Venom Returns
First Aired: July 23rd, 2018
Synopsis: Miles calls Gwen Stacy and tells her to finish up Peter's party while he and Spider-Man look for Venom in the city. They head to the Daily Bugle where Venom is tormenting J. Jonah Jameson. After a quick fight Venom escapes with Jonah, so Miles and Peter look up Eddie's address and head there for clues. While they're doing that Venom goes to Gwen's house and captures her. At Eddie's address Miles and Peter find a live feed of Venom capturing Max Modell, and work out that Venom is capturing people close to Peter. Peter tells Miles to go to the space centre where the symbiote was experimented on, while he calls Aunt May, whose return flight from her holiday has just landed. As he does so, however, Aunt May is captured by Venom. Miles goes to the space centre and is turned away by the receptionist, so sneaks in invisibly.
Spider-Man manages to find where Venom's captured everyone and manages to free all of them but Jonah when Venom returns. As they fight Venom unmasks Spider-Man and reveals to Jonah how Peter gets such good shots of Spider-Man: he is Spider-Man. As Jonah reels in shock Miles shows up in one of Peter's costumes and says that he's the real Spider-Man and that Peter was just working with him to distract Venom. Miles also has a large gun taken from the space centre designed to destabilise Venom, but when he uses it Venom recovers too quickly. He and Peter realise that if they can fire it in an acoustic chamber, like the basketball court, it'll be more effective, and they lure Venom there and successfully defeat him. In the aftermath Peter is fired by J. Jonah Jameson for working with Spider-Man but Miles says that it's probably for the best. Venom is taken away by the space centre to work on a way to remove the symbiote from Eddie, who seems to have bonded with it.
Review: Miles' appearances throughout this series have been a little spotty, so something that I'm really pleased to see this episode do is give him a strong role in the plot that really affects things. He's ultimately responsible for not only saving the day against Venom, but helping to protect Peter's secret identity. It all works really well, and it's the sort of thing that really highlights the benefits of having multiple superheroes in your show, not to mention it's definitely better than using him as a punching bag for highlighting how dangerous a villain is.
Miles' actions are definitely the best part of the episode, but you don't have to look far to find the worst part - Venom's plan makes sense from the perspective of an unhinged man, but his actual capture of Peter Parker's allies is just weird. He constantly appears wherever they are, somehow knowing where everyone lives or what they're doing, and jumps from person to person so fast that you'd think that he was teleporting. And then for some reason he livestreams himself doing at least some of it! It's supposed to come across as intimidating and terrifying but it ends up being inconsistent at best, comical at worst.
Ultimately though, like the last episode this one works in spite of its flaws. Adding in Peter's identity getting exposed is a nice extra hurdle to the final fight, and while Miles solves it a little quickly and conveniently, it's a satisfying solution. The episode probably spends a little too much time showcasing Eddie capturing Peter's allies, but I think that what we end up with is still strong enough that I can forgive it for that.
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