Warning: the article contains spoilers for Secret Invasion‘s final episode.
With the finale of Secret Invasion finally unleashed onto the world, the Disney Plus Marvel miniseries has received a tepid response, overall, from fans and critics. However, one of the most egregious sins of the final episode might just be how it has pre-emptively knee-capped a fan-favorite X-Men character from truly shining.
It’s become a bit of a Marvel cliche nowadays that a climax to one of their stories usually involves one superhero floating in the air with a similarly-powered supervillain as they exchange CGI energy blasts with each other. We’ve seen this in everything from the first Iron Man film to WandaVision and many others. The climax to Secret Invasion proved to not stray from this formula too much, with Emilia Clarke’s G’iah and Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Gravik duking it out with destructive mayhem as two Super-Skrulls.
This may seem business as usual for Marvel but there’s one very important reason G’iah’s triumph over Gravik may have nerfed a fan-favorite X-Men from making the grand comics-accurate arc in the MCU that she truly deserves. You see, the source of G’iah’s powers in the show comes from the Harvest, the blood collected from past Avengers whose DNA enables Skrulls to mimic their powers. Thus, you see G’iah employ the “sleep” ability of Mantis and even the flying, super-strength, and energy-blasting abilities of Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel.
But hang on, there’s another character in Marvel’s history who adopted Captain Marvel’s powers as her own: the X-Men’s Rogue. That’s right, because of Rogue’s ability to steal other people’s powers through touching them, the comics famously had the southern belle of Gambit’s affection permanently adopt Carol Danvers’ powers. Now that G’iah has apparently fulfilled this plot point, in an indirect way, there seems to be a very low chance of a comics-accurate Rogue ever coming to movie screens.
For example, Ms. Marvel’s powers were changed for the titular Iman Vellani-starring Disney Plus show, in all likelihood because they too closely resembled that of Reed Richards in the comics, who will be a character introduced in the MCU with the forthcoming Fantastic Four movie down the line. Instead of Ms. Marvel’s “embiggening” abilities staying true to the comics, they made her utilize the conjuring of solid energy constructs from the Noor Dimension. This may be an early indicator that Marvel Studios wants to make each of its superheroes more distinct from one another. In other words, we’re not likely to get a Captain Marvel-empowered Rogue when the X-Men eventually do get introduced to the larger MCU because G’iah has stolen her thunder, essentially.
The real shame of it is, we’ve never truly gotten a comics-accurate version of Rogue in movies whatsoever. Though I personally liked Anna Paquin’s portrayal of the angsty teenage Rogue in 20th Century Fox’s original X-Men trilogy, that version of her arguably reflected Jubilee’s characterization, in spirit, rather than the Rogue we knew from the comics.