Spider-Man: The Animated Series Episode Twenty-Nine: The Sins of the Fathers, Chapter 2 - Make a Wish

Make a Wish

First Aired: May 4th, 1995

Synopsis: The Hardy Foundation is demonstrating their new Argon-Matrix laser, which can cut things precisely and be configured to not harm organic matter, when Doctor Octopus attacks. Peter Parker is there as a photographer, and he changes to Spider-Man and fights Octopus. In the process, a medical lab is destroyed. Octopus gets away, and the next day Spider-Man is heavily criticised in the paper for destroying valuable equipment. At the Daily Bugle, Peter is enraged by this, and decides to quit being Spider-Man, but before he leaves, Robbie Robertson gives him a letter to give to Spider-Man. The letter is from the parents of a young fan of Spider-Man who want him to visit her, but Peter dismisses it. Once he's outside, he's mentally contacted by Madam Web, who knows that he's Spider-Man and tells him that he needs to stop doubting himself. Seemingly teleporting Peter to her place, she deals some tarot cards and says that Spider-Man must believe in her and have the faith of a child.

Deciding to interpret the last part of Madam Web's advice literally, Spider-Man heads to the fan mentioned in the letter, a young girl named Taina who really does seem to be his biggest fan, having posters and articles of him everywhere. When she asks about who Spider-Man is, he gives her his origin. At the same time, Doctor Octopus demonstrates a new Octo-Bot to Kingpin, showing that he can control it mentally and that he'll use it to destroy Spider-Man. Once Spider-Man's finished telling his origin, he tells Taina that he's quitting, but she convinces him to take her web-swinging. While they are, Octopus finds Spider-Man and attacks him with the Octo-Bot. Spider-Man's able to taunt Octopus, weakening his mental control over it enough for Spider-Man to escape, but Octopus successfully gasses Spider-Man, knocking him out. As he prepares to throw Spider-Man to the ground, which will kill him, Taina looks on in horror.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• This episode - specifically, most of the second half - seems to be loosely based on Amazing Spider-Man #248. It's ambiguous as to whether Taina is in the same situation that Timmy Harrison from that issue was.
• Yet again, when we see a Daily Bugle newspaper the front page article is by Ned Leeds. He must be one hell of a reporter in this continuity.
• During Spider-Man's origin, when we see him attending the science demonstration, Doctor Stillwell is the person behind it. The show's been really good on the continuity with the neogenics stuff and Stillwell's contribution to it; I really like it.
• In an award-winning example of padding, when Spider-Man is discussing his origin, he of course includes when right after he was bitten, he turned into a spider with his face, which was then flushed down the drain by Aunt May, only for him to turn into a giant spider with his face, and be attacked by the military...only, wait, it was all a dream he had after being bitten!
• Spider-Man mentions that among his other powers are "a spider's craving for dark corners and new heights". I'm pretty sure he's never shown a craving for either of those things and never will.
• When explaining his web shooters, Spider-Man theorises that when the spider bit him, he developed instinctive knowledge of how certain chemicals would let him make webbing. It's an alright explanation, I guess, but I'll never understand why people get caught up on Peter being the one to come up with his webbing and web-shooters. I mean, it's not like we've ever seen how being given the super-soldier serum gave Captain America such great tactical and fighting skills.

Review: Basing a story on Amazing Spider-Man #248 is setting yourself a high bar to clear, and while I don't think that this episode is bad, per se, I don't think it really manages to capture what made that such a fantastic issue. Part of this is probably due to what a network will allow versus what a comic will allow, but even if next episode does try and deliver the same ending, the pacing's just not as tight. I guess this is probably as good as we could have expected in 1996.

Outside of this stuff, there's not a lot here that's that memorable. The initial fight with Ock is decent enough (there's a clever moment where Spider-Man's about to be cut by the laser, only to remember that it's been configured not to harm organic matter) and the medical centre being destroyed is actually a decent consequence for Jonah to be annoyed about, but it's hard to feel like any of it will matter at the end of the day. As far as Peter quitting being Spider-Man goes, I've seen more compelling reasons.

Madam Web kind of spends the entirety of her screentime just talking down to Spider-Man, so while she's probably meant to be a wise mentor, she comes across more as someone pragmatic and callous. I will say that she's got potential though, and could end up being good for kickstarting some plots. This is only the first part of what looks to be a two-part story, so I'll be interested to see how the ending turns out and how it retroactively affects the quality of this one, though I'd be lying if I said that I think it'll fix the issues with it.