Spectacular Spider-Man Episode Seventeen: Shear Strength

Shear Strength

First Aired: July 6th, 2009

Synopsis: The Master Planner is revealed to be Doctor Octopus, who only pretended to have mental issues to throw suspicion away from himself. Peter meets with Norman Osborn who's setting up an old building to be destroyed, but the countdown starts early and nothing can be done to stop it. Changing to Spider-Man, Peter's able to save everyone, not knowing that the countdown starting early is due to Octopus controlling it remotely. Later, Peter's getting coffee with Gwen and Mary Jane, and although Peter keeps paying attention to Liz, Mary Jane is trying to get him and Gwen together. The electronics in the coffee shop, then across the city, start going crazy, and in the confusion Gwen is grabbed by Vulture and Electro. Peter changes to Spider-Man and goes after Electro and Tinkerer, who are getting away in a van, and manages to intimidate Tinkerer into giving up the location of the Master Planner's lair; in the river. At said lair, Doctor Octopus uses Gwen's phone to call George Stacy, and forces him to get security codes from the homeland security base in New York if he doesn't want Gwen to be killed.

Spider-Man swims into the river and gets into the lair, but is attacked by Electro once inside. At the same time, George Stacy manages to insert a USB into a computer at homeland security, and Doc Ock uses it to upgrade George's security, so he can reach the codes. While Spider-Man fights Electro, Ock tells Electro to back off when the base starts getting damaged, and so Spider-Man taunts Electro and gets him to damage the base further, which soon starts flooding. Spider-Man manages to take out Electro. Meanwhile, George can get the codes Ock wants, but refuses to do so until he hears that Gwen is okay. When Ock goes to retrieve Gwen, Spider-Man fights him, and in the process a server is damaged. Ock's mind is overloaded by all of the electronics he's connected to, since the server was doing most of the heavy work, and he leaves the base, recognising his plan as having failed. Before he does so, he sets the base to self-destruct. Spider-Man gets trapped under some debris which falls from the ceiling but seeing Gwen gives him the strength to get it off him. They manage to get out, with the unconscious Electro, using an escape pod. At midnight that night - New Years' - Peter tries calling up Gwen but George doesn't want her to talk to him since she's been through a lot, in spite of her protests. Unexpectedly, Liz shows up at Peter's door and kisses Peter, saying that it's all over between her and Flash, right as Gwen gets on the phone to talk to Peter.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• The worker who sets the detonation of the building near the start of the episode is named Morris Bench, better known to comics readers as Hydro-Man.
• As mentioned in the synopsis, Doctor Octopus manages to take control of most of the electronics in New York. Just a few months later in real life, he did the same thing in the comics in Amazing Spider-Man #600. From the timing, it's hard to tell whether the writer of said comic - Dan Slott - was inspired by this episode or whether it's just a coincidence.
  
• The original comics story which dealt with the Master Planner - Amazing Spider-Man #31-33 - also had the villain's lair be underneath the river, and had Spider-Man trapped under a big pile of debris before he gathered his strength to get out from underneath it. It's a good moment in the episode, and the show is right to homage the scene, but I've yet to see any homages which equal the strength of the original.

Review: The climax of the Master Planner arc is here, and while there's a lot of good stuff here, there's also a few nitpicks I've got with it - but let's focus on the good first. Doctor Octopus controlling all of the electronics in New York is a great visual and a great moment, since it's just expanding on what he's already doing with his tentacles. The idea that he can't actually handle all of the input and needs a computer to do most of it is entirely logical, and it's a good weakness. I also liked that the episode sets it up to make it look like he's going after Peter, before it turns out that he's actually going after Gwen for her connection to George - again, all makes logical sense.

As mentioned though, there are some nitpicks with the episode. After last episode went out of its way to mention that Mysterio was the only one of the Sinister Six who was captured, why are Vulture and Electro the only ones seen in this episode? How did Ock communicate with his group - especially with the voice and image distorter - from within the asylum he was previously in? It's less of an issue, but it also occurred to me that while it's mentioned that the security codes George is retrieving could give Ock access to all of the government computers in the US, if not the world...why does Ock want them? It's vague enough that you can think of a reason, but it would be nice to know what the end goal is.

Still, while I think that I did enjoy the previous episode a bit more, the episode does feel like an appropriate enough climax and manages to pull off pretty much everything it sets out to do. Liz declaring that she wants to be with Peter right as he's trying to talk to Gwen is the perfect amount of dramatic irony, and while it does make Peter look like a bit of a ninny for not saying, "Thanks, Liz, but I'd actually rather sort out what's happening with me and Gwen," you can understand why he doesn't. Overall, it's not the best episode, but by no means does that make it bad.