Secret Invasion wasn’t exactly short of moments that made you shout “WTF?” at the screen while watching. The fact that Samuel L. Jackson didn’t get to drop an F-bomb anywhere in the show is one of them, actually. From the shockingly poor treatment of Maria Hill to Emilia Clarke growing a weirdly proportioned Drax arm, the disappointing Disney Plus series surprised us in many ways, you have to give it that. One of its most egregious twists, though, concerns the fate of Don Cheadle’s Rhodey.
We knew War Machine was a secret Skrull long before the reveal even occurred, but the ultimate heavy hint in the series finale that Rhodey has actually been replaced for the past eight years of the MCU, ever since 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, was way too much for a lot of fans to handle. Having him be a Skrull since The Falcon and the Winter Soldier would be fine. Since Avengers: Endgame? Eh, we could probably get our heads around that. But for a full 50% of his entire franchise life-span? Nah, sorry, Kevin Feige, that’s too much.
Given this enormous and ongoing controversy around what’s going on with Colonel Rhodes, it’s notable that the newly released Secret Invasion behind-the-scenes special completely avoids the issue of this Rhodey retcon. What we do get is Don Cheadle briefly giving his thoughts on getting to play an evil Rhodey, which only leaves us as in the dark about the Avenger’s situation than we were before. As he says in Marvel Studios Assembled: The Making of Secret Invasion:
“It’s been an interesting ride through all the different sort of iterations of Rhodey and it’s great to have an opportunity to keep exploring a character and keep finding new facets to him and finding new ways to play it. I think that is always the exciting thing to me about all these shows is seeing the other colors of these characters and seeing what they have to deal with.”
There are two things we can perhaps infer from the Secret Invasion documentary’s refusal to acknowledge the War Machine in the room. A) the studio knows exactly what it’s doing and has big plans to explore this twist properly in Cheadle’s upcoming Armor Wars movie. Or B) even Marvel doesn’t really know what’s happening here and is still in the process of figuring that out. Honestly, that last one seems pretty plausible, given Secret Invasion director Ali Selim’s conflicting comments on the matter.