GameSpot watched two episodes of Secret Invasion and saw Andor in the smoke machine.
The Original Review
“It all helps the show to play less like an Avengers movie and more like FX’s The Americans–or even Disney+’s Andor.”
The evidence begins with the headline: 'The MCU Tries Its Own Andor With Mixed Results.' That is not a review, that is a witness description from someone who saw a prestige drama wearing a Marvel trench coat in a fog machine. GameSpot was given two episodes of a six-episode Disney+ series and immediately started dusting it for Andor fingerprints like a detective who thinks every soup is technically bouillabaisse if you whisper 'espionage' over it.
The review keeps repeating the magic words: refreshing, slow-burn, espionage, The Americans, Andor. This is what happens when a screener packet arrives with genre aspirations stapled to it and the critic salutes like a mall cop guarding a cardboard bank vault. Two episodes in, Hayner admits it is impossible to know whether the series will stick the landing, then still files the piece as if the landing zone is not currently full of banana peels, Disney synergy, and a Skrull holding a clipboard marked 'future franchise obligations.'
The funniest artifact is the caution pretending to be analysis. 'Good, albeit uneven, start' is critic Morse code for 'I have seen 33 percent of the thing and the embargo goblin is tapping its watch.' Reviewing a serialized mystery before the mystery resolves is like reviewing a parachute because the backpack looks expensive. Yes, the first two episodes can be discussed, but dressing that limited sample in prestige comparisons is how you end up calling a smoke alarm 'basically Beethoven because it has notes.'
Secret Invasion later became a case study in Marvel television collapsing into green-screen oatmeal, which makes this review read like an autopsy report written before the patient entered the building. The problem is not that Hayner liked parts of the opening; the problem is that GameSpot sold two chapters of setup as enough evidence to invoke Andor, The Americans, and meaningful MCU reinvention. That is not criticism. That is a salad spinner full of embargo notes trying to pass as a telescope. Sponsored by the truth.
