Spider-Man Unlimited Episode Eight: Ill-Met By Moonlight

Ill-Met By Moonlight

First Aired: February 17th, 2001

Synopsis: Spider-Man returns home to find a werewolf attacking Naoko, but when he fights it she tells Spider-Man not to hurt him. Shortly into the fight the sun comes up and the werewolf turns into John Jameson. John reveals that when he first arrived on Counter-Earth, the High Evolutionary experimented on him before he was freed by the human rebels, and that he transforms when there's negative ions in the air. He normally has a chip in him which tricks his body into not transforming at night, but it's been buggy lately. At that point a group of machine men attack, called by a neighbour who saw the fight, but one of them turns out to be a rebuilt X-51, who tricks the others into leaving and then takes John and Spider-Man to a rebel base. Coincidentally, the rebels want Spider-Man to help them on a mission to shut down a power plant that's irradiating the humans' water supply, as his abilities would be best for the job. He agrees to do it, and all of the rebels go to a building where they're attacked by more machine men, who don't fall for X-51's trick this time.

 

As it turns out, this is an intentional plan by Karen and John, so that the High Evolutionary's forces will be distracted and they can infiltrate the actual plant. Spider-Man gets sent off to find the master switch while John and Karen go through the building and fight the security devices they encounter. Spider-Man finds the switch and disables it but is found by one of the guards, an electric eel who is the Counter-Earth version of Electro. While the two of them fight, Karen and John plan to broadcast their demands to the High Evolutionary, who phones in himself and yells at Karen while John collapses in the background. John turns back into his Man-Wolf form thanks to all the negative ions thrown up as a result of the plant being turned off, and becomes a threat to Karen. Meanwhile, Spider-Man's able to deal with Electro by throwing him into a generator, which overloads him, then webs up Man-Wolf and takes him outside into the sun, where he transforms back to normal. He assumes that Karen will hate and distrust him for that form, but she reassures him that it's alright. As thanks to Spider-Man, John gives him a disc with information on where the ship Spider-Man arrived on is, leading to Spider-Man thinking about going home.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• John explains to Spider-Man that to transform X-51, "We glued together some X-O armour, slapped it on-" - a reference to X-O Manowar, perhaps?
• The title of the episode, Ill-Met by Moonlight, is taken from a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream: "Ill-met by moonlight, proud Titania."

Review: I went into this episode expecting it to be mostly about John being Man-Wolf, thanks to both the title and the opening scene, and so while I was initially a bit disappointed by it, I found myself warming up to it as time went on. Spider-Man essentially being tricked by the rebels into going along with the distraction at the first location they go to feels like the sort of thing they'd pull in order to win the war, but at the same time it's not such an egregiously evil move that you feel they've really done anything wrong. It's objectional - they're leaving people behind to risk their lives - but understandable. It's a good moment of grit that really works for me.

The rest of the episode is mostly Spider-Man fighting Electro, but you know what? I'm fine with that, both because this is a really clever interpretation of Electro (between him and Man-Wolf being the result of the High Evolutionary trying to turn John into a bestial, I really like the way classic Spidey villains are done in this episode), and because this episode is really more about the rebels and what they're doing. John and Karen's mission feels like something out of Shadowrun, and that they say they're going to make demands of the High Evolutionary implies that there's more to them shutting down the plant than just wanting to stop the irradiation of the water supply.

Although Spider-Man's not really doing a lot here - I don't even think we see him unmasked as Peter Parker - more of this sort of thing would improve the show greatly. It's got a bit of realism, it's got great reinterpretations of Spider-Man villains, and it feels like it fits the setting a lot better than some of the past episodes have. All this, and Machine Man too! I'm not holding my breath for more episodes like this, but I can hope.