Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Twenty-Eight: Electro

Electro

First Aired: January 21st, 2013

Synopsis: Spider-Man is fighting Electro, while on a billboard in Times Square J. Jonah Jameson brags about the Daily Bugle's new satellite system. Spider-Man tasers Electro with his webs, which causes Electro to disappear for some reason. When Peter's at home he tries telling his teammates what happened, but all of them are preoccupied with various electronics and don't listen. The electricity soon goes out though, and Electro appears on television, now in an energy form. He declares that Spider-Man supercharged him, and demands a ransom or he'll permanently shut down the power in Manhattan. The team head into the city, albeit with difficulty since Spider-Man's Spider-Cycle isn't working and they can't contact SHIELD. They run into civilians who are annoyed at Spider-Man, and while dealing with them run into Batroc the Leaper, who's on a crime spree. Batroc is able to easily defeat them all since they're not communicating well. The team eventually make it into the city, where they find Electro causing multiple vehicles and electronic devices to go crazy.

An offhand comment by Nova inspires Electro to start robbing banks, and when the team try and stop him he makes Spider-Man's web shooters malfunction, webbing the others up. Once they're free Spider-Man points out that they're not communicating, and they work out a plan. Having noticed that Electro is occasionally glitching out, Nova suggests he hook himself into the Daily Bugle satellites, which Electro does. After quickly defeating Batroc when they run into him again, the team then taunt Electro enough to get him to create multiple copies of himself to fight them. As he creates more copies he loses more and more control of himself, until he returns to his human form, completely disoriented and defeated. At home, Peter finds that the others have found a form of entertainment that doesn't involve electricity - they're playing Pictionary, and Nova is drawing a crude picture of Spider-Man on fire. Peter plugs in his phone to charge it, which is somehow enough to cause the power in the house to go out.

 

Sam Alexander is Actually the Worst:

• When the team first arrive in Manhattan, Nova goes and stops a bus that's out of control. That's good! Then the electricity on the not-PSP he was playing earlier in the episode turns on, and he decides to play that rather than focus on the bus. That's bad!
• Nova's aforementioned distraction causes the bus to go out of control again, and Luke has to stop it. Once he has, Nova - pressed into the windscreen the entire time - is the one to say "you're welcome".
• As mentioned in the synopsis, Nova directly mentions that Electro should be robbing Wall Street banks, which the villain takes him up on.
• When Spider-Man tells the team that they should communicate more, Nova says, "Huh? Sorry, I missed it; I was thinking about a video game." He's joking, but the fact that every other member of the team gives him a look of disgust shows how inappropriate the comment is.

Review: I've spent the past five minutes trying to find an eloquent way to open this review and I'm still stuck, so I guess I'll try being blunt instead: this episode is badly written and I hate it. Why does Spider-Man hitting Electro with taser webs give the latter enough power to blackout all of Manhattan? I can buy Electro shutting down the Manhattan grid, but somehow also affecting all vehicles, Spider-Man's web shooters, and battery-powered devices like Nova's not-PSP and Ava's laptop? I mean, the writers do know that most people use electricity frequently and every day, right? It's not some exotic magic where you can fudge the details and we'll shrug and go, "Sure, I think that makes sense."

The thing is, the message which the episode mangles oh-so horribly actually isn't a bad one - in the modern age, face-to-face communication is still important and relevant. But the show doesn't really show that the team's electronics are what's causing the communication issue, instead having them all go off guns blazing whenever Electro (or Batroc) appear for the sake of it. At the end it's not so much improved communication that lets them stop Electro so much as it is that they sit down for five minutes and work out a plan. And while I'm at it, what's with that plan? Did Electro need to be in the Daily Bugle satellites before he could start creating copies of himself? Did the team know that he could do that, given he hadn't shown the power before? Like most things in this episode series, random events just sort of happen, and they eventually lead to the conclusion the episode needs.

I'll give the show credit for the way the team trick Electro into going into the Daily Bugle satellites, and I do like the message the show is going for, as badly as it tells that message. But I keep trying to think of other positives in the episode, and I'm not coming up with any. If it's not inane electronic nonsense, it's the team conveniently being ineffectual, and if it's not that it's Batroc randomly showing up to pad out the episode. Needless to say, this isn't a good one. Stay away if you want some quality twenty-odd minutes.