Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Seventy-Two: The Revenge of Arnim Zola

The Revenge of Arnim Zola

First Aired: September 26th, 2015

Synopsis: Arnim Zola sends new synthezoids at the heroes, and Cloak disappears while teleporting the Scorpion/Juggernaut one away. Spider-Man deals with the other, a Juggernaut/Doctor Octopus hybrid, but during the whole fight Rhino and Venom keep clashing. They continue to clash as they head to the reactor room, where they find Zola. Spider-Man manages to connect Zola to the reactor and deliver a shock of electricity strong enough to defeat him, but the heroes still need to find their captured allies. They wander along and find them held in gigantic tubes, but Zola appears on some screens and reveals that he can send his consciousness to any computer within range. Zola attacks them with a gigantic robot which has somehow copied the captured heroes' powers, and he's able to defeat Venom and Rhino and put them into tubes. He then reveals that he wants to take over Spider-Man's body for himself and places Spider-Man within a tube inside his giant robot.

Spider-Man finds himself in a virtual castle where he fights a human Arnim Zola, who's slowly taking over his mind. In the real world some damaged tubes free Venom and Rhino, who work together to try and free Spider-Man. Although they're able to free his body it doesn't show sentience as his mind is fighting Zola. Spider-Man's teammates somehow appear before him and are able to lend them his powers, and when Rhino and Venom are defeated by Zola and Spider-Man returned to his tube, he's able to use those powers to defeat Zola. Zola appears on more screens, as this is just a setback for him, so Spider-Man takes the Iron Spider outfit from Amadeus' unconscious body and releases an EMP. It frees everyone and traps Zola in an old television. In the aftermath, Nick Fury reveals that the Triskelion is being repaired from the damage it suffered.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• There's a few odd video game references in this episode - Spider-Man saying that Zola's using cheat codes, referring to his friends joining in as turning things into multiplayer - but the best one has to be when Spider-Man directly references the Konami Code.

Review: There's some fun ideas in here, but overall this episode is kind of a mess. Right from the start of the episode, Cloak is instantly written out in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment. He and Dagger haven't really gotten much focus since they joined SHIELD Academy, and I was kind of looking forwards to seeing more of him. As the team continue through the Triskelion, they're able to find their captured teammates, who - wait, didn't Cloak say at the end of the previous episode that they were on the helicarrier? What are they doing here? How does Arnim Zola absorb their abilities into his giant robot, and why bother putting that detail in if he's only going to demonstrate two powers? (Dagger's and Ant-Man's, for those curious).

I like the idea of Spider-Man's body being overtaken by Zola, and I like the idea of Spider-Man having to fight in a virtual reality to save himself, but the episode goes about it in all the wrong ways. His fighting with Arnim Zola is mundane and boring (at one point we get a cliffhanger before an ad break of, "He's going to punch me again!"), and doesn't show any tricks like Zola being able to control the virtual reality, or the virtual reality acting any different to the real world. Spider-Man getting his teammates' powers also comes out of nowhere, and there's no real indication that they were specifically needed to defeat Zola.

Things I did like were Rhino and Venom having to bury the hatchet to save Spider-Man, and Flash instantly being willing to do so for Spider-Man's sake was a good character moment. An EMP defeating Zola makes perfect sense, and Spider-Man taking back the Iron Spider to do so is a neat trick - I'd love to see a plot that revolves around the fact that there are two Iron Spider pilots. But overall, when this episode isn't fighting it's got some clunky plot points and story beats, and it doesn't tell a compelling tale.