Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Twenty-Seven: The Lizard

The Lizard

First Aired: January 21st, 2013

Synopsis: Spider-Man and his team are in a warehouse, investigating an abandoned warehouse of Doctor Octopus'. Doctor Octopus turns out to be there but SHIELD arrive and drive him off, before claiming some animal DNA compounds that Ock made. The team then return home to Aunt May's since she's just getting home, but Spider-Man soon finds the house too cramped and returns to the warehouse to do science with Doctor Connors. Connors helps Spider-Man improve his web fluid, creating flash webs, and then starts getting interested in the DNA compounds, thinking that they might help him get his missing arm back. Spider-Man talks him out of it, but shortly afterwards accidentally activates a security measure of Octopus' and is trapped under debris. To save him, Connors injects himself with a lizard DNA serum, growing a muscular and reptilian new arm. As he and Spider-Man fight off robots, Connors convinces himself that he needs more of the serum, which turns him fully reptilian - into the Lizard.

 

Confident that Doctor Octopus can fix the flaws in the serum, the Lizard leaves the warehouse, followed by Spider-Man after he calls his teammates for backup. The Lizard is able to track Doc Ock's scent to the sewers, and Spider-Man finds him trying to talk to the villain, even as his intellect keeps dropping. Spider-Man tries fighting the two of them, but as the Lizard gets more and more monstrous, Doctor Octopus suggests that they team up. They briefly lock the Lizard in a vault but he breaks out and Doctor Octopus soon abandons Spider-Man to save himself. Spider-Man's able to get out of the sewers and lets the Lizard chase him back to Ock's warehouse, where Spidey's team arrive. While they distract him, Spider-Man analyses some of the original serum and is able to create a cure, which returns the Lizard to being Doctor Connors when it's splashed on him. Unbeknownst to the team, Connors' eyes still briefly stay reptilian. In the aftermath, as Connors is taken away by SHIELD, Spider-Man returns home with his team and thinks about how he appreciates all of them.

Sam Alexander is Actually the Worst:

• While investigating Octopus' warehouse, Spider-Man tells Nova to "light us up, now!" In response to this reasonable request, Nova replies that "You don't have to yell in my earpiece, bug breath! Sheesh!"
• When Spider-Man calls in his team to ask them for backup, Nova is condescending and dismissive towards Spider-Man when he hears that Spider-Man's about to go into the sewers.
• At the end, after Connors transforms back he can't recall what happened. Nova is more than happy to tell him that he turned into a terrifying monster, and the only thing that stops him is a quick web from Spider-Man.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• For some reason, Connors' hair has gone from a light brown in the first season to more of a sandy colour here. Bizarrely, when we see a few flashback shots - which aren't recycled footage, as far as I can tell - his hair is back to being light brown.
• We get a montage of Spider-Man showing us what his teammates living with him is like, and as it turns out, Luke gives himself an extensive face routine every day. I'm so down with this.
• This episode gives us the best joke the show's done so far - when Connors (with his mutated arm) and Spider-Man are fighting robots, we get a brief riff on the opening to Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends with Spider-Man and the mutated Connors, in the same animation style as the other show. Even better, when Ock later suggests that he and Spider-Man should team up to stop the Lizard, we get the same gag again but this time with Ock in Connors' place.
• Can we talk about this show's design of the Lizard? Because man is it uggers. He's got this incredibly elongated face, more like a crocodile than anything, and he's wearing tiny jorts which make him look like some sort of teenage reptile monster rather than the terrifying monster he's supposed to be.
• At the end of the episode, Coulson tells Spider-Man that "Doctor Connors is lucky you found him," which implies that SHIELD aren't privy to everything that happened. I guess we'll see what happens with Connors next time he appears.

Review: I'm pleased to say that after last episode made the rather creative choice to tell a story with barely any logic behind its events, this episode has decided to stick with the more traditional idea of having your stories make sense, and it works much better for it. Sure, there's still flaws here, but we've also got some good small moments. Even though Peter finds his house cramped, there's no sign that he resents his teammates for having to live with him, already a strong improvement over his usual relationship with them from the first season. Doctor Octopus having animal DNA compounds is a good setup for future villains (besides the lizard compound, we also see some with a scorpion, a rhino, and a vulture on the labels), and there were those two brilliant gags that riffed on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.

Probably the biggest problem I have with the episode is the ending. Putting aside that Spider-Man puts together a cure for the Lizard serum in about ten seconds, the very end of the episode has Spider-Man return home and think about how much he appreciates his teammates. It's a weird ending - it's like it's trying for a moral along the lines of "you should get along with your family/housemates" or "it's better to be together than apart" but...neither of those things were shown to be a really major issue in the episode. Yeah, Peter left the house so he could get a bit of space and do science things with Connors, but it wasn't an irrational move, nor one he did out of spite. It didn't directly lead to Connors becoming the Lizard, or have any major consequences, so it's a weird message that's just kind of there.

Other than that, the rest of the episode is pretty forgettable. The episode tries to spice up its bland fights by giving Spider-Man issues with fighting Connors - a classic Spidey conflict - but it awkwardly has to insert a sequence earlier in the episode to tell us that, "No, really, I was totally respecting Connors all the time offscreen in the past; we're great friends." Connors finding justifications for why he should be taking the serum is a good character bit and flaw, and something that helps it is that he isn't the creator of the serum here - rather than doing some dangerous science from the start, he's trying to convince himself that someone else's dangerous science is harmless. I wouldn't call this my favourite incarnation of the Lizard, but it does just enough right and the rest of the plot is inoffensive enough that this episode averages out to boring, but alright.