The Lizard King
First Aired: July 26th, 1997
Synopsis: After revealing his identity to Mary Jane last episode, Peter asks her to marry him, using a spider-tracer as an improvised ring, and she agrees. After telling their aunts about it - May approves, Anna doesn't and has to refrain from pointing the Punisher in Peter's direction - they go to Professor Connors at university to ask for him to take the role of Mary Jane's father in the wedding, since neither of them have any significant male figures in their lives. Connors agrees, but the three of them are then attacked by lizard-people, who manage to kidnap Connors and Mary Jane. Peter follows them into the sewers using the signal from the spider-tracer he gave Mary Jane, while the lizard-people reveal that they used to be ordinary reptiles in the sewers until they drank a mysterious liquid, which Connors thinks is part of a failed experiment he poured down the sink. Connors semi-transforms into the Lizard and fights the lizard-people, giving Mary Jane the opportunity to escape. Spider-Man finds her and sends her back to the street, but she doesn't plan on just siting around and waiting for him to come back.
Mary Jane goes to Connors' wife and lets him know what happens, and in response she watches a video Connors made for her in the event of this happening. The video reveals the existence of a bomb Connors made which will destroy any neogenic life, but hesitant to use it, Mary Jane and Margaret Connors go to Debbie Whitman, who modifies the bomb to instead negate neogenic life. Back in the sewers, Connors transforms fully into the Lizard, and Spider-Man is captured, along with the sole lizard-person who suggests they show mercy. Spider-Man reveals to her that their existence is an accident before the two of them are brought to a colosseum for The Games. Spider-Man easily defeats the gladiators but is trounced in turn when the Lizard jumps into the arena himself. Fortunately, Mary Jane's group shows up with the bomb, which ends up in the hands of the sympathetic lizard-person when they're tripped up by nets. Disgusted with her race and disappointed that they're just an experiment gone wrong, she activates the bomb, which turns all of the lizard-people back into lizards and Connors human. In the aftermath, Mary Jane reaffirms that even after all of that, she still wants to marry Peter.
Miscellaneous Notes:
- When Peter initially asks Mary Jane to marry him, she immediately leaps off the building they're on. I get it; I did the same thing myself when proposed to.
- The reason Mary Jane gives for leaping off the building, after Spider-Man catches her, is "to prove to myself that you'll always be there when it really counts!" I...don't think the logic of that really works out?
- Before Spider-Man is taken into the colosseum, he's chained to the wall, and on trying to break his bonds is told, "It's no use! These chains were stolen from above!" I'm pretty sure that where chains were manufactured shouldn't stop Spider-Man from breaking them.
Review: The Lizard is a concept that works - his origin is one-hundred percent comic book science, but it's a pretty simple concept that doesn't feel stupid unless you want to think about it too hard. The problem is that it only works when the scope is small - one person (or reptile) transforming into a lizard monster is a horror story that shows what science can do when misused. A whole group of people (or reptiles) transforming into lizard-people is a goofy 50s B-movie, and that's exactly what this episode feels like.
If we got a group of semi-transformed people who were horrified by what had happened to them and were seeking out Connors to transform them back, that would be one thing, and it would actually work. But introducing a race of lizard-people with creative names like Monitor (do monitor lizards even live in the New York sewers? ...Do lizards even live in the New York sewers?) who are looking for a ruler, and who have an arena for gladiator fights? It's a bad story for Spider-Man to fit into even on its own, but let's face it, it's a pretty bad story even if it was being written as a standalone narrative.
Really, why does this episode exist? Spider-Man and Mary Jane confirm that they can work together even with her knowing his secret identity, but I can think of hundreds of better plots than this to show that. There's a weird bit where Debbie Whitman's inclusion in the plot has her realise that maybe she's not done with science, and that she should stop partying so much to cope with what happened to Morbius, which would maybe have a bit more impact if we'd seen it before this episode, and if there was any real reason for her to act that way in the first place. This is just a giant mess of an episode, one well-worth skipping.
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