Spider-Man: The Animated Series Episode Thirty-Three: The Sins of the Fathers, Chapter 6 - Framed

Framed

First Aired: September 21st, 1996

Synopsis: Peter Parker is in court, and is declared guilty of the most heinous of crimes, in spite of the best efforts of his lawyer, Matt Murdock. While he's being taken away to prison there are explosions and he's rescued by Spider-Man. Peter thinks back to how this all started - Richard Fisk, son of philanthropist Wilson Fisk, hired Peter to work for Wilson's new company, Fisktronics, as he knew that Peter was good with computers and was grateful for Peter saving Wilson's life in the past. Peter did well at the job, which mostly involved him taking home a disc every day with diagnostic problems, but one day he was attacked outside of work by people with guns. He managed to escape from them as Spider-Man, but they went to his home, where it turned out that they were federal agents. They were suspicious that someone was selling defence secrets to other countries, and it turned out the disc Peter had that day was full of them. Peter was assigned Matt Murdock as his lawyer, but as seen at the start of the episode, he was still declared guilty.

 

In the present, Peter's taken to Richard Fisk, who reveals that he framed Peter, and that the fake Spider-Man is Chameleon. Peter gets locked in a cell that's airtight and too strong for him to break out of, but he's freed by Daredevil, who claims that Murdock sent him. Daredevil takes Peter to Murdock's penthouse, and Murdock tells Peter that he's on his side because he knows what it's like to have the deck stacked against you - when he was young, his father took a job for a mobster, right before Murdock was blinded by some chemicals. His father tried getting revenge on the mobster, the future Kingpin, but he was killed. What Murdock doesn't tell Peter is that he also got powers from the chemicals, and is Daredevil. Peter sneaks out and gets his Spider-Man costume from home, then heads to Fisktronics to look for evidence that he was framed, but is attacked by Daredevil, who thinks that he's planting further evidence to frame Peter. The two fight before some thugs come in and set a bomb to blow up the place. The bomb explodes, and the two heroes start running away from the explosion.

Subplots:

• When Chameleon and Richard Fisk head off after locking Peter up, Richard comments "How ironic that Parker should be branded a traitor! Especially after what  you've told us about his parents..."
• Aunt May collapses and gets sent to hospital, which I guess you could call a subplot, but personally I think of it more as being part of her daily routine.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• When Peter's in court at the start of the episode, he thinks to himself, "It's as if I've stepped into a Kafka novel!" I'm assuming that this is a reference to The Trial.
• Don't get me wrong, both as Daredevil and his civilian identity Matt Murdock is fantastic throughout this episode, but...blonde hair on him? Ech.
• So, about that mention of Peter's parents being traitors: in the comics, they were spies who were initially thought to be traitors, before Peter investigated and discovered that they were actually framed (all revealed in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #5). They were later revealed to be alive in Amazing Spider-Man #365, but they later turned out to be robots created by the Chameleon on Harry Osborn's orders. Whether or not any of this happens in this show, there's at least a connection between Chameleon and them, which I appreciate.

Review: You don't know what you're missing until you've got it. I like Daredevil a lot, and upon seeing Matt Murdock at the start of the episode, I thought this would be a decent episode, but I didn't anticipate how great it would be. Starting out in media res is a brilliant decision, since we don't know what Peter's crime is, and even though the fake Spider-Man is obviously going to be the Chameleon (we can see his distinctive belt), the show still knows better than to reveal it. It's a fair-play mystery: if you've noticed the belt, you don't get cheated out of your guess, if you haven't, it's not so left-field that it feels impossible to have guessed.

Besides the Chameleon, keeping Daredevil's identity secret for most of  the episode is another clever move - if you don't know the character, it's a genuine surprise when it's revealed that Matt and Daredevil are one and the same. It's almost disappointing in how understated the reveal is - it could have been kept for a much more dramatic moment, and been done as a genuine twist for anyone who didn't know who Daredevil was.

So, yeah, I loved this episode. Daredevil's origin is concise, his fight scenes are insanely cool, and he fits into the plot smoothly. Peter getting framed feels realistic, especially with the Kingpin involved, and the nonlinear nature of the storytelling does the episode nothing but favours. Probably the best episode of the series yet; I can't wait for the next part.