Date of airing: May 13, 1995 (FOX Kids)
Well, this episode happened. Maybe I shouldn’t have hyped myself up for multi-episode arcs in this series, because at the end of it all, there will be an entire episode devoted to fights between Spider-Man and the main villain, and it bores me to sleep. Unfortunately, it was anything but an interesting episode, even though one of the stories started pretty impressively, but ended in quite the disappointing fashion and could be considered a waste of time.
I’m talking about Spider-Man’s unmasking by Venom, which was foiled by the fact that J. Jonah Jameson needed so damn long to focus the video camera, or the fact that no one else in the crowd had a camera directed at the action on the rooftop of a random New York City building where the action was happening, or the fact that Venom wasn’t interested at all in just dropping Spider-Man’s alter ego in the press or literally dropping Spider-Man to the ground instead of having him dangle up there. While there could have been a lot of ways for Venom to destroy Spider-Man this way or simply just reveal the wallcrawler’s secret identity, the fact that this episode didn’t do it meant that there was no interest for the writers to have this fictional universe know about Spider-Man’s alter ego, simply because it would send the story into a wholly different direction the writers weren’t able to handle on the basis of a weekend morning cartoon. Because if you had revealed Peter Parker to be Spider-Man, it would have meant an ongoing storyline about Peter being in the public spotlight – a story that you can’t just tell in 20 minutes.
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| If you want hot muscular guys, open the Yellow Pages. |
But yeah, the repeated fights between Venom and Spider-Man quickly bored me. Venom didn’t want to kill Spider-Man because he thought it was much cooler to taunt him. Venom didn’t even get into threatening Aunt May or Mary Jane, so that Peter would be in a rage and act irrationally, which could have helped Venom in his fight against the superhero. The writers never figured that Venom’s murderous tendencies (“murderous” for a weekend morning kids show, which is not murderous at all – no one dies in this series) and Peter/Spider-Man’s human rage when it comes to the threatening of his loved ones, could have been portrayed simultaneously, and could have been part of the fight between the two. Spider-Man could have fought to not only protect his maskless identity, but also the lives of his family and friends. Venom could have fought for recognition for Eddie after having been humiliated by Peter so often. But none of that happened here, and instead, the two were just fighting, without a sense of story in those battles. Rage could have been the theme of this episode, and yet these 20 minutes, minus “previously on” and the title intro and the end credits (which comes up to about 18 minutes), were filled with action sequences that were quickly forgotten again because there was no narrative coherence in them.
Meanwhile, this episode forgot all about Smythe and Kingpin and the entire deal with the Prometheus X that Spider-Man switched in the previous episode, completely killing a storyline that was still part of the narrative in the previous half hour. Here was a plot device, a rock from another world, that started the Symbiote storyline, and it’s entirely absent in the third act, making me wonder what the theater about Prometheus X was even about during acts one and two. At least John Jameson still appeared in this episode, even if his character wasn’t used for much, let alone some alone time with his once-worried father.
When Spider-Man found Shocker and Rhino fighting, I loved the “computer dating” comment. This episode aired in 1995, so it must have been written and produced in 1994 when the Internet was still in its infancy, and online dating and Tinder weren’t quite the things yet. Equally hilarious was the notion that there was a launching pad somewhere in New York, easily reachable by train, in case Spider-Man needed to find a way to blast an alien lifeform back into space when an unmanned rocket was conveniently being launched during the wallcrawler’s battles. But I guess I’m just nitpicking at this point, since the launch pad was the least absurd thing about this episode.
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| It's time to rob a train, Wild West-style! |
Furthermore, I was a bit surprised that Peter and Mary Jane seemed like they were dating for real now. First of all, they haven’t even kissed yet (shame). Secondly, I would like to know what MJ thinks of Peter in general. Considering her background in the comics, one would have thought that she would be her own character by now, but it looks like she is just a side character who is randomly involved in Peter’s life every once in a while, but isn’t given time to shine as a character because too much of that time that could have been given to her was wasted on Spider-Man’s battles with his rogue gallery. And it’s about time for MJ to be a proper character in this show.
