The Secret Invasion miniseries coming to Disney Plus is inspired by a Marvel comic book event series of the same name. Penned by Brian Michael Bendis and illustrated by Leinil Yu and Mark Morales, the Secret Invasion event series revealed that many of the heroes and villains readers loved were actually Skrulls in disguise. The Skrull home world had been destroyed, and they sought to make Earth their new home. The Skrulls came to Earth in small groups, disguising themselves as humans and using Skrull technology to implant human memories, and in some special cases, superhuman powers, in their own.
Secret Invasion on Disney Plus seeks to tell a similar storyline. While the Skrulls in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have not been the villains of their story, there is a small rebel sect of Skrulls who have grown disillusioned since Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) promised to find the Skrulls a new home world in the Captain Marvel movie in the 1990s. They have begun to hide among humans with plans to use Earth as their permanent home, much like the Skrulls of the comics. The series is already set to feature Ben Mendelsohn as Talos, Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill, Martin Freeman as Everett Ross, and Don Cheadle as James Rhodes, but it could also pay homage to a heartbreaking reveal in Marvel Comics featuring Mockingbird.
Who Is Mockingbird In The Comics?
Mockingbird is the codename for Agent of SHIELD Barbara Morse, who prefers the nickname Bobbi, in Marvel Comics. The character was created by Len Wein and Neal Adams and made her Marvel comic book debut in an issue of Strange Tales in 1971, but readers didn’t learn her name for several more issues of the comic. Originally, her codename through SHIELD was Agent 19 as most SHIELD agents that worked in the field were assigned a number in the early days of the organization in the comics instead of a codename. She didn’t start using the codename Mockingbird until the 1980s, a codename she earned because she would taunt her opponents while fighting them with her staves.
Mockingbird doesn’t always work for SHIELD in the comics. She’s also been a costumed hero who goes by the name Huntress. She’s also been recruited to the Avengers under the name Mockingbird. A woman of many names, she also works in many fields. With a PhD in Biology, Barbara Morse is just as adept in a lab as she is in a fight. Over the years, her adventures in the comics have sent her to the Savage Land, back in time, and into outer space. Mockingbird’s comic book adventures, however, haven’t been depicted in the MCU, though her Secret Invasion storyline could.
Who Is Mockingbird In The MCU?
Mockingbird’s identity in the MCU is a bit murkier than it is in the comics. That’s because Bobbi Morse isn’t technically in the MCU. Her SHIELD codename, Agent 19, is in use in the MCU by Clint Barton’s (Jeremy Renner) wife, who isn’t Bobbi Morse. Laura Barton (Linda Cardellini) is revealed to be a former SHIELD agent and has gone by Agent 19 in the Hawkeye series on Disney Plus.
During the series, Clint is trying to recover a watch that is said to contain sensitive SHIELD information on it from years earlier. He and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) team up, despite Clint not wanting a partner, to get the watch back. The watch, inscribed with “Agent 19” is revealed to belong to Laura as Clint eventually brings it home to her. Up until that point in the MCU, there had been no indication that she was a former SHIELD agent, but it makes sense considering she knows all about his partnership with Black Widow (their children even call Natasha (Scarlet Johansson) “Aunt Nat”) and she isn’t surprised by him bringing the Avengers to their home to lie low in Avengers: Age Of Ultron.
This does call into question exactly how codenames work in the MCU though because, at the point of Age of Ultron’s release in the MCU, Agents Of SHIELD was still considered part of the canon timeline. Events in the television series spun out of events in the movies like Agent Coulson providing the Avengers with the helicarrier used to rescue people from Sokovia in Age of Ultron, though the Avengers didn’t know it was from him. At that point, Agents of SHIELD had its own Mockingbird, named Bobbi Morse as she is in the comics, played by Adrianne Palicki.
Agents of SHIELD didn’t diverge from the MCU timeline until its fifth season when time travel came into play in the series. That could indicate that multiple people have used the Agent 19/Mockingbird codename in the MCU. Though Laura Barton has never explicitly been called Mockingbird in the MCU, she is clearly meant to be the character.
Mockingbird Is A Skrull In The Secret Invasion Comics
Though neither Linda Cardellini nor Jeremy Renner have been confirmed to appear in the Disney Plus Secret Invasion series, the show could bring one heartbreaking moment from Marvel Comics to life. Mockingbird and Hawkeye have an on-again-off-again relationship in the comics and at one point, they reconciled their differences and tried to have a relationship again. Just as they did, however, Bobbi was killed on a mission.
A few years later, Clint would discover that it wasn’t Bobbi at all. Instead, the person who had reconciled with him and come back into his life was actually a Skrull who had Bobbi’s memories implanted in them and didn’t even know they were a Skrull themselves. Mockingbird had a similar experience to the Skrull. When she was captured, she was held in a Skrull containment facility designed to look like the Avengers mansion and led to believe that her Avengers allies were actually Skrulls. Bobbi even learned to speak Skrull during her time there. Bobbi’s entire ordeal wasn’t revealed in full until after the Secret Invasion comic book series was over. When the real Clint and the real Bobbi came face-to-face years later, he had to get her to reveal a secret only the two of them knew in order to prove her identity.
While the full Mockingbird story is unlikely to play out in Secret Invasion since it is a limited series with a lot of characters, a similarly heartbreaking turn of events could still happen. The series promises that a sect of rebel Skrulls have been embedded among humans for years without humans knowing. It’s easy to believe that Laura Barton could be one of those Skrulls. The reveal that she’s been hiding in plain sight and gathering intelligence about the Avengers from her husband would be devastating for Clint, their children, and the former SHIELD members in the series like Nick Fury and Maria Hill. It would also be a surprising moment for most of the audience while still paying homage to the comic book series that inspired the show.
Secret Invasion episodes stream weekly on Disney Plus beginning June 21, 2023.