Date of airing: April 1, 1995 (FOX Kids)
It was a solid episode, but between the previous episode and this one, I made the silly mistake of reading what was awaiting me for seasons two to five. Now I’m getting all excited about the show and the stories it will go into, after knowing that John Semper and his writing team knew that Marvel wasn’t looking at their work, so they could do whatever they wanted (and what they wanted was to go into some serious and earnest storytelling). All this makes the first season a little boring already, with all the stand-alone villain-centric episodes, in which their origins are being given attention, making this episode almost entirely forgettable because of it. Kraven was a lovesick villain of the one-dimensional kind (although all villains in this series are of the one-dimensional kind), and Mariah was a character written by men, so she was not giving up on the love of her life, even after he became awful and violent towards her. I wouldn’t necessarily say “battered woman syndrome,” but this episode came pretty close to that.
That little thing became the bitter pill of this episode, but maybe the writers just didn’t have any time to make this episode a proper love story (or something other viewers than the Y7 audience can enjoy) – excluding intro and end credits, the episode was 18 minutes long, which in television terms is too short. And Kraven’s origin story felt like an entire episode by itself, making the actual story of the episode even shorter. I mean, what was the story in the end? Kraven wanted Mariah back, and Mariah was researching a cure for Kraven. And Spider-Man got in the middle of it. I guess two sentences for an 18-minute-long episode is good enough, but when you come to realize that Mariah ran off to search for a cure, while Kraven didn’t know anything about it and therefore ran mad in New York City, shows that the two (former?) lovers weren’t talking to each other. This episode is an example of how a conversation could have saved a few lives and prevented the taxpayers from fixing the damages superheroes inflict on their city.
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| Model Mary Jane Watson excites the entire audience. |
I was surprised to see that the story found time to get Mary Jane and Felicia in it, even though their appearances were pretty much useless. There is only one thing that keeps me interested in the appearances of both women, and that is the inevitable love triangle that would have been written into a live-action show if prepared like this. MJ invites Peter to a gala, Felicia shows up, and suddenly you remember that both women are flirting with the photograph and secret superhero.
Meanwhile, Kraven was a bit of a lame villain. Instead of writing a cat-and-mouse game that could have elaborated on the hunter-and-prey premise, Kraven just kidnapped Robbie and gave Spider-Man an ultimatum. A little boring, considering the superpowers of the villain in this episode, but only having 18 minutes (of which you spend about five on Kraven’s origin story) doesn’t make for much. I did like that Spider-Man had a few technical problems going on during the climactic fight. His web-shooters got damaged, and it almost sounded like the partridge of his other web-shooter was empty when he was saving Robbie from the gators. For a moment I came to realize that it must be hard for Spider-Man to do his job as a superhero when the tech you rely on starts failing you in the middle of a fight. It was an idea worth thinking about in this episode, so I wondered if the writers ever got back to it. Besides the obvious story of Spider-Man losing his powers at one point, which has to be part of the series for sure. The web-shooter thing may have just been a throwaway plot in this episode, but the fact that Spider-Man has to deal with this in the first place means that the writers at least talked about the premise in the room.
In the meantime, I still wondered whether Felicia was interested in Peter or not, and if she knew she was dating Flash at the same time she was ogling Peter. Felicia has been a questionable character on the show, but it kind of makes her a little more fun, to be honest. Not knowing where she stands with her love interests could make things a little more interesting while Peter and MJ are totally into each other (I still don’t think they are dating, but they have to be, right?), and when Felicia inadvertently turns into Black Cat, which I am waiting for.
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| And tomorrow, we're all going to the zoo with Spider-Man. |
And finally, I laughed about the Danielle Steele comment. Oh, the mid-1990s, during which TV audiences were assaulted by Steele made-for-TV movies. Two decades later, Danielle Steele and her work might have been entirely forgotten, but it lives on in an animated show targeted at kids. Did they even understand the reference when they watched this episode for the first time? Did the watching parents chuckle at that bit?
