Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Sixty: New Warriors

New Warriors

First Aired: October 14th, 2014

Synopsis: Spider-Man introduces his team to the New Warriors - Agent Venom, Iron Spider, Ka-Zar and Zabu. They start a training session but are interrupted by Taskmaster teleporting in with his own team, consisting of Cloak, Dagger, and Vulture. Cloak teleports away Spider-Man's original team before Spider-Man and the New Warriors are locked in the room by Taskmaster. They escape via a passageway and then head to where prisoners are incarcerated, realising that Taskmaster's there to free people, but they screw up and accidentally free Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Beetle, and Scorpion. The Goblin teleports away with Taskmaster's team after breaking Amadeus' Iron Spider outfit, and after a brief fight with the remaining villains Spidey and his team make a tactical retreat. Doctor Octopus, Beetle, and Scorpion start to escape the helicarrier using a jet, but Vulture, wanting revenge on Ock, manages to damage it badly enough that it returns to the helicarrier. 

Spider-Man and his team head to the deck of the helicarrier where they fight Taskmaster's team, but during the fight a stray shot from one of the Goblin's gauntlets knocks Cloak below one of the turbines. Spider-Man goes in and saves him, and although they end up falling out, Cloak comes to in time to teleport Spidey and him back to the helicarrier. Cloak and Dagger realise that Taskmaster's just using them and join the New Warriors. Spider-Man goes off after the Goblin and Taskmaster, who are making their way to the armoury, while the New Warriors fight Doctor Octopus and his team. They're able to defeat them, partially due to the help of training robots they used at the start of the episode. Spider-Man fights and defeats Vulture and Taskmaster at the armoury, but the Goblin has already found what he's looking for - the Siege Perilous. He uses it to escape before Spider-Man can stop him. In the aftermath, Nick Fury praises Spider-Man for his work and leadership, and reveals that as the helicarrier isn't big enough for all the superheroes, they'll be moving to the Triskelion.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Taskmaster names his team the Thunderbolts, which is traditionally the name of a Marvel team of villains trying to redeem themselves. It kind of comes out of nowhere, and I'm not a big fan of him choosing to use it - a bit of a square peg, round hole situation.
• So, Taskmaster freeing the villains - he and his gang are trying to break into the prison section of the helicarrier when Spider-Man and his group show up and attack them, firing Venom's missiles and Amadeus' repulsors at them. Taskmaster declares, "Just like we practiced!", Cloak teleports them away, and the attack blows up the door and frees the prisoners. I can't decide whether it's an absolute baller move, for suddenly taking advantage of an unexpected resource, or whether it's incredible contrived, especially given he'd just locked them up and had no indication that this was part of the plan they should have practiced.
• As you'd expect, when Ock and his group fly their jet from the helicarrier they're moving away from it. Then, when Vulture slashes the jet they've suddenly done a 180 and they're headed back directly to it, when everything indicates that the jet can't be controlled. Either Vulture's attack somehow flipped them around, or some weird physics are at work here.

Review: Arguably my most consistent complaint about this show is that the fights are usually quite boring, so I'll say this up front and give this episode some respect: the fights here aren't that bad. A highlight for me is Spider-Man fighting Taskmaster at the end of the episode, with some great choreography in a fistfight before Spider-Man switches to using his Spider-Cycle, figuring that Taskmaster can't copy that (a logical solution? In this show?!) Ignoring that, though, given the large cast it's got to work with it does a fairly good job of giving all characters on both sides moments to shine, even if it does have to quickly shuffle out Spider-Man's original team before the episode really gets going.

So that's a pretty good thing, given that most of this episode is fighting. I'm a bit iffy on large parts of it though - as you can see in the miscellaneous notes there are a few moments that had me scratching my head a bit, and I'm not a big fan of the way Amadeus mostly sits around and awkwardly watches everything after his suit is broken. I'm also really, really sick of this show's version of the Green Goblin - he's smarmy and arrogant about everything, constantly acting as though he's this genius with a master plan when it's all really quite simple. He's probably itching to tell Taskmaster that, "Actually, I don't think you really got Neon Genesis Evangelion in the same way that I, an intellectual, did."

Still, the more I think about it the more I think I actually liked this one. Spider-Man frantically trying to wake up Cloak as they plummet to Earth is a great action moment (let's not think about why he can't make a web parachute in that moment), and him letting the Vulture go since they had a brief friendship feels like the sort of thing Spidey would do. Taskmaster seems to be taken care of at the moment, but Goblin's escaped with the Siege Perilous, so we're keeping things moving. Not a bad start for the New Warriors, even if they are missing Speedball.