Date of airing: May 6, 1995 (FOX Kids)
Okay, this episode was a little bit annoying. While the writers were taking their time to build the Venom story out of nothing, there was some jumping around in this episode’s story, especially when it comes to Eddie Brock’s development to becoming Venom. At first, Spider-Man wanted to make sure that Jameson knows about Eddie’s lies when it came to the story of the space shuttle’s crash and Rhino’s involvement in the theft of the Prometheus X, but because Jameson needed some proof of his own, some time had to be spent on that story, which took away from the plausibility of Eddie’s story and left information out of the narrative that could have explained why Eddie continuously kept himself in the danger zone when Spider-Man was involved in fights around him. Eddie was moved from scene to scene in a speedy fashion, turning him into an incredibly stupid character making even stupider decisions, beginning with the entire lie about the crash story, and ending with his declaration to jump right into the middle of the fight between Shocker and Spider-Man. Eddie should have been crapping his pants while running away, considering how Shocker kidnapped him and how violent the fight between Shocker and the wallcrawler in black seemed to have been.
In addition, Eddie was still working for the Daily Bugle at the beginning of the episode, but after less than 20 minutes (2 minutes were spent on a “previously on,” the title credits, and the end credits, taking even more time away from the story), he lost his job, he lost his home, he lost his only adversary in his hatred against Spider-Man, he decided to sneak up on Jameson and follow him until he makes contact with Spider-Man, and then he was dense enough as a person to get involved in a fight between a superhero and a supervillain, without waiting first whether or not the supervillain manages to kill the superhero first. Someone needs to tell Eddie how to be a better character.
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| "Here, snip away at this part of the suit, if you can." |
Because he was not the smartest of the bunch in this episode. I had to laugh when he threw himself into the climactic fight between the superhero and the supervillain, and he did so twice for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Eddie’s actions were not only absurd, but he didn’t even realize that he never would have won the fight if he actually thought he could hold his own between two guys who are clearly superior in power and fight moves. Seriously, Spider-Man is a superhero, and Shocker obviously had some huge electrical guns as fists, so why would Eddie believe he could beat Spider-Man? Just because he is an animated character, it doesn’t mean he and his decisions don’t deserve to be scrutinized.
But I loved that the episode took its time to depict Peter/Spider-Man in a bad light. His cocky attitude was entertaining, and seeing Spider-Man about to do some bad mistakes was a nice way to depict how his uncle’s “great power, great responsibility” mantra was burning through the black suit Peter was wearing, turning him into an invincible character and therefore could do anything he wanted. It was an attempt at telling the viewers that the so-called Peter Parker Principle didn’t help when he was about to become a bad guy, and that he could become corrupted like anyone else on this planet, whether superpowered or not.
It was also great to see that the Symbiote seemed to have some contingencies running if the host wasn’t listening to what it wanted. The suit pushed Shocker down the bell tower, because it realized that Peter was unable to let go of Shocker and kill him. I wonder what would have happened between the Symbiote and Peter if the ringing bell hadn’t separated the two. Peter was definitely able to do some good things under the influence of the suit (rescuing John Jameson, protecting John and J. Jonah while doing so), and he was able to remember what the suit was doing to him, which is why he decided against dropping Shocker. Maybe there could have been an understanding between Peter and the living Symbiote, although that would have meant the writers had to turn the suit into a character as well, and I can only imagine how hard that must have been. Besides, maybe the entire fight with Shocker was proof of how powerful Peter was in the first place. He stopped himself from killing Shocker (which is why the Symbiote had to take over in that instance), so he was constantly able to fight off the Symbiote’s influences on him.
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| Peter needs to be shirtless and in his underwear to fight the Symbiote. |
By the way, did Peter just forget about Eddie hanging in the bell tower by the end of the episode? I found that kind of hilarious, even if it was a silly plot convenience to move towards Eddie being the new host for the Symbiote and becoming Venom. Although it was probably just another instance of Spider-Man and Eddie’s adversarial behavior – maybe Peter deliberately forgot all about him as “punishment” for getting involved in the fight. Let Eddie figure out for himself how to get out of this mess.
