When details about Marvel’s Secret Invasion first began to come out, I was excited to get Agent Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) back. We hadn’t seen her since Spider-Man: Far From Home, and she’d never had as much screen time as other characters before that. Agent Hill is awesome, and I was looking forward to seeing her have a bigger piece of the action.
Which is what made the final scene of Secret Invasion episode 1 so disappointing.
To recap: In episode 1, Hill finds out that Everett Ross is actually a Skrull double who’s protecting Gravik, the leader of a group of Skrull extremists. Hill and the Skrull leader Talos takes the info to Nick Fury, and they explain that Gravik is trying to start a nuclear war that will annihilate the human species so that Skrulls can take over the planet.
Not trusting official government channels, Hill, Fury, and Talos try to stop the extremists from committing a terrorist attack. They fail, and during the chaos, Gravik disguises himself as Fury and shoots Hill. The episode ends with her body lying on the pavement.
And that, frankly, is garbage.
Why did Marvel feel the need to fridge Maria Hill?
Hill’s death is the latest example of fridging, a trope in which a female character is killed off just so that her death can trigger an emotional journey for a male character. Other notable fridgings include Alexandra DeWitt, who kicked off the trope by getting stuffed in a fridge in Green Lantern: A New Dawn, and Padme Amidala, who loses the will to live so that Anakin can complete his turn to the Dark Side in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.
Sometimes, it’s debatable whether a death is a fridging or not. After all, characters die sometimes, and anyone’s death is going to have an impact on those around them. However, I’d argue that one feature of a true, unambiguous fridging is that the death feels pointless and forced as it’s happening. The seams show. The surviving character’s feelings are the only thing that matters.
What makes Hill’s death so frustrating is that, since it happens in the very first episode, it seems like her only job in the show was to die. She doesn’t get to do much before she’s killed. She feels like a third wheel to Talos and Fury—if you took her out of every scene, the other two would still advance the plot. She gives Fury a stern but gentle pep talk, telling him he needs to be more awesome, and her death feels like it leaves Fury with an obligation to do as she says. It’s not even clear why Gravik kills her, except to upset Fury.
Exacerbating the trope is the false hope that the trailer and marketing materials gave Marvel fans. The trailer really made it look like Hill would be a main character in the series! In the credits, though, she’s credited as a “special guest star,” implying that her time in the series is over. It could turn out that she was actually a Skrull (unlikely, given how long the camera lingered on her body) or that she comes back in a flashback, but I’m not holding my breath.
Secret Invasion is off to a rocky start, and Maria Hill’s fridging isn’t doing it any favors. Time to rewatch The Avengers, I guess.
(featured image: Disney+)
