Generations
First Aired: September 27th, 2020
Synopsis: Under Curt Connors' iron fist Horizon students are being made to do science experiments without being told why. Drones are coming in and out of the school to deliver mysterious packages, and Peter and his friends find that they're delivering Jackal serum. While Anya and Miles try to investigate the faculty lounge, Spider-Gwen and Spider-Man go to the warehouse it originated from. They find a secret lab in it which responds to Gwen's DNA, and then are attacked by shark monsters and the Jackal. They manage to stop them, but the Jackal floods his base, leading to the heroes having to make a hasty retreat. They return to Horizon where Miles and Anya have been captured for trying to break into the faculty lounge by Connors and Anya's sister Maria, a faculty member. Connors reveals that they've been trying to combine the Jackal serum with the symbiote, all to cure his boss - a weakened and near-dead Norman Osborn. Norman receives the hybrid and becomes the Dark Goblin.
Norman exposits about how he survived and used Curt Connors to take over the school, then Maria gets into a mech and declares herself to be the Tarantula, shortly before Jackal and Swarm show up. As the heroes fight the villains Connors transforms into the Lizard and escapes. While Spider-Man fights Norman Harry shows up, as Spider-Man called him, and he helps fight his father. Elsewhere, Miles finds out that Swarm is his father, who became a villain to try and protect his son, and Swarm flees as he realises that he hasn't helped at all. Anya, meanwhile, realises that Maria is actually the Chameleon and defeats him, then tells Spider-Man that she's worked out something about Norman's healing pod. Miles then saves Gwen from the Jackal, and everyone regroups as Norman takes more of his serum and mutates further. They force him into the healing pod which they've modified, and get it to reverse his transformation. Some nearby drones conveniently recorded everything, so they upload Norman's confession about being behind everything and get Max reinstated as principal. In the aftermath, Peter affirms that his friends are his best allies and that they'll always have each others' backs.
Review: The big problem with this episode is that its pacing is entirely off. One of the big reveals is that the random science experiments the Horizon students have been doing has all been part of an attempt to heal Norman's ruined body, and proves vital in letting them know how to modify his healing pod, but it's been set up so clumsily that it just doesn't gel that well. Similarly, Max getting reinstated at the end is supposed to be a big, exciting moment, but we only get maybe five minutes showing what Horizon's like under Connors before it's all superhero adventures. This sort of stuff needs to be spread over multiple episodes, so that the foreshadowing with the experiments can be implemented better, so that we can really get excited about Max coming back.
I'm unsure how I feel about Norman in this episode. On the one hand, his body missing a leg and being badly injured is a great look for him that justifies why he'd go to such lengths to be cured, and the Jackal/symbiote hybrid serum turning him into a monstrous goblin works well enough. On the other hand, him assembling a villainous team that's supposed to reflect Spider-Man's allies feels a little cartoonish. The fights against him aren't really that exciting, and when he pumps himself full of more serum, it's hard to feel as though the stakes are really being raised by that much given how quickly he goes down afterwards.
Overall I guess I'd say that this episode is about middling quality. None of it is really that bad, but there's not really a lot that stands out about it, either. Thinking back on Norman, I'm kind of disappointed that they brought him back and made him a shadowy mastermind rather than surprising us all by keeping him dead. That's the episode in a nutshell, really - it does things that work adequately enough, but they probably weren't the best decisions that could have been made for the story.
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