Marvel's Spider-Man Episode Fifty-Two: Web of Venom

Web of Venom

First Aired: April 19th, 2020

Synopsis: At Horizon Peter discovers that Max Modell has made a synthetic symbiote which he claims is safer than Venom, but Peter's sceptical. Grady Scraps, who Peter met previously, enrols at Horizon and Peter shows him around. Curt Connors is also at Horizon, now a teacher. That evening Peter gets a call from Grady at Horizon and finds a robot, an old project of another student's, attacking him. They discover that it can eat technology to grow, and it's dubbed the technovore. Max suggests that they stop it with the synthetic symbiote, as it has no technology in it, and reveals that he knows that Peter is Spider-Man. Spider-Man puts on the synthetic symbiote and is able to stop technovore. Afterwards he agrees to work with Max to keep testing the symbiote. Unbeknownst to anyone, Connors secretly released the technovore, and is working with a mysterious person.

While testing the symbiote Spider-Man discovers that it's weak to electricity, but when he later stops a runaway train the symbiote shows no such weakness. Max tries convincing Peter to go public with his identity, which Peter refuses to do. Connors wanders into an abandoned area of the school and finds Max's secret lab with the symbiote, which breaks and turns him into Venom. Spider-Man goes after him but Venom absorbs Spider-Man's artificial symbiote then says that when the seed is used he'll destroy the planet. He then ejects Connors and runs away. After Spider-Man saves Connors he goes after Venom, and finds him extracting the seed he mentioned from the ground. Venom puts the seed in himself and a giant laser is shot into space as a result. Spider-Man then realises that the symbiote's weakness was to a specific type of electricity, and with Grady's help on the phone is able to recreate it and electrocute Venom, stopping him. In the aftermath Connors has told the school board about Max's projects, which gets Max out of the way so that Connors can take over Horizon. Out in space, a group of symbiotes react to Venom's laser as it reaches them.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• As of this season, episodes of this show now run for around forty-four minutes. Although some networks apparently split them into two episodes, I've chosen to review them as single episodes.
• Spider-Man's costume changes slightly as of this episode - his palms are now blue, and the belt-y sort of area around his waist has more spacing. None of the changes are bad, but I wouldn't say that they add that much, either.
  

Review: Well, the first half of the episode is decent enough, at least. The technovore is a solid threat to Spider-Man, and the reveal that it was secretly released by Connors is a good hook to end that part on. Most of the fight is it going through areas Peter showed Grady earlier that day, making them competent-if-predictable Chekhov's Guns, and which in turn makes the fight feel a bit more planned than these things can be. Max suddenly revealing that he knows Peter's identity is a bit convenient, but given that Peter's friends have all vanished - the explanation being that they're touring colleges - it does work well enough to give Peter an ally he can talk to while fighting crime.

The second half of the episode, though - that's kind of nonsense. It starts out alright, with Spider-Man exploring the symbiote's abilities and Max trying to convince Peter to reveal his identity, but after the symbiote takes over Connors I find myself struggling to care. The symbiote spends its entire screen time trying to be scary and ominous, but I just don't really care about what it has to say. And then there's the stuff at the end of the episode - when Venom landed on Earth, it buried a seed (?) which has now grown (?) which lets him put it into himself (?) and fire lasers (?!) to summon more symbiotes (?). It's...not a great train of logic, and it just looks silly.

Connors being ominous and evil is something that I'm interested in, and the ending puts him in a position of more power, so that's something to look forwards to for future episodes. Multiple symbiotes getting summoned isn't, however - for me, the symbiote is less interesting when you explore its race and history and much better when it's used as a means to an end, namely giving someone an evil version of Spider-Man's powers. We'll see how it turns out, but I'm not overly optimistic.