Captain Marvel Theory: Skrull Coulson Takes Nick Fury's Eye
Could a line in The Winter Soldier open up another MCU theory?
"The last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye."
With those simple words, we were introduced to why Nick Fury has trust issues (and why he's generally just not the most affectionate of people in the MCU). Back in The Winter Soldier - a film all about inception and subterfuge, about an enemy hidden within and the creeping anxiety of discovering them - Fury revealed that he'd lost his eye to someone he thought was an ally. Or so the suggestion goes anyway.
How appropriate that that movie should be the point at which we discover the first hint of what happened to him now that there's a pretty big hint that Captain Marvel will be where we actually see him lose his eye. Both are about hidden enemies, as already qualified, and it could be that Fury's behaviour in The Winter Soldier could give away what might happen in Captain Marvel. After all, he'd been there before and he knew to go for cover: could he have learned that from someone...?
Anyway, before getting to that, we have to deal with those trust issues again, because they're very key.
What if the person Fury trusted was, in fact, someone we've seen to be close to him in other places in the MCU? What if Captain Marvel explains that closeness and what if it was initially born out of intense adversity? What if the Agent Pil Coulson that we see in Captain Marvel ends up being a Skrull who infiltrated SHIELD and realised that Nick Fury had to be taken out for their plan to work?
Think about it: when Thor "invades" Earth, Fury is at the forefront of an anti-alien incentive designed to create devastating weapons of mass destruction to save Earth. He's a man of action who leaps to Earth's defence and who the Skrulls would absolutely need to remove in order for them to take over. What better opportunity to do that than to place someone extremely close to him, within his defences with the highest levels of clearance?
That could perhaps explain why Coulson (the real one) and Fury are so close and why Coulson is even involved in Captain Marvel. It could be that Fury and Marvel end up rescuing him from his Skrull captivity and they bond over whatever the climactic mission in the 90s-set stand-alone turns out to be. It's not like Fury has really built any other really close relationships anywhere else (Maria Hill aside).
And perhaps Fury's "over-reaction" in The Avengers - or his happiness to sanction the World Council's plan to deal with aliens like Thor - was borne out of his fears at anyone getting close to him the same way the Skrull Coulson did? After all, it seems a strangely anti-Fury thing to do when you consider how welcoming he is to the idea of supers in the first place. He doesn't count Hulk a threat, for instance, and he seems to genuinely admire Captain America and they're just as dangerous.
So there's definitely a story there.
It's that behaviour in The Winter Soldier that really suggests that Fury was betrayed by someone REALLY close to him during the 1990s when he lost his eye. As soon as he begins to suspect that SHIELD is infiltrated, he fakes his own death and flees: even as he knows that Cap will need his help. He knows to remove himself from the situation because it's too dangerous and because he has the scars from last time he avoided his instincts. The last time he trusted.
What if he learned that from Captain Marvel in the 90s? What if the reason she has left Earth is because she genuinely doesn't know who to trust, just as Fury didn't in The Winter Soldier? What if she did what he did and hit her foxhole, only to be drawn out again when times were desperate in another way? Don't say that's not possible.