Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Sixty-Eight: Ant-Man

Ant-Man

First Aired: July 21st, 2015

Synopsis: Ant-Man is teaching the students of SHIELD Academy when an alarm sounds. The cause of it is that Doctor Octopus is freed, and fighting alongside him is Nick Fury. While some heroes go after Octopus, the others stop Fury and discover that it's really him. The reason he was helping Ock is because a tiny octobot is embedded in his brain and controlled him. It's integrated into him too much for it to be removed via surgery, so Ant-Man, Spider-Man, and Luke Cage shrink down into a spider-themed vehicle so that they can enter Fury's body and destroy it - but they only have thirty minutes before the Pym Particles wear off and they grow to normal size. After escaping from some white blood cells which see them as a threat they have to change their route to go via the heart, but with Fury's heart rate of sixty beats per minute they'll have a second to get through it before it contracts and crushes them. On the way there octobots attack the vehicle and destroy the team's communication with the outside, but when Ant-Man tries to stop them he's carried off by them.

Iron Fist uses his chi to slow down Fury's heartrate and make it easier for the team to get through Fury's heart and reach the brain. They discover the octobot controlling Fury's brain but more octobots appear. Luke exits the vehicle to fight them while Spider-Man's able to communicate with Fury, who reveals that Ock also set him up to set the Triskelion's reactor to explode. Spider-Man manages to take control of Fury's motor functions so that he can stop the reactor, but Iron Fist and Amadeus Cho are suspicious of what's happening and try to stop him. They eventually recognise some of Spider-Man's movements and Fury's able to stop the reactor, but it turns out that Ock set up some of his octobots to explode and kill Fury. Worse, the Pym Particles are about to wear off. Luke and a returning Ant-Man go back to the vehicle and Spider-Man's able to send all of the dangerous octobots into an ulcer that Fury has, which kills them. With seconds remaining until the Pym Particles wear off, Spider-Man aggravates the ulcer, inciting Fury to burp them out. In the aftermath Doctor Octopus is recaptured and Fury declared healthy.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Courtesy of Amadeus Cho, Luke gets a new outfit this episode, although to be honest it doesn't look that different to me. Still, given that Nova, White Tiger, and Iron Fist have all gotten new costumes too it's nice that he wasn't forgotten.
• Towards the end of the episode we see a countdown with how long the heroes have until the Pym Particles wear off, and it shows that they have twenty-four seconds to go. By my count, when we next see it, forty-one seconds have passed yet it's only down to seven seconds.
• The episode doesn't mention who Ant-Man is when he's out of the costume, but given that from what we can see of his hair it doesn't appear to be blonde, it's safe to say that this is probably intended to be Scott Lang.
  

Review: This episode's got a few good moments in it, so I might as well start off things by listing them here. Spider-Man controlling Fury's body and Fury getting exasperated at how embarrassing Spider-Man's making him look is a decent gag, and Iron Fist using his chi to slow down Fury's heartbeat is a clever use of the character; that's the sort of thing I could see the comics pulling out. The ulcer is set up early in the episode and is a fairly clever way to get the team out of Fury's body quickly, and the story keeps things moving at a fairly fast pace, never letting the characters get too comfortable.

Still, while all of that is nice, and the episode isn't egregiously terrible, there's a few issues I have with it. For a start, how did Ock create this magical brain-controlling octobot, and how did he get it into Fury? He also somehow planned far ahead enough to put communication functionality into it so that he can taunt Spider-Man and company, which doesn't really seem necessary to me. There's also a bit where Spider-Man notes that other than octobots, Ock has also put in lizard-bots, scorpion-bots, beetle-bots, and "even goblin-bots!" - as if these tiny robots are miniatures of the villains they're modelled after, and not, you know, robots in arbitrary shapes.

In spite of the episode's title, Ant-Man's more a means to an end than a star here, which is a pity because I quite like Ant-Man (both Pym and Lang). Aside from shrinking down the heroes, he's mostly there to fight robots - as is Luke, for that matter - which never really gets that interesting. Given the timing of when this episode came out, it was probably mean to help promote the Ant-Man film, but I can't say that it does that very well - this Ant-Man is fairly bland and boring. Why not send him and Spidey off to fight one of his villains, instead of this Fantastic Voyage homage? It doesn't really feel like there's anything here we haven't seen before, and I don't think we got anything of significance from this episode.