Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Thirty-Four: Carnage

Carnage

First Aired: March 31st, 2013

Synopsis: Spider-Man is swinging through the city when he's attacked by the Green Goblin. They fight for a bit but Spider-Man eventually has to help hold up part of a building which collapses, leading the Goblin to assume he's dead. Before leaving, he mentions that he has a family matter to attend to. Spider-Man's unearthed from rubble by his team, and seeing as how the Goblin mentioned a family matter, he visits Harry Osborn as Peter Parker. The Goblin attacks them, but to Harry and Peter's surprise it turns out it's Peter he's after. Although Spider-Man's team tries to fight the Goblin, the Goblin defeats them and takes Peter to a hidden lab of his. He reveals that as he's smarter and more likely to appreciate power than Harry, he's going to give him power, before injecting him with the Venom symbiote. It turns red and the Green Goblin dubs the new being Carnage, before ordering him to kill Spider-Man and his team, who he has found out survived.

Carnage attacks the team at Harry's penthouse, where the team are, but after defeating them all Harry approaches him. Harry's able to absorb the symbiote and he returns to being Venom, then heads off to stop his dad. Peter goes after him as Spider-Man, and the two of them agree to team up against the Green Goblin. They manage to defeat him but Venom wants to kill him, and Spider-Man has to hold him back, which leads to a three-way fight as the Goblin recovers. Trying a different tactic, Spider-Man's able to change to Peter Parker, and tries talking Harry out of it as himself. He manages to convince Harry, who gets rid of the Venom symbiote and puts it in a beaker, but the Goblin points out that Peter arrived just as Spider-Man left. At that point Spider-Man's team arrives, including Iron Fist wearing Spider-Man's costume, as Peter communicated to him earlier. The Goblin runs off, but not before trying to drop Harry to his death. He's able to get away, but in the aftermath Peter asks Harry if he wants to hang out, since they haven't done so for a while.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• When Spider-Man's fighting the Green Goblin at the start of the episode, he thinks to himself, "Centripetal force, don't fail me down!" It's very easy to mix up centripetal force and centrifugal force; good job, writers!
• This isn't the first time that Peter's become Carnage; he also became Carnage in the very excellent Ultimate Spider-Man video game, not to mention Spider-Carnage from Spider-Man: The Animated Series.
• In the comics, Iron Fist imitated Daredevil while the latter was in prison to help protect his secret identity. It's possible that this was the inspiration for him wearing Spider-Man's costume here.
  

Review: While I think that this is a much better episode than Rise of the Goblin was, it still suffers from a fair share of issues. Primarily, this is yet another episode where the majority of the episode is a lot of boring fighting. Spider-Man fights the Green Goblin at the start of the episode for ages, his team fight him when he's after Peter, Carnage fights his team for ages, and then when Venom and Spider-Man team up to fight the Goblin it just keeps dragging on and on. Speaking of Venom and Spider-Man teaming up, remember at the end of Rise of the Goblin when Harry declared that he hated Spider-Man? Yeah, the writers don't, either.

As I said, it's not all bad here. Iron Fist putting on Spider-Man's costume leads to some great lines as he tries and fails to imitate Spider-Man's usual jokes. Peter convincing Harry not to kill his father, and Harry admitting that in spite of everything that's happened, he still loves his dad is executed well enough (even if it shows Harry's horrible, horrible judgement). Even the twist that the Green Goblin is after Peter isn't a bad one, although it's spoiled a bit by how convinced the team are that he's after Harry.

Annoyingly, in spite of the title of this episode being Carnage, the titular character barely appears - and when he does, he's a screaming monster, which takes away from what he can actually do a bit. I'm also not impressed by the episode showing that Harry and Peter have grown a bit distant - it would have more impact if this wasn't literally the first episode all season where we'd gotten to see Harry. Add it all up, and you get an episode that does a passing job all-around, but still isn't anywhere near the high-stakes, high-drama that it seems to be striving for.