Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe comes to the small screen with the premier of its first show, “Secret Invasion.” With the mixed success of its first film, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” the phase is off to a so-so start.

“Secret Invasion” follows an attempted takeover of Earth by Skrull rebels who want to take the planet by force. Skrulls are aliens introduced in “Captain Marvel” who can shapeshift into human form, which they’ve been doing to take the place of world leaders. In “Captain Marvel,” which is required viewing in order to understand this show, SHIELD chief Nick Fury (Samuel Jackson) promises to help them find a new world, which he hasn’t made good on at the time of the show. Fury was also blipped by Thanos and in the time he was gone, relations between humans and Skrulls have deteriorated, allowing extremist Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) to replace Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) as their leader.

Though the Skrull population is still relatively small (the group Fury met in “Captain Marvel” were just a handful of survivors), Gravik wants to rid Earth of mankind and plans to do this by manufacturing a war between the United States and Russia. Skrulls are immune to radiation, so their plan is to provoke a nuclear strike.

Talos helps Fury in this episode, though he proves ineffective. His daughter, G’iah (Emilia Clarke), has been serving Gravik, who might have something to do with the murder of her mother, so there’s some interesting conflict there. Clarke also grounds the episode and has the strongest performance.

Jackson chews the scenery, perhaps a bit too much. This show is supposed to be a spy thriller in the MCU, but this version of Fury doesn’t take anything seriously enough. This show also has some very confusing and cluttered action scenes where Jackson’s age becomes all too apparent — I couldn’t help but wonder if the time to tell this story was 5 to 10 years ago.

This is a very clunky fumble out of the gate for this show. It feels like an unofficial sequel to “Captain Marvel,” but it doesn’t bother to lay key character groundwork as to why we should care about these characters; it just assumes we already know all there is to know about Fury and the Skrulls and that we’re already invested in their characters.

The Skrulls were a fun part of “Captain Marvel,” but they were paper-thin characters. Fury has also been mostly absent from the last handful of Marvel projects, appearing at most as a comedic cameo here and there; his role in the MCU has greatly diminished since “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” We needed a reintroduction to both, one that this first episode unfortunately glossed over.

“Secret Invasion” Season 1: Episode 1 “Resurrection” gets a 6/10