In The Marvels, Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) join forces with our favorite one-eyed man of intrigue Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) by cosmic intervention to fight a Kree named Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) who is Hell-Bent™ on destroying the people and places dear to Carol.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a Captain Marvel story, but since 2019 we’ve learned more about Fury and Monica and met Kamala for the first time, while also finding out more about the ongoing Kree-Skrull War. So if you’ve missed multiple hours of Disney+ programming like WandaVision, Ms. Marvel, and Secret Invasion, here’s a guide to what and who you need to know before watching The Marvels.
Carol Danvers, the Prodigal Child of the Milky Way
After a freak accident with the Tesseract resulted in wiping her memory, giving her alien powers, and being taken off-world to live and train among the Kree, Carol Danvers returned to Earth in 1995 and dug into her past. Along the way, she teamed up with then-Agent Nick Fury and reunited with her best friend and fellow pilot Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), and Maria’s daughter Monica Rambeau (Akira Akbar). Together, they uncovered her past, revealing the truth of the Kree-Skrull War to Carol – and to us, the audience.
It turns out, Carol’s mentor Dr. Wendy Lawson (Annette Benning) was actually a Kree named Mar-Vell who was secretly helping refugee Skrulls find a new home. Mar-Vell came to Earth to develop a Light-Speed Engine powered by the Tesseract’s energy that would get the Skrulls quickly and safely away from the Kree’s path of destruction. In addition to that, she was hiding Skrulls at her off-world laboratory and was on her way up there with Carol when Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) ambushed and assassinated Mar-Vell in an attempt to reclaim the Tesseract. As a result, in addition to transforming Carol’s life, this project was put on pause indefinitely and Talos and the rest of the refugee Skrulls spent the next six years trying to locate their hidden friends and families.
Back in 1995, standing up and fighting off her former Starforce unit, Carol sent Yon-Rogg back to the Kree homeworld Hala with a message that she would destroy the Kree Supreme Intelligence and end the war. Carol decides to not stay on Earth and instead finish Mar-Vell’s mission to find a new home for the Skrulls. With the exception of coming to the aid of the Avengers when facing Thanos, Carol has been on her own (save for Goose the “cat,” of course), flying through the cosmos for the past 30 years and still looking for a home for the Skrulls. At the end of Secret Invasion, it seems like the Kree and Skrull are open to peace talks, but will their reveal to humans make this hunt for a homeland even more time-sensitive?
How Monica Rambeau Got Her Powers in WandaVision
We first were introduced to Monica Rambeau as a young girl in Captain Marvel, where she handled meeting shapeshifting aliens descending upon her home very well compared to most. She also made friends with a Skrull child named G’iah, by the way, who will be important again in Secret Invasion. In fact, at the end of Captain Marvel, Monica was so into the whole experience that she says she will find a way to meet up with her Auntie Carol. A bit of foreshadowing there?
Over the years, Lieutenant Trouble, as Carol called her, grew up into Captain Rambeau. We first met her adult version in WandaVision, where we learned that shortly after Carol left with the Skrulls in 1995, Maria founded S.W.O.R.D. (Sentient Weapon Observation and Response Division). She was head of the agency until her death in 2020 after a battle with cancer. Unfortunately, Monica wasn’t there for her mom because she was taken in the Blip in 2018. Monica also worked at S.W.O.R.D. before and after the Blip, but was forced to stay grounded for a time immediately after being un-dusted.
As a part of a protocol Maria enacted (because of Carol), if someone missing returns, they are grounded for six months. So Monica is sent to Westview with a S.W.O.R.D. drone to help FBI Agent Woo (Randall Park) with a missing persons case. But after Monica is sucked into the mysterious energy field surrounding the town (that ends up being called the Hex), S.W.O.R.D. sets up a base and brings in various scientists, including Dr. Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) to figure out what’s going on and how to get Monica out. Darcy discovers a broadcast frequency transmission that reveals Wanda’s WandaVision sitcom reality she’s rewritten for herself and the town. They see that Monica “joined” the show, but is then literally ejected out of the Hex by Wanda after upsetting her.
Now having been through the barrier twice, Monica passes through a third time against all advice, which permanently alters her DNA and gives her energy absorption, spectral vision, and phasing abilities. Monica uses these powers to prove herself as an ally to Wanda, and at the end of the series is recruited by Fury to join his S.A.B.E.R. defense organization in space. And that’s where we’ll find her during The Marvels, working as a S.A.B.E.R. agent.
Introducing Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel
Kamala Khan is a Pakistani-American teenage girl from New Jersey who is a big fan of The Avengers (Carol Danvers, most specifically), just like in the comics, but the origin of her powers and the way they manifest has been somewhat inverted from the printed page. Instead of these powers altering Kamala’s physical form, making her stretchy like Reed Richards, Kamala is more like Green Lantern in that she can harness light and manipulate it into tangible forms. This is a very convenient, yet comprehensive change that fits Kamala seamlessly into The Marvels, where all three heroes’ light-based powers are quantumly entangled.
Kamala’s great-grandmother Aisha is a Clandestine (or Djinn to humans) who was exiled from the Noor Dimension along with a small group of followers. They’re looking for a pair of powerful bangles that would allow them to get back home. Aisha finds one of them and puts it on, activating her own powers. However, Aisha falls in love with a human and has a child… who eventually has a child who has Kamala, meaning that our hero’s DNA and genes are very different than that of a regular human. She’s a mutant basically (cue X-Men theme song). However, those genes are only activated after she puts on Aisha’s bangle, which is connected to the Noor Dimension, making it a very important bangle indeed.
Nick Fury’s Longstanding Promise Leads Us Right Into The Marvels
Though Nick Fury has been here from the very beginning, we haven’t really spent much personal time with him until Captain Marvel and Secret Invasion. These two projects bookend his time before and after a certain age of superhero that he helped usher in. However, it seems like Fury’s truest obligation has always been to the Skrulls. And with Dar-Benn, a Kree, as the villain of The Marvels, we might get to see how this ongoing war has been influenced by Earth’s involvement.
Inspired by meeting Carol and Skrulls like Talos, Nick Fury came up with the Avengers Initiative for SHIELD to find other super-abled beings to protect Earth from global threats. In 1997, after two years of fruitless searching for a new home, Talos and a handful of Skrulls returned to Earth to strike a deal with Fury: The Skrulls protect Earth with their abilities and he and Carol Danvers will continue to search for a new home for them.
As of 2025, 30 years after that first contact, that task has yet to be accomplished, and a Skrull resistance is formed that wants to take Earth for themselves. How do they plan to do this? Well, firstly, it’s important to mention that there are actually close to one million Skrulls on Earth at this point – significantly more than the 20 or so Fury agreed to shelter in 1997. See, after everyone returned from the Blip, Talos could tell Fury was not the same. He felt that he was basically abandoned by Fury when he decided to leave Earth to work on setting up S.A.B.E.R. With this, Talos decided to invite all the remaining dispersed Skrulls across the galaxy to find refuge on Earth together.
But Talos would go on to lose the trust of his fellow Skulls and was voted out of the Skrull council. In his place, Gravik was elected. This Skrull was first introduced to Fury in 1997 as a child. Another twist of the knife is that Talos’ wife Soren died and his now-grown daughter G’iah joined Gravik in his cause. Once G’iah learned of Gravik’s role in Soren’s death, however, she started to help Talos secretly.
Gravik’s plan involved impersonating world leaders, causing global warfare, and having humanity destroy itself so that the Skrulls could rise out of those ashes and claim Earth as their own. To come out on top, Gravik had a Super Skrull machine built but was missing a key component: the Harvest, which was a collection of Avenger DNA Fury had Gravik and other Skrulls collect after the Battle of Earth and had hidden away until now.
Amidst all this espionage, Gravik killed Talos, which made G’iah step up to help Fury end Gravik. They teamed up and separately stopped both parts of Gravik’s grand plan. With some trickery, Gravik got the Harvest from “Fury” (who was really G’iah) and both were turned into Super Skrulls. They fought, with G’iah killing Gravik. Meanwhile, Fury rescued President Ritson and stopped him from launching a missile that would’ve started World War 3 at the behest of Skrull Rhodey (long story). Hopefully, we find out soon just how long Tony Stark’s best buddy was held captive while a Skrull walked around impersonating him.
President Ritson would go on to reveal the truth about Skrulls to the public and introduce a bill that designates all off-world species as enemies, inciting paranoia and violence. Taking this information, MI6 Special Agent Sonya Falsworth approached G’iah for a strictly professional alliance. With the Skrulls now exposed after Ritson’s speech, she explains that she can help protect G’iah’s species against the humans.
As Fury returned to S.A.B.E.R., he got a message that the Kree are open for peace talks with the Skrulls, which G’iah may possibly be a part of. He invited his Skrull wife Varra to join him as a diplomat during these talks. And that’s how Secret Invasion ends, which is convenient timing ahead of a film with another Kree villain…
And that should be everything and a little more that you need to know before watching The Marvels. For more on the MCU, make sure to follow and subscribe to IGN, wherever you like to read or watch!
