Spider-Man Unlimited Episode Twelve: Sins of the Father

 Sins of the Father

First Aired: March 24th, 2001

Synopsis: Peter's taking photos when he spots Karen of the rebel underground laying flowers at some graves. She gets attacked by machine men and although Peter tries to save her while in his civilian identity, he fails and she gets taken away, which he blames himself for. As Spider-Man he updates John Jameson on the situation. In Castle Wundagore, the High Evolutionary spots a mark on her arm and decides that she should be taken to a private room rather than an interrogation room, much to Sir Ram's frustration. Lady Vermin goes in to question Karen, but Karen breaks free of her bonds and tries to escape, only to find that there's a force field keyed to her DNA which stops her from leaving. Meanwhile, Spider-Man and X-51 sneak into the machine men's central processing unit, where all data goes through, and use what limited time they have to work out where she was taken. They end up having to break out and narrowly escape from machine men. When the High Evolutionary is told of the break-in, he's dismissive and says that he anticipated something like this and so he put a little surprise in.

Spider-Man and X-51 return to the rebels, but as Bromley's decrypting the data the High Evolutionary's surprise kicks in - there's a homing program in the download which lets machine men work out where the rebel's base is. The rebels have to flee completely, although they now know where Karen is. At Castle Wundagore, Karen is questioned by the High Evolutionary as to why she's so skilled, but she's dismissive of him even as he implies there's more to her than meets the eye. He then tells the Knights of Wundagore to prepare her for a bestial transformation, although they object. Outside, the rebels start assaulting Castle Wundagore, leaving Spider-Man to break in to free Karen. He finds her and is able to get her out of her cell since his DNA confuses the force field, but the High Evolutionary shows up. He beats up Spider-Man, but flashes back to some people calling him disgusting for experimenting on his granddaughter, and he tells Karen that he'll let her go for now. Spider-Man and Karen leave, and Karen later looks at a photo of herself as a child with the people from the High Evolutionary's flashback.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• The Knights of Wundagore object to the High Evolutionary wanting to transform Karen into a bestial, even though he tried to do the same to John Jameson as shown during Ill-Met by Moonlight. You can no-prize it by saying that the Knights weren't there last time and they would have objected to that, too, but from what John said it didn't sound like it was a particularly strange occurrence for the High Evolutionary to try and change him.

Review: This episode reminds me of the second season of Jessica Jones, in that it has one decent twist, but once you get past it, that's kind of the one trick it has and there's nothing else really worth talking about. Of course, the difference is that Jessica Jones had the decency to a) not beat us over the head with hints about the twist before it was revealed and b) it then dealt with the consequences of that twist and showed how they affected the main character. (Which I found ended up in a cycle, but I digress; this isn't a Jessica Jones blog). 

So as it is, we get the High Evolutionary repeatedly flashing back to these mysterious people and thinking about experiments, all the while asking questions of Karen like "Did you ever wonder where you got your skills from?" or telling her that he knows her DNA very well; even if it's not obvious that he's her grandfather he obviously has something to do with her, and it's vague enough that there's nothing we can really work with. The High Evolutionary experimented on Karen and presumably used those experiments to create bestials or wanted to make her one, so what? It's a twist that is there because they wanted a twist; knowing it doesn't change anything about the characters or push the show in a new direction.

None of this would matter if the rest of the episode were any good, but it's really, really forgettable. Spider-Man and X-51 break into a machine men base, they run away, Spider-Man infiltrates Castle Wundagore; blah blah blah. There's nothing exciting here; even the loss of the rebels' base is mitigated when you remember that in an early episode they said they have to frequently move thanks to the tracking chips that have only been mentioned once or twice since then. If the show had more episodes than the next then it's possible that all of the stuff set up here with Karen could have led somewhere really brilliant, and this would hold up well - but it didn't and it doesn't, so I have to judge this episode by its own merits. It's just not that exciting.