Guilty
First Aired: February 1st, 1997
Synopsis: Robbie Robertson heads off to a sports game of his son Randy's, but is gassed by a taxi driver and knocked out. Shortly afterwards, Spider-Man, who is feeling guilty over Mary Jane disappearing into a portal in the previous episode, and is contemplating retiring, follows a police car to the docks. He fights the criminals he finds there, only to find out their leader is a groggy and confused Robbie Robertson, who seemingly shoots at him. The thugs and Robbie are all arrested, and declared guilty. J. Jonah Jameson is sure that something is wrong, and insists that Robbie is innocent. Peter looks over some shots he has of the fight and finds that when Robbie shot at him, his finger wasn't anywhere near the trigger of the gun. Jonah takes this evidence and goes to a cop friend of his to investigate. Unbeknownst to either of them, Kingpin laughs that his plan is succeeding, and hacks some computers to move Robbie to a different prison.
Jonah's cop friend points him to an old informant of his, which in turn gives him information about a warehouse. Spider-Man, who is following Jonah, fights some thugs at the warehouse, and together the two of them find a remote control for Robbie's gun, proving that he didn't fire it. While Jonah goes to a judge with the evidence, Spider-Man hacks a computer at the warehouse, and discovers what Kingpin's done. He goes to Robbie's prison, where it turns out Richard Fisk and Tombstone are there and want to get revenge on Robbie. Spider-Man manages to stop them and get them arrested again, and in the aftermath Robbie is declared innocent. Robbie comments to Peter that Spider-Man was essential to the whole affair, and Peter decides he won't retire after all.
Miscellaneous Notes:
- While Jonah's telling all of his staff that Robbie's innocent, we get to meet a character who's been been mentioned but hasn't appeared before: Ned Leeds! (Not Needs).
- The secretary of the Daily Bugle is also shown to be Glory Grant. I like Glory; she admittedly rarely has a lot to do but she's a fun character.
- As it turns out, Jonah's nickname when he was a reporter was Jigsaw Jameson, which somehow manages to fit him perfectly.
- When Spider-Man sits down at the computer to hack it, he says that he'll need all of his skills, then one scene transition later we see him inputting the password Progeny, which gets him in. Apparently his idea of hacking is to go through every word in the dictionary.
- Apparently Jonah thinks that Robbie lives at the Daily Bugle, because at the end of the episode there's a big banner saying WELCOME HOME ROBBIE on it.
Review: Don't get me wrong, this episode is fine and all, but it's definitely a bit of a letdown after the high-stakes climax of the previous one. We've gone from an adaptation of a classic story, one which had been building up slowly for a while, to some fairly low-stakes stuff with Kingpin and Tombstone. It's definitely what we needed after the last episode - and I loved that Peter's still feeling guilt over Mary Jane and is thinking of retiring - but it's ultimately not going to come anywhere near close to as exciting.
The episode does do quite a lot right, though. While it's obvious that Robbie's been framed, who's done it and why is portrayed as a mystery for most of the episode, and while the motivation is fairly mundane, it adds a nice human element to the whole thing. The scenes with Jonah investigating the crime are also really nice - they showcase his more compassionate side in how far he'll go for Robbie, and he also gets to demonstrate that he's actually quite competent. I'd happily have accepted this entire episode being from Jonah's point of view.
Still, it's ultimately mostly a placeholder while Spider-Man gets himself together, and while it was a necessary break for the show, it mostly ends up being a bit forgettable. I'm glad that it exists, but I'm looking forwards more to what's going to be coming up next.
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