Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Eighty-Five: Beached

Beached

First Aired: March 27th, 2016

Synopsis: Spider-Man and his allies are looking for Vulture. Amadeus Cho insists that Vulture is a horrible monster but Spider-Man is adamant that he's just hurt and ultimately lost. Vulture appears and attacks them, and the fight leads them to an island before Vulture flies off. As Amadeus and Spider-Man argue over what to do the beach shakes and Sandman appears. After a brief fight they get away, and Spider-Man thinks that Sandman was acting like a child. Amadeus thinks Spider-Man is wrong and that Sandman is just as villainous as Vulture. They're soon attacked by Sandman again, split into multiple beings, and while Spider-Man fights them Amadeus notes a suspicious lighthouse. He investigates it and finds a secret base beneath it, which Spider-Man tells him not to go into. Soon afterwards Amadeus returns to Spider-Man, but it turns out to be the Iron Spider costume being controlled by Sandman, as the real Amadeus has been locked into a machine with what appears to be the original Sandman.

As Spider-Man continues fighting the Sandman duplicates the original Sandman explains to Amadeus that Doctor Octopus locked him up here, and that he's going to experiment on them. At the same time, Doctor Octopus appears before Spider-Man, and reveals that he's been trying to create copies of Sandman so that he can have another member of his Sinister Six. Spider-Man somehow makes his way to the secret lab and helps Sandman and Amadeus break free, and Sandman reveals that Doctor Octopus controls the copies with a remote control. Spider-Man is able to take out the Iron Spider suit and create an EMP from it which destroys the remote control and the Sandman duplicates too, somehow. Doctor Octopus destroys the base but Spider-Man and Amadeus are saved by Sandman. In the aftermath Sandman is invited to join SHIELD Academy. He thanks the heroes but says that for now he's not ready to join a team. Amadeus admits that Spider-Man was right and that not all villains are horrible monsters, and they wonder whether Vulture intentionally took them to the island to help Sandman.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Amadeus insists that it's impossible for Sandman to split himself into multiple beings and that it doesn't make sense, in spite of the fact that that's exactly what Sandman did back in his first appearance. Either Amadeus has never heard of Sandman, in which case he shouldn't be surprised at what Sandman can do, or he's read about him in SHIELD files, in which case he should know the above information.

Review: Between last episode giving Scarlet Spider trust issues and this episode suddenly having Amadeus being unable to view Sandman and Vulture as anything but villainous, it looks like the show's trying to round out Spider-Man's teammates a bit and give them some character development. It's an alright idea on paper, but both there and here it feels like the writers are grasping at straws a bit given that the issues have come out of nowhere. I gave Scarlet Spider a pass since his issue made sense given his backstory, but there's really no reason for Amadeus to suddenly be this vitriolic about villains - the only time I can think of that he might have interacted with Vulture was back in New Warriors, and I'm fairly sure nothing happened there to make him hate Vulture so much.

Focusing on Amadeus' character development is also a bit of a detriment to the plot - while there's stuff here for Amadeus to do, the show struggles to occupy Spider-Man, and so he really does just spend most of the episode hanging out on the island fighting Sandman's duplicates, which as you might imagine, gets old quickly. I'm also a bit over Doctor Octopus and his goal to create a new Sinister Six - firstly, it doesn't need to be drawn out over this many episodes, and secondly, it's just not as dramatic or as big a deal as the episode wants it to be. The stated goal of the new team is explicitly said to be to destroy Spider-Man; how's that any different to Ock's usual plans?

On a more positive note, I do like that Amadeus talks about how everyone just sees him as a big brain to solve problems all the time, which he's not a big fan of, and Sandman is now in a position where he could easily become a hero. If more focus had been put on the former, and if there was less boring fighting done against Sandman's duplicates then I think this one would be serviceable, but as it is there's just not really that much to enjoy here.