Warning: This article contains spoilers for Secret Invasion episode 5.
With the arrival of its fifth episode, Secret Invasion has but one week left before it concludes, and the miniseries just introduced a shocking new development in its penultimate installment that really raises the stakes for next Wednesday’s climax. The only thing is the development in question should be ringing bells for those who’ve been watching Marvel series for longer than Disney Plus has been around.
Episode five reveals that Gravik plans to upgrade his Super-Skrull powers when he gets his hands on something called “The Harvest.” This is ultimately revealed to be a vial containing the DNA of all of the Avengers who took part in the Battle against Thanos in Avengers: Endgame, as harvested from the blood the heroes left behind on the battlefield. With this, Gravik hopes to juice himself up on the many powers of Earth’s Mightiest protectors.
This seems like a pretty novel scheme, and it is for the most part, but this is not the first time a TV show set in the MCU has featured the villains wanting to get their mitts on some super-powered blood. For the pioneer in this field we have to revisit a series that ironically was practically shuffled out of MCU canon by Endgame. Namely, Agent Carter, the ABC series starring Hayley Atwell’s S.H.I.E.L.D. co-founder.
Agent Carter season one saw Peggy having to stop the evil organization Leviathan, a kind of Russian equivalent to HYDRA, from getting their hands on the last remaining sample of Steve Rogers’ blood. With this, Leviathan hoped to recreate the Super-Soldier serum for their own nefarious purposes. Villains looking to make their own Super-Soldiers have also been snatched from Agent Carter before this, in the likes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and now the storytelling device of using a vial of Avenger DNA as the MacGuffin is being copied in Secret Invasion.
Poor Agent Carter hasn’t been treated all that well by Marvel of late — although James D’Arcy got to reprise Edwin Jarvis in Endgame, that same film ended by erasing Peggy moving on from Steve in her own show, That said, they do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and maybe it’s only fitting that a show about Skrulls should be imitating other Marvel series in its plot.