Spider-Man: The Animated Series Episode Fifty-Seven: Six Forgotten Warriors, Chapter Four: The Six Fight Again

 The Six Fight Again

First Aired: October 10th, 1997

Synopsis: Robbie shows up at Omar Mosely's house for the keys he has to the doomsday device, but once Mosely takes him to the lockbox where he has them, Robbie reveals himself to be the Chameleon. Spider-Man and the Destroyer show up and get the keys back, but the rest of the Insidious Six attack and defeat Spider-Man and the Destroyer. The Black Marvel unexpectedly shows up and saves them, but Kingpin reveals that he's holding the real Robbie Robertson hostage, and forces the heroes to give him the two keys. After Robbie's freed, Destroyer is suspicious of the Black Marvel since he's supposed to be dead, but Black Marvel unmasks and reveals that he is and always has been Omar Mosely, as the original test subject was forbidden to participate by his father, but it was a good cover to keep. Black Marvel and Destroyer gather the remaining members of the Six - Miss America and the Whizzer - and they agree to fight again alongside Spider-Man to find the Thunderer and protect the last key.

 

Kingpin and the Insidious Six can't find out where the Thunderer is, but they have discovered the location of the doomsday device so go there to secure it. They start interrogating a homeless man there but Spider-Man and the Six show up. They're being beaten when the homeless man saves them, revealing that he's the Thunderer. Unfortunately this means that Kingpin knows where the last key is, and once the heroes are defeated, he and the Insidious Six go into the building where the doomsday device is. They all activate their keys, but once the room's open Chameleon betrays the villains and knocks them out with gas. The Insidious Six, Kingpin, Spider-Man, and the Six American Warriors are all restrained, while the son of the Red Skull arrives, revealing that Chameleon is his adopted brother. The captured scientists he has with him free the Red Skull from stasis and he activates the doomsday device, which is a bunch of robots, but while he's not paying attention Captain America is also released from stasis. Silver Sable arrives out of nowhere and frees Spider-Man, who frees the Six American Warriors. The Insidious Six are freed in the chaos, and the Red Skull and his son escape while the heroes and villains fight robots. Spider-Man and Silver Sable chase after the Red Skull, vowing to stop them.

Places That Spider-Man Will Chase Shocker To:

• Spider-Man outsources his work in this episode; Shocker gets thrown around by the Destroyer.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• When Kingpin seemingly has Spider-Man at his mercy, he tells our favourite wall-crawler that "Your life must be...terminated!" Ah, censorship.
• At one point there's some shots of the Insidious Six attacking Spider-Man and the Destroyer, but they made the mistake of recycling some footage from The Sting of the Scorpion for Scorpion's attack, leading to Scorpion being inexplicably mutated for those few moments. Whoops!
• When Thunderer saves the Six American Warriors from the Insidious Six, he does so while still in his homeless man clothes - there's a quick cut to Kingpin, then when we next see the Thunderer he's in full costume. I timed it and he managed to make the entire change in six seconds! Maybe the Whizzer helped him?
• The robots which Red Skull unleashes end up powering down, since it turns out that he hasn't had time to charge them up fully. In a hilariously understated moment, Doctor Octopus softly comments in response, "Lack of foresight isn't usually a German failing!"
  

Review: The plot's moving along quite nicely now - we've got the existence of the doomsday device revealed, the Red Skull and Captain America are back in the picture (and man, even though you can see it coming from ages away, what a cool moment it is when Cap rematerialises and immediately starts kicking ass), all of the Six American Warriors are in the picture and working with Spider-Man, and we're even getting backstory for the Black Marvel. Thinking about it, this doesn't feel a whole lot like a Spider-Man story - if you cut him out of it once the Six American Warriors reunite, not a lot would change - but it definitely does feel like a Marvel Comics story.

While the overall plot is definitely enjoyable, and I do feel that we're moving into a nice climax, there are still some moments that don't work one hundred percent. After all of the build-up to the doomsday device, it's disappointing to discover that they're just some robots - we've seen robots a million times, and they're shut down without much difficulty. Silver Sable bursting in to deus ex machina Spider-Man out of his bonds is sloppy (even if it gets an explanation next episode - my guess is that she was working with Chameleon so she could eventually shut him down - it's still sloppy here), and it's a little frustrating that the Six American Warriors keep running out of their powers at crucial moments. Maybe they had a point when they said they should stay out of the fight.

Overall though, I found this to be quite enjoyable, and knowing that the earlier episodes of the arc were building up to this definitely puts them in a bit more of a favourable light. There's a lot of players on the board now and while they're not all getting the spotlight, it's still managing to tell an enjoyable story. Nothing feels overly complex, nor like we're missing out on any essential infomation. This is pretty good stuff.