Swarm
First Aired: June 9th, 2013
Synopsis: Spider-Man is fighting Juggernaut when Iron Man shows up to help. Spider-Man is confident that his spider-tracer can keep track of Juggernaut and helps Iron Man stop a building from collapsing, but when trying to use his spider-tracer finds that it's faulty. Iron Man gives him a piece of advice - technology is less important than the mind using it. Spider-Man later heads to Stark Industries to try and apologise, and finds some machines going crazy. The culprit turns out to be a man named Michael Tan, who has developed technology to control machines as though they're extensions of his body. Iron Man isn't impressed by the danger he's put people in and fires Michael on the spot, but Michael cranks the controls on his device up in protest, which somehow causes him to disappear. Iron Man heads to his lab and starts looking into reconstituting him, and while he's doing that, Spider-Man decides that he should upgrade his spider-tracer using Tony's technology. He briefly notices some strange energy going into it, but decides it's nothing important.
Spider-Man finds Juggernaut somehow and puts a spider-tracer on him, which bafflingly multiplies into copies of itself, distracting Juggernaut enough for the villain to be stopped. Spidey heads to Stark Industries to talk to Tony about it, but finds Iron Man being attacked by another group of the spider-tracers. After Spider-Man saves him he finds that Iron Man's armour is badly damaged, and as his spare armours have also been weakened by the tracers, Tony has to change into a mishmash of different armour parts. Tony works out that Michael is controlling the tracers, based on them ranting about how he's the future, and Spider-Man declares him to be Swarm. As they continuously fight Swarm and fail to gain any ground, Spider-Man realises that while Michael's controlling the tracers, he also has controls for them. Using Tony's arc reactor to help boost the signal, Spider-Man remotely downgrades all of the tracers, making them harmless. In the aftermath Tony starts collecting the tracers so that he can put Michael together again, and reiterate his message to Spider-Man about the technology being less important than who's using it.
Review: I've mentioned before that while Swarm is seen as a bit of a joke villain ("Nazi bees!"), I think he's got potential. Bees are painful, and it's not like you can just punch them away like most supervillains. So, how do I feel when you replace the bees with tiny robots? It's an interesting interpretation, but I can't help but feel like we're swapping out some of the flaws of the original concept for flaws in a new concept.
The biggest one, to start off with - how do the spider-tracers replicate themselves? I doubt that's an ability Spider-Man initially put into them, and I don't see how either Michael's presence or Tony's technology would allow for that functionality; like many things in this show, it's something that just happens because the plot wants it to. The episode is also happy to show the tracers sticking to Iron Man, being a nuisance, but there's no real explanation for how he gets them off himself (which happens twice) - the first time Spider-Man just throws him into some things, the second time he flies himself through some walls, and that just magically makes them disappear.
Still, in spite of these flaws, and how much time of the episode is spent on fighting the ugly blob that is Swarm, there's some things to like here. Spider-Man taking out Swarm by downgrading the tracers makes sense (if I don't think about it too hard), and Tony's advice that Spider-Man should focus less on what his technology can do and more on what he can do is actually pretty applicable to real life. The episode isn't outstanding by any means, but it's got more good in it than the last few episodes combined.
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