Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Eighty-Seven: Force of Nature

Force of Nature

 

First Aired: April 10th, 2016

Synopsis: Spider-Man is feeling overwhelmed by the responsibilities the SHIELD Academy personnel expect of him when he realises that he hasn't talked to Aunt May for a while. He calls her up but in the middle of the call there's a distress signal which he thinks might be from Nick Fury. Spider-Man, Iron Spider, Scarlet Spider, and Miles Morales head to the signal's location, which is an abandoned shopping centre in Queens. After fighting off its security measures they find a secret entrance in a barber shop, which leads them to a sealed-off room. They open it up and are attacked by a man made out of water, but when he overhears them talking about Nick Fury he realises that they work for SHIELD. He explains that he's Nick's friend and is down there trying to control his powers, and is in containment so that villains don't try and capture him. The heroes take him with them as they head back to SHIELD, but Amadeus looks him up in SHIELD's files and discovers that he's actually a prisoner in solitary confinement.

The newly-dubbed Hydro-Man attacks the heroes and they're forced to land their jet in Queens, in an area that Spider-Man realises is near Aunt May's house. Spider-Man tells Amadeus to return to SHIELD and to shut down the water in the area before returning with freeze webs. Scarlet Spider is sent to protect Aunt May, and he seems to recognise her. After they talk briefly about Spider-Man's past he takes her out of the house, just as Amadeus returns. Hydro-Man attacks Aunt May, but Scarlet saves her using one of the freeze webs Amadeus brought back. Aunt May unmasks Scarlet, despite his reluctance, and when he claims that he doesn't have a name, she names him Ben. Hydro-Man unfreezes, so all of the heroes shoot their webs at him, which absorb him like a sponge. In the aftermath, however, it's reported that Hydro-Man's transport was attacked, and Spider-Man realises that Doctor Octopus sent the distress signal in the first place so that Hydro-Man would be broken free for him.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Entering secret SHIELD headquarters via a barber shop is taken right out of the comics, where Nick Fury did it in the Silver Age all the time.
• Given that Scarlet Spider's been named Ben by Aunt May, but when unmasked his face looks to be Peter's with short hair and a scar, it appears that this version of Scarlet Spider is a mixture of Ben Reilly and Kaine Parker - the classic and contemporary Scarlet Spiders, in other words.

Review: This episode really is a bit of a mixture of both good and bad stuff. On the good side, while I'm not particularly interested in Nick Fury's whereabouts, it's good that we're taking some time to address that it's still a mystery and that the characters want to find him. (Nova, being the idiot that he is, probably forgot that Fury couldn't breathe in space and took him out there, or something). I also really like the mystery around Scarlet Spider - the show doesn't call attention to the fact that he looks like Peter, but it's there, and he clearly knew who Aunt May was prior to Spider-Man sending him to her. Of course, it's probably the simplest answer, and he's just a clone of Spidey, but I'm enjoying it regardless.

The episode also has Spider-Man trying to live up to Nick Fury's standards of competence, and there's a nice little arc to it as he works out how to defeat Hydro-Man. Speaking of said villain, him pretending to be a friend of Fury's is a genuinely clever plan, and for all that Spider-Man beats himself up for freeing Hydro-Man, it did legitimately seem to be the right thing to do. Moving onto the bad stuff in the episode, a lot of the fights with Hydro-Man are lacking in weight - at one point Scarlet Spider comments that he's turning himself into a category-five cyclone, but nobody's really injured and not that much of a big deal is made about it. It also feels kind of selfish of Spidey to send Scarlet out of his way to protect Aunt May, given that there are presumably residents within all the other houses in the street that would also need protecting.

I'm also not quite sure what's going on with Doctor Octopus' plans here - the episode makes it a bit of a mystery as to who sent the distress signal, especially when Hydro-Man admits that he didn't send it. It turns out to have been Ock who sent it, but...if he was in position to send the signal, why didn't he just free Hydro-Man while he was there? A much cleaner explanation would be that it really was a malfunction, as the characters initially speculate, and then Ock found out about Hydro-Man during the public fight and chose to recruit him then, but at the end of the day, it's kind of a clunky plot point regardless. Given the negative flaws of this episode - particularly the amount of time spent fighting Hydro-Man - I don't think this one is quite for me, but there's still a few salvageable things in it, and if anyone watching this did enjoy it, I wouldn't blame them one bit.