Spider-Man: The Animated Series Episode Sixty-One: Secret Wars, Chapter 1: Arrival

 Arrival

First Aired: November 7th, 1997

Synopsis: Spider-Man floats through a vortex of floating colours before arriving on a planet, where a pair of eyes floating in the sky express disappointment in him. Madam Web convinces the eyes to give Spider-Man a shot, and the eyes turn into a being calling himself the Beyonder. The Beyonder wants to learn about good and evil, and as an experiment, transports Doctor Octopus, Doctor Doom, Alistair Smythe, the Lizard, and Red Skull to a peaceful planet that has no concept of evil, and then accelerates time by a year, by which point the world has been ravaged. Spider-Man gets transported to the planet and is told to stop the villains, but gets his choice of heroes to assist him. Spider-Man gets the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Captain America, and Storm transported to the planet. While he's trying to allay their suspicions, the Lizard bursts out of a room he was being held in and attacks Spider-Man, but is defeated by the heroes.

The heroes are still suspicious of Spider-Man, and while they're confronting him the Lizard comes to and escapes the laboratory they're in. The heroes chase after him but are attacked by giant worms, and when they're unable to defeat them they return to the laboratory with the Lizard. They work out that the building was the last fortress of the scientists of the planet, and that they abandoned it when it ran out of power. Storm summons some lightning to reenergise the lab, which lets them put up a force field to stop the worms from attacking. Examining the Lizard's, Mr. Fantastic is able to reawaken Professor Connors' brain in the Lizard's body, and afterwards, all of the heroes agree to work together. The Beyonder, viewing them all, says that while this is hopeful, soon Spider-Man will have to face his greatest foe. Spider-Man, for his part, has found a recorder, and plans on keeping notes so that the conflict isn't a secret war.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• In the comics, Madam Web is not the Beyonder's assistant, which explains why when she takes off her glasses at the start of the episode and tells Spider-Man to look into her eyes (for...some reason), she's not blind. I was wondering why, then, she chose the form of an ancient cripple on Earth, but I'm going to fanwank that she chose an old lady form to subconsciously remind Peter of Aunt May, and alongside the spider theme, she was hoping that it would make Spider-Man trust her more. 
• In the comics, the Beyonder ended up settling on the form of a caucasian male with black curly hair, often wearing white clothing. Here, he goes for a ridiculous look which makes him look like a shitty sorcerer in a low-budget cartoon.
• When Doctor Doom is summoned, it's mentioned that here, he's despised by his people. In the comics it flips back and forth a bit depending upon the writer, but I think it generally ends up being that he's loved by them more than hated.
• The Beyonder comments that as a villain, Curt Connors' brain is "poisoned by radioactivity", which isn't how the Lizard works at all.
• In-universe, Spider-Man only summons Storm because he's only allowed one more person to bring, and he figures that her power to control the weather might be able to challenge the Beyonder, which is pretty good logic. The out-of-universe reason is that the show couldn't afford to fly down all of the X-Men voice actors to Los Angeles for recordings, but Storm's voice actress - Iona Morris - was already LA-based.
• Iron Man is voiced by Robert Hays, the same voice actor from the 90s Iron Man cartoon. The only returning voice actor for the Fantastic Four is Quinton Flynn, who voices the Human Torch (a kind of weird moment for me; I strongly associate him with Raiden from Metal Gear).
  

Review: I pretty much agree with the general consensus of the Secret Wars comics - first series is enjoyable even if it is just a big advertisement for some toys, second series is Jim Shooter being weird, and to be honest I haven't read Hickman's Secret Wars. (I read some of the tie-ins though; Siege was quite good, as you'd expect of something Kieron Gillen wrote). And credit where it's due, this episode does manage to get something right from the comics - bringing in superheroes that we recognise, when I was expecting street-level allies of Spider-Man's, like Black Cat and Morbius. So that's a pretty good thing here.

The rest of the episode though...holy crap, where do I begin with how bad this is? The start, with Spider-Man spinning through dimensions and meeting the Beyonder, honestly feels like something out of the 1967 cartoon, and not in a good way. The Beyonder was always a bit of a ninny in the comics, but here he manages to make the comic version look sensible - summoning the villains to destroy a peaceful planet basically makes him responsible for genocide, and saying "it's an experiment" really, really doesn't justify it. Side note, why is the planet destroyed? Doom would take it over so that he can use its resources to get home, Ock and Smythe would side with Doom and inevitably get used then cast aside, Red Skull would antagonise everyone and get shut down by Doom, and the Lizard would run off into the swamps and not disturb anyone. But the story wants a destroyed planet, so I guess they all treated the planet like it was GTA, or something.

I've mentioned before that I'm not a big fan of Spider-Man in cosmic-level stories, and when there's stuff like this on display, can you blame me? In what world is Spider-Man a good character to be the protagonist of this story? Compare it to any previous episode we've had in this series so far - sure, there was some crazy science going on at times, but it still felt grounded, and we still got moments with Peter Parker having to balance his superhero life and his civilian life. There's nothing like that here, and I doubt we're going to get it. Man, I really hope this is the only bad episode of this arc, but I'm not optimistic about it.