School of Hard Knocks
First Aired: July 9th, 2018
Synopsis: After Spider-Man laments his bad reputation from seeing a news report which talks up the Avengers, he hears noises from a nearby alley. Investigating he finds someone there with energy leaking out uncontrollably and as he stops them, finds that they keep saying the number 237. Spider-Man then finds their student card and goes to their school as Peter Parker to investigate, discovering that it's fairly hostile and is run by a woman called Monica Rappaccini. Peter manages to sneak in and befriend a bullied kid named Grady Scraps, who shows Peter around the school. He sees a mysterious door marked 237 which he's told he's not allowed into, so he comes back to the school that night as Spider-Man to stake it out. Spider-Man is found by Ms. Marvel, an Avenger his own age, and they agree to work together. Ms. Marvel explains that the Avengers intercepted some communications about weapons coming from the school, which she's investigating on her own, and she and Spidey sneak into room 237 where they discover that the school is a front for AIM.
AIM discover Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel and attack them, but they manage to get away. They need a special access card to return, which Spidey knows Grady has, but when they go to his room he's woken up by Rappaccini and told to continue his experiments. Grady heads to room 237 where he tries transferring the powers of some captured Avengers - Captain America, Captain Marvel, and the Hulk - to students, but it fails. Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel, who have followed him, try freeing the heroes but are found and attacked by AIM and Rappaccini, who reveals herself to be the Scientist Supreme of AIM. As the fight goes on Spider-Man tries appealing to Grady, who's been hoodwinked into thinking everything is on the level. Grady tells Spider-Man how to reverse the partial transformations caused by transferring the Avengers' powers, by getting the students into the chamber where they were transformed, and Spider-Man does so. Shortly afterwards Black Widow and Iron Man show up and help stop AIM. In the aftermath Ms. Marvel thanks Spider-Man for helping him, and takes a photo with him and the Avengers. The next day Peter finds a note from Ms. Marvel thanking him again, and discovers that she's tried to get him into the newspaper with the Avengers to improve his reptuation, but he's barely in the photo at all.
Review: In spite of her popularity, I haven't really had that much exposure to Kamala Khan - I read the first trade of her initial ongoing series, and it was fine, and I feel like I've read a few comics where she's shown up as a member of a team, without too much space to shine. In other words, as an episode whose purpose is presumably to introduce the character to both viewers and Spider-Man fans, this one is pretty good for someone like me. We don't get her origin or powers explicitly explained, but that's fine, since they're pretty understandable just through watching what she can do. She does appear fairly annoyed at Spider-Man at first, but later apologises and explains why she was annoyed, which easily helps make up for it. All in all, she's a pretty great character.
The episode's content itself is fairly standard - AIM secretly using a school to run experiments on kids works fine as a plot. There are a few questions that I have, like why Peter isn't at Horizon right now, and whether AIM built the entire school themselves or just acquired it, but none of them are niggling enough that I need answers. It takes a while for the episode to get to any real action, and once it does the antagonists aren't that interesting, but like I said, it's all fine enough.
So yeah, that's about all that I can say about it - Ms. Marvel good, AIM plot serviceable. It is good to see Spider-Man desire the reputation of an Avenger, while Ms. Marvel points out the downsides, such as having to always be compared to legends, and her attempting to help Spider-Man's reputation with the photo at the end is cute. This episode wasn't anything I really needed to see, but I certainly don't regret watching it.
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