Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Seventeen: Snow Day

Snow Day

First Aired: August 5th, 2012

Synopsis: Spider-Man is woken by an alert from Nova requesting his help, but when he leaves home he's hit in the face by a series of snowballs thrown by his team. It turns out that they don't have school that day due to the snow, but Coulson wants them to take advantage of the free time to do some winter survival training. Instead, the team decide to go to a deserted island that Nova found in SHIELD's database. The team spend some time making sandcastles, playing sport, and ignoring Spider-Man's spider-sense, but when they're playing volleyball, the ball ends up knocked away. Shortly after Spider-Man retrieves it a small child, Sandy, appears, and challenges the team to a game of hide and seek. Although the team are disturbed by him they agree they can't leave him alone, and start looking for him, noting that he seems to be everywhere. They soon run into a teenager, Flint, who says that Sandy's probably in the ruins. Although the team don't recall seeing any ruins, they suddenly form out of sand. The team are creeped out enough by now that they're ready to leave, but Sandy reappears. He crumbles into sand, and the team's plane is absorbed by sand and taken to the top of the ruins.

The sand keeps forming into shapes and attacking the team, culminating in a large maze being created. Luke and Spider-Man see some hieroglyphs in the maze that give Sandman's origin and reveal that Nick Fury dumped him to be alone on the island; it's his prison. The team fight their way through to their plane and manage to fly it off the island with Nova's help, but on arriving at New York Fury contacts them and tells them that they can't land - if Sandman got onto the plane, letting him touch the ground will result in him becoming too powerful to stop. Naturally, he is on the plane, so the team have to land it on the frozen Hudson. Sandman starts making his way towards the city, and nothing that the team can do is able to stop him. Spider-Man then has the idea for Nova to blast him but with heat only, which succeeds in turning Sandman to glass. Later, Fury has Sandman kept in containment which keeps him moving constantly, preventing him from forming into any shapes and escaping, and although Spider-Man points out that leaving Sandman alone on the island was a horrible thing to do, Fury tells him that he knows what he's doing.

Sam Alexander is Actually the Worst:

• In case you missed it, Sam told the team to ditch training so that they could instead go hang out at the beach. (I didn't have the space to fit it in the episode, but he thought it said "Classy" when it actually said "Classified", because Sam Alexander is a fucking moron). I mean, I get not wanting to do training, and it's definitely on the team a bit for going along with it, but jesus fucking christ this character.
• When Sandy first runs off to play hide and seek, Ava points out that "We can't leave a helpless little boy alone in the jungle," to which Sam lets out a lengthy protest, ending with "Why do we have to be the heroes?" Seriously, now, does anyone find this guy likable in any way?

Miscellaneous Notes:

• It's understated a bit, but when Spider-Man and Luke discover Sandman's origin, Luke lets out a "Sweet Christmas!", his classic and nonsensical exclamation from the comics.

Review: Look, I get what they're going for with this episode. Giving Sandman an entire island to play around with does make him more of a threat, and means it's more of a challenge to defeat him. The idea of it being a prison is a cool idea on top of that, honestly. But...this isn't my Sandman. My Sandman robs banks, and doesn't really make the most of his powers, and sometimes wears a kinda meh Jack Kirby costume then goes and fights the Fantastic Four. It's the same problem as we had back in Growing Steps - escalating Sandman's threat level makes him feel like he's in the wrong genre for Spider-Man to be fighting him.

But lets put that whole issue aside and look at the rest of the episode. That just leaves us with the issues of everyone agreeing with Nova's idea to ditch training, Nova not knowing how to read, Spider-Man ignoring his spider-sense, Sandman conveniently creating some hieroglyphs to exposit his origin to the heroes, Nick Fury telling everyone to shut up and mindlessly obey him, and some very bad fights. Oh dear. In case you can't tell, this episode is more than a little shit.

The pros are, um...there's an alright joke about how Fury must secretly use the island for parties (see the image above), and the hieroglyphs showing Fury with an afro and Coulson with a ponytail is pretty funny. There's also, um...a lot of fighting, so that makes it a bit easier to write up a synopsis? And the episode only goes for twenty-something minutes, so I didn't have to sit through it for very long? Yeah...better skip this one.