Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Ninety-Eight: Strange Little Halloween

Strange Little Halloween

First Aired: October 1st, 2016

Synopsis: Spider-Man goes out trick or treating but his friends don't want to join. While he's out a wave of magical energy turns kids into what they're dressed as, so Spider-Man goes to Doctor Strange, who says that he's contained it to the city. He doesn't know who's behind it but can detect that it originated from the quantum space between dimensions, so they go to see Ant-Man. Due to the spell Ant-Man has turned into a giant ant, but Doctor Strange returns him to normal and he shrinks them down into the quantum realm. In the quantum realm they find Baron Mordo, who has Dormammu working for him. As they fight him Dormammu turns into Ultron, then Doctor Octopus, and they realise that it's just an illusion. Spider-Man deduces that the power is within Mordo himself and that he's drawing energy from the quantum realm - therefore, if they can take him out of it he'll be depowered.

Doctor Strange moves Baron Mordo to the real world but his spell is still active. Mordo explains that he didn't have a way back there and needed a way back, and that he now has the power to make whatever he wants into reality. As he creates more chaos around the city Spider-Man realises that everyone's imagination can become reality. He imagines himself as a pirate, while Doctor Strange and Ant-Man become a dragon/knight combo, but none of them can defeat Baron Mordo. Spider-Man then imagines that there's a spell that can defeat Mordo, and the Eye of Agamotto casts it at him, defeating him. The spell over the city ends, and Spider-Man asks his allies to go trick-or-treating with him. They go around to Nova, and just to spite him Spider-Man has Doctor Strange create a giant rabbit which terrifies him.

Sam Alexander is Actually the Worst:

• At the start of the episode Spider-Man asks Nova to go trick-or-treating with him, and Nova declines, saying that he's too mature for that sort of thing. What we see on screen, though, is that he's just hanging around at Peter's playing video games. 

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Doctor Strange says that Spider-Man is immune to the spell which has transformed everyone because magic from their last encounter protects him. It doesn't really make a lot of sense.
• Ant-Man reveals that he's a big fan of Doctor Strange and wants to be a magician, and demonstrates a rabbit disappearing trick. It's strangely prophetic of the film Ant-Man and the Wasp, where the Marvel Cinematic Universe's version of Ant-Man learns a bunch of card tricks.

Review: I'll be completely honest here: not a whole lot of this episode makes sense. Baron Mordo says something about how he was scattered across dimensions by the Siege Perilous but was able to gain magical power, which is all the explanation we get for the plot. The stuff at the end about everyone being able to alter reality feels a bit hazy - I can buy that kids are transforming into what they're dressed as since they subconsciously are using their imaginations, but expanding that to "anything you imagine becomes reality" is a bit too far, especially Spider-Man magically creating a spell that can save the day.

You know what, though? I'm fine with it. After all of the nonsense we've had this season - this series, really - with Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin and goddamn Wolf Spider, where there's these dubious solutions to problems and attempts to create high-stakes drama falling completely flat, it's nice to have a simple low-stakes episode. I mean, the show tries to frame all the costumes transforming their wearers as being this big thing that needs to be solved, and obviously it does, but it's a light-hearted sort of danger, one that doesn't feel like it's aiming too high.

So yeah, overall I'd say that this episode doesn't make a lot of sense but it's fine in spite of that. The fights drag on a bit and some parts of the episode are there solely for padding - I'm looking at the sequence where Spider-Man magically becomes a pirate - but whatever, even with those flaws this episode still ends up being better than like, half the episodes of this series. There's also a message about how imagination is good, kind of, that I guess works well enough? Anyway, the main thing to take away from here is that Nova gets tormented by Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, and I'm pretty okay with that.