Spider-Man Unlimited Episode Eleven: One is the Loneliest Number

One is the Loneliest Number

First Aired: March 17th, 2001

Synopsis: Spider-Man goes after Venom when he spots him on his own, but Venom attacks him and gets away while Spider-Man is buried under a pile of rubble. When Spider-Man breaks free and catches up to Venom, he finds the symbiote separated from Eddie Brock and thinks about his own experiences with the symbiote and Venom's origin. Although Eddie's delusional and wants to fight Spider-Man, Spidey nevertheless takes Eddie to Naoko's clinic to get help. She examines him and reveals that if he doesn't get  reattached to the symbiote he'll die. Spider-Man agrees to go and find it when Eddie threatens to reveal his identity, even though he would have done so regardless. He runs into Carnage who's on a rampage looking for Venom, and Carnage ends up holding hostages to get Spider-Man to talk, while dangling the latter in front of an upcoming train. Spider-Man gets Carnage to free the hostages then tricks Carnage into getting hit by the car. He then goes to the alley where he found Eddie Brock, where he finds a tiny piece of the symbiote which wants to bond with him.

Spider-Man reluctantly allows the symbiote to touch him, and it shares memories of Venom being attacked with him. Spider-Man recognises the name of the scientist behind the attack and goes to him, finding him communicating with the High Evolutionary. The High Evolutionary wants a way to destroy symbiotes easily, as he's only temporarily working with them. Spider-Man grabs the container containing the symbiote and heads out, but since it's dying he reluctantly bonds with it. Spider-Man returns to Naoko's but finds Carnage there, as the symbiote somehow communicated with him and told him where Eddie was. Eddie no longer wants the symbiote, as he's bonded with Naoko and Shane and remembers what actual human contact is like, but when Carnage threatens them he takes up the symbiote again to save them. Carnage and Venom fight before machine men try attacking them when the fight goes outside, and after they're dealt with they team up to attack Spider-Man, somehow fusing into a hybrid. Spider-Man overloads a leftover machine man's gun to separate the two, and they disappear. In the aftermath, the scientist who took the symbiote is taken away by Sir Ram for failure, and the High Evolutionary says that he'll deal with Spider-Man.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Some people think that this series is set in the same continuity as and takes place after Spider-Man: The Animated Series, but this episode is the biggest sign that it's not intended to be - when Spidey's thinking back on the history of the symbiote, Carnage is created without any interference from Baron Mordo.
• As mentioned above, Carnage and Venom briefly fuse into a single being, and we also see signs that Venom's symbiote can somehow communicate with Venom telepathically; neither of these are things that the symbiotes can do in the comics.

Review: I'm a believer that symbiotes are fine in most stories, and it's more the quality of the story that determines whether they'll be any good or not. I definitely cringe a bit when I think about how much I liked Venom in my early teens, but the concept is solid and he really does have a great design. (Early Venom stories written by David Michelinie are really solid, too; they're well worth reading if you can get your hands on them. Actually, Michelinie's whole Spider-Man run is pretty good and pretty underrated.) I say all of the above, because, honestly, I think that the symbiotes have done more harm than good in this series so far - I don't care about the synoptic or the various changes to their powers.

So how do they hold up then when they get an entire episode focusing on them as the main antagonists, rather than being side antagonists or only appearing to set up subplots? Eh, it's fine, I guess. Eddie Brock deciding that he doesn't want to be Venom any more is an interesting concept - especially given that he knows that he's going to die if he doesn't - but the show unfortunately doesn't go too much into it, nor into the consequences of Spider-Man having to wear the symbiote again. For the most part this is just a straightforward story where Carnage is being a dick. 

Overall I can't say that this is a bad episode, but it really ends up being mediocre more than anything. Carnage feels crazy, sure, but not in that unhinged, psychotic Carnage way; more in a generic-shouty-supervillain way. The reveal that the High Evolutionary wants to be able to destroy symbiotes, too - it feels less like an interesting direction and more like something that I'd already assumed was the case. This episode doesn't sink to the lows of some of the worse things I've seen in this series, but it doesn't really do anything worth mentioning, either.