Marvel's Spider-Man Episode Thirty-Seven: Brain Drain

Brain Drain

First Aired: August 13th, 2018

Synopsis: An exhausted Peter heads to school as Spider-Man when he's attacked by the Tinkerer, who's still after the bounty. Spider-Man beats him but collapses from exhaustion and is captured by the police, who take him to Chief Watanabe. She frees him and tells him that the Chameleon wasn't behind the bounty, before giving Spider-Man some of Chameleon's mask to track down the technology. At school Peter is greeted by the Living Brain, the new robot which hosts the neuro-cortex. Miles looks up the material the Chameleon's mask uses and finds out that it was used by Jackal, but admits that it might have been stolen. Peter returns home to sleep while Miles investigates one of the Jackal's warehouses. He finds the computer that uploads the masks that Chameleon uses and thinks that he can use it to track who's behind all of this, but security activates. The Living Brain, who followed him, shows up and helps stop security, but destroys the computer that could have tracked down the culprit in the process.

The Living Brain tracks a call history from an Oscorp sub-basement to the lab it's in with Miles, so they go to investigate. Miles can't get into some encrypted files there so he tries backing them up so that he can break into them later. The Living Brain, however, tries activating them and accidentally triggers security in the process. At home, Peter gets an alert from Miles and heads out to back them up as Spider-Man. Miles is knocked out during the fight, and then the Living Brain reveals a device that they can take to help track down the culprit. Spider-Man touches it but is electrocuted and nearly taken out. The Living Brain then reveals that he's actually Doctor Octopus' mind, uploaded to the neuro-cortex, and is behind the bounty. He says that hurting Spider-Man would only hurt himself, and then laughs ominously as the episode ends.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Contrary to the episode's title, and to its detriment, it does not, in fact, star Brain Drain, Squirrel Girl's friend and yours.
• I'll admit that I'm a little over jokes in Spider-Man media about wheatcakes, all derived from that one panel in Amazing Fantasy #15, but I did have a chuckle when Peter asks Gwen Stacy to distract Aunt May so that he can sneak out. We later see her learning how to cook from Aunt May and she compliments the pancake recipe, to which May bluntly insists, "They're called wheatcakes."

Review: I think that this episode is overall pretty well done, but it could improve. The Living Brain secretly hosting Doctor Octopus' brain is set up pretty well, with most of its accidents such as destroying a computer appearing to be genuine. There's also some clever use of some cuts - we see Miles and the Living Brain be attacked by security, then cut to Peter getting an alert on his phone. It's shot to make it look as though Miles placed the alert, but then we later see Miles pick up his dropped phone, and when revealing himself Doctor Octopus explains how he picked it up and sent the alert since he wanted Spider-Man to be there. It's all quite clever.

Where the episode is weakest is Peter's role in all of this - he's sent home by Miles to recover after falling asleep repeatedly, but then rather than using the episode to focus on Miles and let him have the spotlight, we constantly cut back to Peter trying to sneak away from Aunt May, which adds virtually nothing to the episode. The episode also has Peter mention that his spider powers are weakening to justify him not getting involved at the start, and we see him failing to cling to a wall when he's attacked by the Tinkerer from the start, but this all comes out of nowhere. If the implication is supposed to be that his powers don't work when he's exhausted it's executed shockingly badly.

The way that the episode sets up multiple possible candidates is done quite well - at first it looks as if the Jackal's the villain based on the Chameleon's mask, then possibly Norman Osborn given the source of the calls to the Jackal's lab. Given that Doc Ock's brain has gotten stuck in the Living Brain in the comics before, I wasn't too surprised that he turned out to be the culprit, but the episode did a good job of providing some red herrings regardless. Overall I liked it, I just wish that we'd gotten less focus on Peter and more on Miles.