Review: Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man “Hero or Menace; If This Be My Destiny…”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The Scorpion strikes again, with Peter and Lonnie the only ones who can face him. Later, Norman tries opening a space portal and Doctor Strange tries to stop him, but a familiar looking alien and spider come through.

OUR TAKE

Just like a certain wall crawler swinging by, this season went pretty fast, but even with the weird pacing of the releases (no I’m not getting over that), we managed to land on a pretty solid finale. All the plot threads got wrapped up service-ably and laid the groundwork for a pretty interesting next season, with Peter AND Harry parting ways with Oscorp to make their own company called WEB, Lonnie inhaling some chemicals and getting superpowers (as one does) while maintaining his good nature but also gaining control of the gang, and Norman goes full…well, Norman and tries opening a big portal that puts everyone in danger. And in a rather unexpected inclusion of time travel, it seems that the symbiote alien and the spider which Peter first saw actually were from the future and went back in time with Strange from this moment. Meaning that Peter basically pulled a Barry Allen and basically became the reason that he would become Spider-Man. This series has not fully hit with me yet, possibly still due to my iffyness with the art style, but I have to give it props about how it’s coming up with its own original moments and ways to handle these characters. Definitely gives me faith in them to do the same next season.

I could speculate about where this pseudo-MCU timeline is going, what with Strange clearly having the Time Stone, the Avengers being fragmented by a version of Civil War, and Daredevil hanging around. Maybe this Peter will have to fight the forces of Thanos another way, or maybe he won’t show up at all. For now though, what’s important is how it handled its own group of characters (including the characters that were not Spider-Man related until this show threw them in) and I would say they did quite well. I guess the main thing I want to give credit for here is, for lack of a better term, restraint. Which is an odd thing to say when they had an alien come out of a portal and then go back in time, but what I mean is that it didn’t feel the need to rush the expected moments just for the sake of having people point at their screens in recognition. Lonnie can take his time becoming the usual Tombstone, Norman can take his time becoming a Goblin, and everyone else will get to where they need to go at their own pace as the story dictates. We got a fully functional ten half hours of TV that is setting up more to come and I am quite excited to get it when it’s here. Oh yeah, and Josh Keaton is Peter’s ALIVE dad who is in prison. Not much to comment on there for now but that was a pretty neat use of the guy, let’s see where it goes.