Review: Spider-Man: Maximum Venom “Amazing Friends”


OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Miles is back in town after touring colleges to help Peter on bad guy beating duty and to catch up on the events of last episode, which is understandable since it’s been a month. Peter then has to hurry home, as Aunt May has set up a meeting with one Mary Jane Watson, the niece of a friend of hers, who Peter seems pretty easily taken with. But that will have to wait, as Baby Groot has come with a message from Star Lord (who Peter has apparently already met?), except the tape with the message has gotten messed up. Peter and Miles go to Avengers Tower to meet with Iron Man, only to find Iron HEART, AKA Riri Williams, and her AI, Not Tony. But it seems they’re not the only ones looking for Groot, as goons from AIM arrive to take him. After some antics, they Groot-nap him, but Not Tony sends them to Doctor Strange for help translating. But Strange isn’t the only sorcerer involved, as Baron Mordo is working with the AIM henchmen, needing Groot for his own ends.

Mordo banishes Strange and Miles to the “Unknown Realms”, leaving just Peter and Riri to go after him. Along the way, they encounter Amadeus Cho, who, like Riri, is another Avengers intern but is also a Hulk with his sense of reason and intelligence intact. They storm the base with enough time to fit in a lesson about teamwork, while Miles and Strange also combine science and magic in order to escape the Unknown Realms. But now Mordo and AIM’s goals become clear: using Groot’s physiology to create Adult Groot shaped golems. What they don’t count on is that these golems also share Groot’s weakness for ice cream, which the heroes throw into another portal to get rid of them. With that, they stop AIM and Mordo and finally reconstruct Star Lord’s message: In less than 24 hours, an army of symbiotes will be arriving on Earth, Star Lord among those who have been taken.

OUR TAKE
We’re back at Maximum Venom with an episode with…virtually no Venom to speak of. This is surprising, as this season only consists of six episodes, even if they’re double length, so you’d think there wouldn’t be room for filler. Granted, it might not be filler if it’s just to introduce these newer characters who may end up being crucial to stopping the symbiote hordes, but the plot of the episode does not really contribute to that or advancing the stuff going on at Horizon High. We have Ironheart, Amadeus Hulk, Baby Groot, Doctor Strange, and AIM, none of which seem super related to one another. It just seems like a bunch of disparate elements just thrown together to…just have it. I mean it’s neat and all to see the animated versions of Ironheart and this Hulk, since that’s kinda like the second phase of Marvel testing if they want to put these two in movies, but they feel like they’re just there to be there. And I guess give Peter more reason to think about his future college or career or superhero career or…something.

Not to mention this episode just has a whole lot of things that just irk me. For one, apparently Spidey HAS met the Guardians of the Galaxy before this episode…it just happened to be in an episode of THEIR show, which aired over two years ago and also oddly included Carnage, the symbiote this season’s subtitle is REFERENCING but somehow is absent. So points off for expecting me to watch a completely different show to keep up with this one’s plot. Then there’s the fact that this was clearly written as two separate episodes, which is something I noticed about last time, only this one gives a really clunky recap in its second half as if this was expected to be aired across two weeks or, even worse, that the writers don’t trust the younger audience to remember the previous twenty minutes. Also, this was pointed out to me in a video review, but this show has way too many characters whose primary personality trait is “the smart one”. I get that having a show valuing intelligence in its characters is good for encouraging kids to learn, but it comes out in the writing like everyone is just about the same person, Miles Morales being a prime example since he does very little to stand apart from Peter in his dialogue and interactions.

I’m assuming the next episode will take another month to get here and will hopefully put us back on track with the plot, but it also seems like we’ll be meeting even more new characters, which makes me wonder why this episode spent so much time on stuff that didn’t add to the symbiote stuff AND have the resolution feeling so cheap and lazy. Perhaps the latter two thirds of this abbreviated season will have a noticeable turnaround, but I’m getting very clear reasons to not be optimistic. Oh yeah, and Mary Jane is here, voiced by Felicia Day. This is about as much as I’m mentioning that here since the show treats it like such an afterthought.