Review: Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man VS. The Sinister 6 “Return to the Spider-Verse – Part 1”
What the hell does this shit have to do with the Sinister 6?
Spoilers Below
A cluster-fuck of Spider-guys show up to Peter Parker’s door, but what gives? Iron Fist shows up and takes Parker and Miles Morales to a temporary SHIELD HQ just in time to battle a bunch of spiders. Dr. Strange shows up and clears house, only to be met by Madame Web. Web tells Spider-Man and Arachnid Kid that they have to travel the dimensions and collect the pieces of Seige Perilous so that they can be forged back together and set the other dimensions back to normal.
The first stop on our Spider-Verse journey is that of the universe of Blood-Spider, a Spider-Man that battles a city swarming with vampires. Blood-Spider shows Miles and Peter to the location of a piece of the Seige Perilous, but he ends up taking it so as to eliminate his world’s vampires. Unfortunately, this leads Blood-Spider into the clutches of the Lizard-King and his Wolf sidekick.
Blood-Spider is able to get free thanks to Spider-Man and Kid Arachnid, but not before he gets bitten by a vampire and is about to turn. Fortunately, the collective minds of our Spider-pals are able to concoct a machine that turns vampires back to humans. It works on Blood-Spider, and in the climactic battle it works on everyone except…Wolf-Spider. Turns out he’s also looking for the pieces of Seige Perilous, but for different reasons. As the Spider-Guys take off with their piece of Seige, Wolf Spider does the same.
Our Take
What I don’t like is that we are now being setup to do a bunch of battles with this Wolf-Spider. It’s one thing that we’ve got a web slinger in Peter Parker, and now his pal Arachnid Kid (shit name for a hero), and traveling to worlds with a bunch more alterations of Spider-Man, but now this Wolf Spider is tagging along which means we’re going to get a whole bunch of web-battles that just get confusing. The Lizard-King was cool, and I thought Blood-Spider was an original take on the character, but I’m not feeling the main protagonist here. Oh yea, and good to see Dr. Strange here RIGHT on time for the new movie coming this fall.
SCORE
Short of getting Roiland back, which I'm sure isn't going to happen, I don't even think they could get much better than the new voices from the previous season. And the ratings for season 7 weren't much lower on average than for season 6; it was pretty much just a normal season-to-season drop that most likely would have happened regardless.
I mean, look at the actual averages:
Season 1 - 1.57 million viewers Season 2 - 1.97 million viewers Season 3 - 2.33 million viewers Season 4 - 1.52 million viewers Season 5 - 0.96 million viewers Season 6 - 0.56 million viewers Season 7 - 0.42 million viewers
Ever since season 3, it had been having steep drops even with Roiland still involved; the season 6 to 7 drop is actually the smallest-percentage drop it's had since it started dropping, and if anything it's possible that changing the voice actors actually *boosted* interest a bit and prevented it from dropping even more.