Secret Invasion’s politics can’t be trusted

polygon.com:

There is a moment near the end of the first episode of Marvel’s Secret Invasion TV series that will feel uneasily familiar to politically attuned viewers. In it, a young man walks briskly through a public square in Moscow, a backpack draped over his shoulder. He is an infiltrator, a hidden alien Skrull whose true identity is undetectable to those around him, and his backpack contains a “dirty bomb” capable of causing mass death to those around him. The attack is halted, courtesy of series protagonist Nick Fury, but in the aftermath, a suspect apprehended by authorities shouts, again and again, “I’m an American! I’m an American!” Nobody listens.

Watching that moment play out, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Disney Plus series is out to make a trenchant political critique: that, for perhaps the first time in the decade-plus tenure of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it intends to use the tools of superheroism and science fiction to draw our attention to the overreach of military authority, and the violent suspicion bred by fears of terrorism. Alas, you would be wrong. A few minutes into the following episode, the moment has been largely forgotten, the narrative having moved along to a plot about government officials and SHIELD bigwigs replaced by alien shape-changers in a conspiracy that feels both labyrinthine and inconsequential at the same time.

It is, in fact, altogether puzzling: How can a series rooted in fears of government conspiracy, and the inability to trust or believe our neighbors and compatriots, seemingly have nothing to say about politics or the government at all? How can a story about asylum-seeking refugees driven toward militant violence manage to avoid any actual evocation of either subject at