last was seen in a gown in Captain America: Civil War.
Hhhhhmmmmm… #Rhodey is wearing a hospital gown. Last we saw that was in Civil War. Curious. #SecretInvasion pic.twitter.com/PkJQRXVNIHJuly 26, 2023
And as some people pointed out, if Rhodey has been held captive since then, then that means that War Machine was a Skrull in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. And this means that Rhodes doesn’t know that Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has died. That better be a massive plot reveal that gets explored in an upcoming MCU story moving forward. Probably Armor Wars, which is now going to be a movie instead of a series.
There will be other ramifications from the events of Secret Invasion playing out in the MCU, perhaps as early as with The Marvels in November. So tune in then and see who the ripples from the MCU event play out.
