Maximum Venom
First Aired: October 25th, 2020
Synopsis: Spider-Man and the Avengers are in a Quinjet which falls from the sky. When they crash MODOK emerges, but they stop him with Spider-Man's help. Iron Man is impressed and says that he might have a place on the Avengers for Spider-Man. Later, a school dance is getting organised to welcome Max back at Horizon, and to Peter's surprise he's asked to it by Mary Jane. Back at school, Peter, Anya, and Gwen find out that while Grady was setting things up for the dance he saw a shadowy figure that he thinks was the Lizard, so they investigate as their alter egos. They encounter not the Lizard, but Venom, who manages to escape. When the school dance happens the next day, Max shows everyone a teleporter that he created thanks to Peter fixing an equation for him. He then opens a portal to a planet of symbiotes and reveals that he's Venom. The portal is shut down by Anya and Miles as students flee, but Venom soon goes to the generator and turns it back on, revealing as he does so that some of the symbiote survived and hid inside the symbiote's seed, which then got inside Max and slowly started influencing him. Venom successfully opens the portal and symbiotes come through, revealing that they're going to destroy Earth.
Venom heads to the symbiote planet to get their weapon, the Worldkiller, while the other heroes fight the symbiotes. Spider-Man tells Max to fight off the symbiote, but Max can't break free. Meanwhile, Grady and Mary Jane sneak back into the school and get the symbiote seed when they overhear symbiotes talking about it, but one of them disguises themselves as Spider-Man and tricks them into handing over the seed. Venom manages to retrieve the Worldkiller, which is a big dragon, and takes it back to Earth. It eats the symbiote seed, but Spider-Man goes after Venom and this time manages to convince Max that he's strong enough to fight off Venom. Max gains control of the symbiote and rips out the seed, then destroys it, which destroys all of the symbiotes. In the aftermath Horizon is destroyed but Max says that they'll do something better than rebuilding it. Peter and Mary Jane dance together in the street and agree to go on more dates. Peter later gathers up his friends and says that they should make their own tech startup company, with it being funded by Tony Stark, who has already agreed. They agree and decide to call it Worldwide Engineering Brigade, or WEB.
Miscellaneous Notes:
- At the school dance Max is wearing a tie with the blue and pink colours of the trans flag. In the comics Max is gay, but to the best of my knowledge he isn't transgender. I really, really hope that they're trying to tell us that this version of Max is trans, and that they didn't just lazily Google "pride flag" and then click on the first one they saw without checking what its meaning was.
Review: Have I said before that a problem with big Spider-Man moments is the scope? Because this issue has a really big scope problem - as the final threat in the series, it tries to pull out all the stops and have Spider-Man and his allies have to fight not only a returning Venom, but more symbiotes, and even a dragon! Gasp! It'd be terrifying, if it weren't for the issue that we already saw a symbiote invasion just a few episodes ago, and that did a much better job at making me feel that the symbiotes were a threat. Even if that hadn't happened, though, this isn't a good Spider-Man story - the scale is too big, and there's not enough personal moments. The episode tries to have one by having Spider-Man talk to Max about how great he is, but it just isn't that well-done.
Aside from the issue of this threat being too big for this to feel like a good Spider-Man story, this episode also has a weird obsession with dropping plot threads. Miles talks to Harry and Peter at the start of the episode about how he wants to track down his father, Swarm, only for that plot to immediately be forgotten. Harry himself doesn't show up at the dance or any of the fights, making his appearance there pretty pointless. The show remembers that the Lizard escaped last episode, only to then introduce a new plot with Venom that hasn't been set up very well. It feels like the episode is struggling to find a story to tell, and as a result it takes a little while for things to start moving.
Still, while most of the episode isn't great, there are a few things that work. The opening scene with the Avengers is fun and doesn't waste time on unnecessary flashbacks, and the ending feels like a good one for this incarnation of Spider-Man and his friends. Miles and Anya go to the school dance together, which is cute, as is Grady asking Gwen to the dance and her accepting. Speaking of dates, Mary Jane is consistently very entertaining and likeable, and I'd go so far as to say that her and Peter dancing in the street after all of the symbiote nonsense is done is a highlight of the series.
Next time: with this, the most recent Spider-Man series, finished, I'll be posting
a retrospect of the entire series, giving my overall thoughts on it,
discussing what I liked and what I didn't, and
listing the best and worst episodes. I hope to see you there.
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