Secret Invasion Episode 4 Establishes Gravik As The Scariest Villain In The MCU Shows

Contains spoilers for "Secret Invasion" Season 1, Episode 4 – Beloved

"Secret Invasion" is a show that doesn't particularly concern itself with downtime, which is only to be expected for a series that both looks into one of the most secretive backstories of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and deals with a potentially apocalyptic alien shapeshifter invasion. "Beloved" continues the show's tradition of packing every scene full of intrigue and dramatic turns. The episode also continues to establish Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) among the MCU's most terrifying antagonists.

The Skrull extremist introduces himself with a literal bang in Episode 1, carrying out a devastating bomb attack in Moscow and killing Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) in the aftermath. In Episode 2, he reveals his plans to give Skrulls superpowers and destroy humanity. In Episode 3, the villain attempts to force the Royal Navy to shoot missiles at a United Nations plane and personally shoots Talos' (Ben Mendelsohn) daughter G'iah (Emilia Clarke). Though G'iah does survive, Gravik still has so much blood in his hands that you can expect anything from the Skrull rebel going into Episode 4. Even so, it's shocking to see him attack President Ritson's (Dermot Mulroney) motorcade and kill Talos with his own hands.

Gravik has barely wrapped up his fourth "Secret Invasion" episode, but he's already racked up a massive body count that includes two major MCU characters. That's more than enough to make him the scariest villain in the Disney+ MCU shows so far — and there's plenty of evidence that he's set to become even creepier.

Gravik's apocalyptic intentions and stealthy shock tactics are bad enough to put him at the top of the MCU Disney+ antagonist pile, at least as far as the primary timeline is concerned. No deity, magician, crime lord, or terrorist in the main timeline of the previous Disney+ shows has come close to killing two long-running MCU movie characters such as Hill (who's been around since Phase 1) and Talos (who entered the picture in 2019's "Captain Marvel"). In fact, going by this metric, Gravik even ranks pretty highly among the movie antagonists when it comes to his sheer non-reversible impact on the MCU narrative. After all, personally killing multiple major characters technically puts him in the same bracket with beings like Cate Blanchett's Hela (an actual deity), and Josh Brolin's Thanos (a threat on a universal scale).

Gravik seems to have built his impressive and ongoing reign of terror with little more than his own Skrull powers and a group of rebels who are loyal to him. We've only seen brief glimpses of his terrifying Super-Skrull powers so far, and there's no telling how many of his troops have been given a similar power-up. As such, there's every chance that the villain has plenty more terror up his sleeve. 

With two more "Secret Invasion" episodes to go and the villain not even close to being defeated, it will be interesting to see how — or if — Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) ultimately manages to take his former protégé off the board.