The Spider-Verse, Part 4
First Aired: March 26th, 2015
Synopsis: Spider-Man returns to his own world and finds that his communicator has conveniently broken. Since he doesn't have the time to visit SHIELD he goes directly to the Hellcarrier, where he finds the Green Goblin powering himself up with a serum made from the DNA of all the alternate universe Spider-Men. Spider-Man sabotages it but it's too late - the Goblin has gained more powers, and to make things worse, he now knows Spidey's real identity. As the fight with Spider-Man continues the Goblin mutates further into the Spider-Goblin, sporting extra limbs and acidic spit. Spider-Man manages to find the Siege Perilous with Electro still trapped inside it. He gets Electro to summon all of the Spider-Men he met over the last few episodes to help defeat the Green Goblin. By working together the spiders are able to hold down the Goblin, and Spider-Man then uses Electro to de-ionise the serum, turning the Goblin back into Norman Osborn.
Electro, however, reveals that he wants revenge on Norman, and somehow uses the power of the Siege Perilous to start transforming the Hellcarrier. The spiders get out as Electro turns it into a mech, and after a brief with the mech Electro heads off, saying that he can take out the whole world. Although Spider-Man isn't confident that they can stop him his alternate selves give him pep talks like he did for them, and convince him to try. Arriving in Times Square, they fight the mech for a bit before Electro sets it to self-destruct in a few minutes. Spider-Girl volunteers to get inside it and shut down the self-destruct while the other spiders distract Electro, but the remaining alternates are taken out quickly. Spider-Man, however, is able to punch out Electro and then touch him to a tower, which somehow grounds him and therefore leaves him defeated. Spider-Girl reappears and reveals that she couldn't stop the self-destruct, but has managed to send the mech into space where it explodes. Spider-Man uses the last of the Siege Perilous energy to send the remaining Spider-Men home, but before they leave they thank him for all of his help. In the aftermath it turns out that Norman is amnesiac and can't remember the last few years, and when Spider-Man tells Nick Fury the whole story, he gets praised.
Review: You'd hope that as the climax of the whole Spider-Verse arc this would be a strong finish - let's be real, the first three parts were basically just setup - but unfortunately I'd easily call it the weakest part. So much of it is just fighting, fighting, fighting, and it hits the usual standard of the show - i.e., "Not great." When the Green Goblin was defeated I thought to myself, "Great, that gives us about half the episode to wrap things up and spend a bit more time with our Spidey," but then the fighting just keeps going on and on with Electro suddenly turning out to be the final boss. It's probably meant to be subversive, but it just drags.
The coming together of all of the Spider-Man alternatives isn't as great as you'd like it to be, either. In a crowd none of them really get the chance to stand out much - Spider-Ham doesn't get to use any cartoon physics, Miles doesn't use his invisibility or venom blast, and so on. Now that the show's brought them together it really doesn't know what to do with them, as evidenced by all of the Spider-Men except for our Spidey getting taken out in one attack by Electro. I'm glad they're here and I don't think that Spider-Man could succeed without them, but there's definitely a few too many for the team to work.
Aside from that, there's also more of the usual weak writing on display here. Spider-Man's communicator magically breaking is convenient already, but why don't SHIELD show up when Electro takes his mech into Times Square? What's the point in having the Green Goblin learn Spider-Man's identity (through incredibly dubious logic, see last episode) and then having him immediately forget it? I want to like this episode, because this arc started out fairly well, but it just drags too much and has too much bad writing for it to be enjoyable.
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