This article contains spoilers for Secret Invasion episode 5.
Time has shown it’s not a good idea to threaten Nick Fury, though the Skrull impersonating James Rhodes doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Over the last few episodes of Secret Invasion, he’s behaved as if he’s got an ace in the hole against Fury: a video that appears to show him murdering Maria Hill in Moscow.
By episode 5, Fury is fully aware that Rhodes is a Skrull. So, when the Rhodey Skrull shows up in the hospital in the aftermath of the Skrulls’ attempted assassination of the U.S. President, he holds him at gunpoint. Then the Rhodes Skrull makes a threat: “In about sixty seconds the footage of you killing Maria Hill is gonna lead off every news program all across the hemisphere”.
Well, maybe on a slow news day, but we just saw news channels are understandably leading with.. y’know, the full-on military assault on the U.S. President that involved helicopters being shot down with missiles, multiple deaths, and the apparent presence of a shapeshifting alien.
The MCU is a very dramatic place, though even so, we suspect news programs are going to focus on that rather than some grainy footage of Nick Fury apparently killing someone they probably don’t know a few weeks ago. Even if they did, the news channels are already confirming the existence of shapeshifting aliens, so Fury has an obvious defense.
The immediate aftermath of an attempted assassination of the U.S. President should theoretically be the worst time to try and leak a story to smear someone, as it’s clearly “a good day to bury bad news”.
Then again, it seems to have worked, even if it doesn’t really make sense. Oh well.