Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Seventy-Eight: Contest of Champions, Part Four

Contest of Champions, Part Four

First Aired: October 24th, 2015

Synopsis: Grandmaster declares that since his ship was destroyed New York will become his new ship. Although he gets to keep all of the superheroes he returns Spider-Man to the Collector since he doesn't want him. Spider-Man  tries convincing the Collector to stand up to the Grandmaster, but he's reluctant to. Meanwhile, Absorbing Man, Executioner, Doctor Octopus, and Titus are pitted against Captain America and Hawkeye to amuse the Grandmaster, but Spider-Man appears and joins the battle. He challenges Grandmaster to a rematch, and Grandmaster accepts with the condition that the Collector is a player in the game. The Collector and Spider-Man are pitted against the Executioner, Absorbing Man, and Doctor Octopus, but the Collector is still scared of the Grandmaster since he always wins. Doctor Octopus manages to pin down Spider-Man for the Absorbing Man to kill, but Aunt May appears and tries attacking them. She's threatened by the villains which gives Spider-Man the resolve to free himself and save her, and he then convinces the Collector to fight properly.

Spider-Man frees She-Hulk and she goes about freeing other heroes, who soon appear and challenge the Grandmaster's team, easily outnumbering them. Grandmaster starts summoning more villains but Spider-Man calls for a time out and challenges the Grandmaster to another game, saying that Grandmaster has to be a player this time. Grandmaster agrees and fights Spider-Man's team, consisting of Captain America, Hulk, White Tiger, and Venom, but all of them are defeated easily. The Collector finally stands up to his brother, however, and with Spider-Man's help he's able to defeat him. In the aftermath the Collector says that he's going to start collecting experiences and friendships instead, and refuses a rematch with the Grandmaster. Nova then appears, revealing that he's been in space the entire time. Peter talks to Aunt May later and she reveals that she's always known that he's Spider-Man.

Sam Alexander is Actually the Worst:

• Why did you even return from space, Nova? The fate of Earth was literally just decided without you contributing; we actually don't need you.

Clint Barton is Actually the Best:

• When Captain America and Hawkeye are fighting the bad guys at the start of the episode, they target him first, because they obviously recognise that he's the bigger threat - he's the first to launch an attack which seems to be pretty effective against Titus and Ock. He also dodges a swing of Executioner's axe so quickly that I swear he just straight-up teleports.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Doctor Octopus argues with the Grandmaster that the villains were promised the Earth. Given that the Grandmaster grabbing New York (i.e. Manhattan) at the end of the previous episode is justified in this episode as being because his spaceship was blown up, it seems like the villains getting Earth in return for winning is definitely their prize - which makes the second part of this arc blatantly wrong.
• Spider-Man asks She-Hulk whether she feels like smashing things, to which she answers, "Pretty much all the time!" No matter how you interpret the word smash, that's a pretty big mood.

Review: Urgh. This episode. The biggest issue I have with it is that this isn't a Spider-Man episode. That'd be fine if it was about one of his teammates, like Luke Cage, or Iron Fist, or even, say, Amadeus Cho, but of all characters this is really about the Collector, undergoing character growth as he learns to stand up to his brother and admire the relationships Spider-Man has with his friends. I don't really care about the Collector beyond being an antagonist for the characters, and you can bet that I wouldn't put him at the top of my favourite villains list.

The way the Grandmaster is defeated is incredibly lazy and boring, too - after Spider-Man summons a team of some of his best allies, they're taken out almost immediately by the Grandmaster, before the Collector wails on his brother. The greatest Grandmaster story told yet is Avengers Annual #16, because it shows how you beat the Grandmaster - you don't play by his rules, because if you let yourself do that, you've already lost. (Incidentally, great Hawkeye moment, and something that I think we wouldn't see the character doing in the modern day). Last episode showed that Spider-Man was smart enough to know when to take actions outside of the game, and it's disappointing that after that clever showing, he's reduced to just fighting and fighting and fighting some more in this episode.

It's all the more disappointing because if the writers didn't want to come up with a clever way for the rules to be bent or broken, they could have instead gone for a large scale battle - all of the heroes fighting all of the villains in a free for all. Yeah, there wouldn't be room for all of the characters to have great moments, and you'd have to quietly ignore some of the villains' abilities or cut them from the fight completely, but it would be an epic scope and an appropriate way for the season to end. Instead, Contest of Champions goes out with a whimper, not a bang. Ah well. Thank god there's only one quarter of this show to go from here.