Spider-Man: The Animated Series Episode Sixteen: Neogenic Nightmare, Chapter 3 - Hydro-Man

Hydro-Man

First Aired: September 23rd, 1995

Synopsis: Spider-Man reads in a newspaper that a thief has been striking and is suspected to be him since he must have super powers. At a nearby aquarium, a mysterious figure appears in a tank and steals some pearls from a clam. Spider-Man arrives and chases the figure, who's able to evade him. The next day, Peter meets with Mary Jane for lunch and asks her out on a date, but she's evasive. Peter's annoyed but they're interrupted by Mary Jane getting a call from a mysterious man named Morrie, who tells her to meet him. She immediately leaves and does so, visibly tense and stressed. Peter follows her as Spider-Man and sees her meeting Morrie, who turns out to be an ex-boyfriend of hers. He wants to get back together with her, and reveals that he can turn into and control water. Spider-Man appears and fights Morrie - who's calling himself Hydro-Man - and eventually gets Mary Jane away to safety.

At home, Peter modifies his web formula to affect Hydro-Man, and then meets with a friend of Mary Jane's and finds out that she's staying at her apartment. Morrie overhears, however, and kidnaps her to his base full of loot, a pumping station. He reveals that after he was expelled from high school he joined the navy, and was exposed to mysterious energy when knocked off a boat which gave him his powers. Spider-Man shows up, having guessed where Hydro-Man is, and shoots him with his new webbing formula, full of coagulant. Hydro-Man escapes it, however, and chases after Mary Jane, who's run off. She throws a stack of paper at him, gets him covered in sand, and exposed to a fire, but he keeps coming at her, up to the rooftop. Spider-Man arrives and points out that she's weakened him greatly, and in the hot sun, Morrie evaporates when he tries attacking Spider-Man. In the aftermath, Peter and Mary Jane go on a date and share a kiss.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• There's a newspaper article near the start with Peter's photos of the aquarium robbery. Looking closely, there's text saying that the article's by Ned Leeds. Nice little touch, that.
• Mary Jane briefly thinks about how she's just like her dad, running away when things get tough. I don't know whether this show will touch on her full backstory, but I hope it does, because it's real great.

Review: Hydro-Man's definitely an underrated villain - he's nice and succinct to understand, and his powers make him difficult to defeat - but understandably so, since he's also a bit unimaginative and is in some ways Sandman 2.0. So while I wasn't exactly opposed to him showing up as a villain, I can't say I was expecting much of him. What a surprise, then, that this episode managed to reinvent him more or less from the ground up and do so spectacularly.

Let's face it, Hydro-Man's a bit of a blank slate in the comics, so updating him here to be Mary Jane's ex-boyfriend is a weird-sounding idea which manages to totally work. His motivation - for Mary Jane to get back with him - is incredibly petty and small-minded and yet it works perfectly. Most of the time in this episode he's not even portrayed as that big a threat for Spider-Man - sure, Spider-Man gets bruised up a bit, but he's more concerned with what might happen to Mary Jane. It's a brilliant writing choice.

The episode gets bonus points for showing Mary Jane to be the one who ultimately defeats him. Looking back over the episode, Spider-Man's kind of useless for anything other than getting Mary Jane away from him to start off with, and you know what? I'm fine with that, because Mary Jane is absolutely tough enough to take on a supervillain herself and win. Overall, the closest I have to a complaint is with how little this episode ties into the rest of the continuity of this series, but whatever. Sometimes it's nice to have a break and a standalone story.