That Secret Invasion Death Was the Worst Kind of Cheap Storytelling Trick

This article contains spoilers

The premiere of Marvel’s latest back in Captain Marvel but conveniently forgot their plight as soon as other villains and bigger problems came calling.)

It’s pretty clear that this is a show that’s meant to do for the MCU what Andor did for terrorism and geopolitics than The Falcon and the Winter Soldier did. (The implication that even the most sympathetic refugees will ultimately turn evil and try to steal your house is…certainly a choice!)

But perhaps its most disappointing element is the “shock” death that closes the Skrull radicals personal for Fury than about any sort of concrete end to her story.

Maria Hill has been part of the Captain America. 

Loyal, capable, and efficient, she’s the one person that Fury (canonically the most untrusting man on earth!!) chose to share his secrets with. Surely she deserved better than being gunned down in a firefight with a gang of double-crossing aliens whose secret plot was so flimsy and obvious that a child could have figured out it was a trap. To make matters worse, her death—surprisingly bloody and graphic for a franchise so traditionally sterile that it shies away from letting its lead characters kiss—isn’t ultimately even really about her, but rather how the fallout from it will affect, enrage, or otherwise motivate Fury. 

To be fair, the MCU hasn’t ever been terribly interested in Hill as a character for her own sake, so I suppose it’s not all that surprising that her death is little more than a plot device. She’s never had a story of her own and has largely been treated as an extension of Fury, fulfilling the roles of his right-hand, emergency backup, and sounding board by turns over the years. Her multiple appearances across various movies and television shows have only ever sketched in the barest details of her character and personal life, relying instead on How I Met Your Mother’s Robin Scherbatsky, okay?) 

The idea that Secret Invasion finally might allow us to get to know Hill as something other than (or at least something in addition to) Fury’s #1 Sidekick was honestly pretty compelling, and it’s unfortunate that Secret Invasion is a Very Serious Story with real and even deadly stakes. And let’s not even get into the fact that this twist continues an uncomfortable narrative pattern of killing off female characters—including Natasha Romanoff, the original Gamora, and even Peter Parker’s poor Aunt May—to provide some sort of emotional motivation for a male character. (Doesn’t that edge awfully close to the idea of fridging? Just asking questions!) 

Granted, this is a Marvel series—and a Marvel series that’s about aliens that can shapeshift into familiar faces at that—so there’s no guarantee (or even likelihood) that this is the end of the line for Maria Hill in the MCU. After all, we’re well over a decade into this thing across two different mediums and we can still count the major characters who’ve really “died” in this franchise on the fingers of one hand. So, you know, hope springs eternal. But while it seems almost certain that Smulders will return in some form, whether as a Skrull copy in this series or as a flashback in the film The Marvels—it’s hard not to mourn what might have been, for a character we spent so much time with and somehow never really got to truly know.