Let’s face it: Secret Invasion got off to a really bad start, with immediate backlash against its AI-generated, animated opening credit sequence in particular coming under scrutiny straight away.

Despite this potentially making relevant points about the shapeshifting Skrulls that were the focus of the show, it felt soulless and ripe for mockery, with clearly incorrectly rendered characters and general imagery that just looked unbelievably dumb.

It was, justifiably, picked apart by artists and other viewers; in light of the current film and TV industry strikes, it feels particularly egregious that the job of animating the credits wasn’t given to actual humans.

I digress, however; still, it is worth noting that the AI credits feel symptomatic of Secret Invasion as a whole – which felt soulless and shoddily cobbled together for the most part.

So, the plot is that Nick Fury – who’s been offworld in a space station for some time – comes back to Earth after being told of a clandestine Skrull plot to essentially take over the world by nefarious means.

The opening episode got the series off to a fantastic start, with a few well known, frequent – if relatively minor – characters either revealed as Skrulls, bumped off or both.

Yet it soon treads water with only a few Skrulls revealed as being seeded in high places; it never really utilises its premise to shake up the MCU in any major way until the very end – by which time its way too late to care.

Even then, a potentially huge development is wasted in a fight scene that has some shockingly awful CGI and relies on the far too common ‘bad guy wants the hero’s powers’ trope – though this one is ‘bad guy wants the powers of ALL the heroes’, it’s still a fight scene between two super powered characters that we don’t really feel invested in enough to root for either of them.

There’s the odd fake out here and there, but these are also clumsily handled – and just about everything is wrapped up so neatly at the end that we’re almost back to status quo before we know it.

There’s the tantalising prospect of one particular character and their new abilities now wandering around the MCU, but given Secret Invasion’s reception, I can’t imagine we’ll be seeing much of them ever again.

Samuel L. Jackson is great as Nick Fury, perhaps never better, but he’s ill-served by the clunky, contrived scripts.

Olivia Colman – as the head of an espionage agency – is an absolute delight and elevates her scenes way beyond what the series deserves; can we just have her Sonya Galsworthy character in her own series?

On the side of the Skrulls, the great Ben Mendelsohn is wasted as a mostly listless Talos; Emilia Clarke is dreadfully dull as his daughter, G’iah and main bad guy Kingsley Ben-Adir goes from passable to just plain awful as a Skrull with an accent that comes and goes seemingly wherever it pleases.

Despite a strong start, Secret Invasion ends up feeling very small scale and never really feels like the massive event it should.

Partly, that’s because it can’t feature the big, important characters affected by the Skrull invasion in the comic book crossover it takes its name, but little else, from; perhaps it would have been better served as a bigger budget, shorter movie; the series, sadly, is a lifeless, often laughably terrible dud.