Spider-Man: The New Animated Series Episode Seven: Head Over Heels

Head Over Heels

 

First Aired: August 1st, 2003

Synopsis: Peter Parker shows up late to class since he's catching a crook, and for the assignment on the relationship between thought and action is partnered with Christina, a slightly off-beat classmate with a crush on Spider-Man. She tries using a homemade device she has to read Peter's mind, but it overloads and afterwards she starts hearing a voice which she thinks is Spider-Man talking to her from her scrapbook. The next day, Peter meets up with Mary Jane, and she says that she and Peter never share their thoughts with each other, so suggests that each day they share a small secret with the other. When Peter tells Harry this, Harry suggests that Peter either get out while he can or tell Mary Jane how he feels about her. Christina, meanwhile, gets visions of Spider-Man telling her to find him, and jumps off a building so that he'll save her. Spider-Man does so, but scolds her for being an idiot. While stopping crimes later, Spider-Man keeps stressing over what he'll share with Mary Jane. In the end, when he meets her she tells him about her coping mechanism for when her parents used to shout at each other, while he claims that he's allergic to grouper.

When Mary Jane rants to Harry about Peter's secret, Harry asks her what's going on with her and Spider-Man. Christina, who is stalking Harry in the hopes of finding Peter to lead her to Spider-Man, overhears this. Shortly afterwards Christina captures Mary Jane and takes her to the top of a skyscraper. Spider-Man shows up, since that apparently triggers his spider-sense, and Christina forces him to have his mind read by her homemade device. She asks who he really is and is amazed at what she reads, but before anything else can happen Mary Jane punches Christina. A shot goes wild and while Spider-Man's dealing with the consequences, Christina heads down an elevator, still with Mary Jane. She sabotages the other elevators and Spider-Man has to deal with them before being able to get to her. He saves Mary Jane and stops the falling elevator Christina's in, but Christina sabotages it and it crashes to the ground. While she's taken away by an ambulance she says that she knows who Spider-Man really is - Meng, the employee at the coffee place on campus. The next day, Mary Jane is ranting about Christina to Peter when she realises that as Christina is to Spider-Man, she is to Peter, and apologises for being so pushy with him.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• One of Peter's classmates is Max Dillon, who will presumably be becoming Electro in three...two...one...
• When Christina jumps off a building, Peter's spider-sense alerts him of it. Okay, it's a stretch, but she lands on a window washer's platform, so I guess his spider-sense could have been warning him that if that landed it could have been dangerous. But when Mary Jane is captured, Peter's spider-sense goes off as he's randomly walking in the street, and when he changes to Spider-Man we see him swinging across a block or two at least. Needless to say, this is not how his spider-sense should be working.
• Peter mentions, when thinking about the things he could share with Mary Jane, that he's taken his driver's license test twice. I've mentioned this before, I'm sure - comics Spider-Man is really not much of a driver; I'm fairly sure he doesn't even have a license.
• When Peter meets with Mary Jane to share secrets, she's reading what appears to be Romeo and Juliet. Because she'd also kill herself if Peter died? Because she wishes she'd married Peter a few days after meeting him? Because her family's feuding with Aunt May? Yeah, it's a metaphor that doesn't really work as well as the writers want it to.
• The person that Christina claims is Spider-Man, Meng, is voiced by Rino Romano, who voiced Spider-Man in Spider-Man Unlimited. So in a meta, across-universes sense, she's not wrong!
  

Review: I'm probably reading too much into this, but I guess that if there was a moral intended to be taken from this episode, it's probably "Be patient in love"? I thought that Peter was worrying far too much over what to say to Mary Jane, but her realisation that she's just like Christina - which is a terrible comparison, but sure - does actually raise a good point that even if she wants her and Peter to be more open, it needs to be a mutual agreement for it to work. It's undermined a bit - a lot - by how inconsistent the show is about how much Peter and Mary Jane mean to each other and what they want (hell, in this episode Peter's flirting with Indy again) but honestly, it's a message I can get behind.

Christina's a bit of a dud antagonist, because of course she's ranting and raving and throwing herself off buildings. The fact that she's obviously been affected by her shitty mind-reading device - something Peter should be able to piece together easily - makes her a victim, but good luck trying to find any sympathy for her here. (Not that it justifies anything that she does, but the point is that Peter should have tried to get her better help sooner rather than shrugging her off - someone delusional enough to throw themselves off a building needs proper help). She's also portrayed as not being nice to be around before she gets altered by her device, even though in reality she's a bit quirky but honestly not that bad.

Still, problems with Christina aside, the climax is quite well-done, with Spider-Man saving all of the elevators. Christina seemingly discovering Spider-Man's identity but then revealing that she's completely wrong is an obvious gag, but it's infinitely preferable to "I learned your identity then forgot it when I was injured, also I guess this means that my mind-reading device works." Overall, I think that the (possibly intended) moral of the episode isn't bad, but most things beyond that vary in quality enough that it ends up averaging out to average quality.