Spider-Man (1967) Episode Twenty-Two: King Pinned

King Pinned

First Aired: September 21st, 1968

Synopsis: Continuing on from Spider-Man's origin last episode, Peter Parker tells his Aunt May that he needs to get a job, and applies for a job at the Daily Bugle as copy boy. When J. Jonah Jameson hears that Peter is "the boy whose uncle was killed," he immediately hires Peter. From near Jonah's office, Peter overhears Jonah talking with his contact, Doctor Omar, who says that there's a scam involving selling useless medicine going on at the moment, and that the Kingpin is behind it.

Peter later overhears Foswell, a reporter, telling the Kingpin that Jonah's going to print a story about the medicine scam. Kingpin and some thugs show up at the Daily Bugle to capture Jonah, and are followed by Spider-Man. There, Spider-Man is able to defeat the thugs and save Jonah. Unfortunately, Kingpin gets away, but not before ominously saying something about a black box. Spider-Man remembers Foswell saying something similar, and realises that there must be a bomb in the Daily Bugle. He manages to find and disarm the bomb. The next day, Peter tells Aunt May that  his job was pretty uneventful, as he looks at a copy of the Daily Bugle, telling the story about the medicine scam.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• In the first season, Jonah was mostly used as comic relief. While a lot of the time I found it to be pretty effective, there were times when some of what he was saying made him look like a real ass. With the implication this episode that he's hired Peter out of sympathy for his uncle's death, he's suddenly done a lot to both redeem himself, and to move much closer to the characterisation of the Jonah of the comics. 
• When Jonah's source mentions that the Kingpin is behind the medicine scam, Jonah reacts as though he knows who the Kingpin is. In the comics, Kingpin's identity was unknown to the public for a while - to them, Wilson Fisk was a mere spice dealer.
• The reporter working for the Kingpin, Foswell, is from the comics (his full name is Frederick Foswell). There, he briefly was a Kingpin-like figure himself as the Big Man, before being caught by Spider-Man. When he got out of jail, he ended up working for the Daily Bugle as a legitimate reporter this time, and ended up dying saving J. Jonah Jameson from some of the Kingpin's thugs.

Review: There's no doubt about it - this is a good episode, but with one gigantic flaw which I'll address in a bit. Kingpin works fantastically as your classical gangster boss - he's got a mole on the inside, he sends thugs over to kill Jameson, and he has a bomb planted at the Daily Bugle, with the implication that it'll be blown up even if Jonah does suppress the story. The one slight oddball is that his plan essentially involves selling medicine which doesn't work, something I don't ever think I've seen in fiction. Still, even that works, because a) it's foreshadowed earlier in the episode when Peter mentions that Aunt May's medicine is getting less and less effective, and b) this show has done things a lot, lot goofier in the past.

This episode also retroactively fixes a complaint I had about the previous episode - while I didn't mention it in my review, for an origin episode, it hadn't explained how Peter ended up working for Jonah. While this episode doesn't go quite all the way - Peter's not yet a reporter and we haven't been given a solid reason for Jonah hating Spider-Man - it's in a good enough place that even if the next episode jumps ahead in time, I'm happy we got some sort of explanation.

So, how about that gigantic flaw? Well, as with last episode, we get some bad pacing in what I'm assuming is an attempt to recycle footage - and I mean bad pacing. The highlight has to be the three-minute long montage of Spider-Man and the thugs who have captured Jonah travelling across the city, but take your pick; there are a lot of moments like that. In the first season we often got padding in the episode, but at least things were happening in most of it. Here, nothing's happening which we'd miss if it was taken out.