Enter the Punisher
Synopsis: Some thugs dressed like punks have captured the daughter of a wealthy person and are intending to collect a ransom to get rich, but the Punisher breaks into their base and takes them all out. Afterwards, he's told by Microchip that his next target is Spider-Man. Said hero is avoiding Aunt May since he grew an extra four arms, and blows off a date with Mary Jane when she calls him, which annoys her. He goes to see Doctor Crawford to see whether she can help him and finds out in the process that he's been accused of kidnapping Morbius after he disappeared from his hospital room. Morbius tries returning to the hospital, which is seen on the news and thought to be Spider-Man because the media are dense. Spider-Man heads over to him, but finds himself confronted by the Punisher.
Spider-Man gets tagged with a tracer by the Punisher, and the two of them fight for a while before Spider-Man's able to web up the Punisher and leave. Returning home, Spider-Man briefly thinks about his origin from the wrestling portion onwards, before using Morbius' tape recorder that he found last episode to track down Morbius' home base. By listening to distinctive sounds on the tape and a map, he's able to trace the route Morbius took before fighting him. Unbeknownst to him, the Punisher follows him using the tracer. When Spider-Man reaches Morbius' base, he accidentally destroys the equipment Morbius was using to try and cure himself. Morbius flees and Spider-Man follows, but the Punisher attacks him, knocking Spider-Man into a warehouse. Once in there, Spider-Man's mutation continues, and he turns into a giant spider monster.
Miscellaneous Notes:
- At the start of the episode, we get a brief scene of Aunt May looking for Peter in their house. What makes this stand out is that the house is made of nineties CGI, and it's incredibly jarring in comparison with her animation. We've had CGI portions of the city before, but it's never been this jarring.
- I like Mary Jane quite a lot, but she's kind of a jerk in this episode. When Peter says that he can't make it to the movies with her that night, her response is to immediately yell at Peter and assume that he doesn't care about her without waiting for an explanation. Give him five seconds to explain himself!
- On that note, Mary Jane mentions that she and Peter went to Coney Island last week. This happened in Hydro-Man, meaning that the events of the last three episodes have happened in the span of that week.
Which is why it's really disappointing at what this episode amounts to. I know that there were strict guidelines and the Punisher wasn't going to enter the episode shooting up thugs and spraying plasma everywhere, but his early appearances in the seventies show that you can do a gritty and grounded Punisher that's not overly violent. This version of the Punisher, by comparison, feels - not entirely unexpectedly - like a toy commercial. He's got a jetpack and continuously is switching to different weapons (each sold separately) throughout his fight with Spider-Man. Frank's resourceful and doesn't give up easily, yeah, but he's also vulnerable and should be fighting a lot more dirtily than this to keep up with Spidey.
Not helping matters is that the fight with the Punisher takes up the majority of the episode, and the rest of it isn't great. The random flashback to Spider-Man's origin is jarring at best - he thinks about how he's responsible for Morbius like he was responsible for stopping the burglar - and Morbius himself is more or less a MacGuffin at this stage. Throw in Spider-Man turning into what looks like a mindless monster at the end, and I don't have high hopes for next episode.
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