Review: Spider-Man: Maximum Venom “Vengeance Of Venom”


OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

With an army of symbiotes hours away from invading, Peter scrambles to get enough heroes on planet together to fight them off. And it seems they’re too late anyway, since the symbiotes have taken over the Avengers’ ship before they could return to Earth, quickly absorbing just about everyone else and then using Avengers Tower to lure the remaining heroes in to possess them as well. Peter must look on in horror as his city is invaded with nothing he can do.

In the second part, it looks like everything’s gone to crap really quickly as Venom starts infecting civilians as well, but Peter still has hope that Aunt May is out there somewhere, especially since he armed her before things got crazy. But he meets pessimistic survivalist Marc Spector, formerly the superhero Moon Knight, who should be able to get Peter across the city in order to find Max Modell, who has trapped the venomized Groot and hope to uses him to create an Anti-Venom. Marc separates and finds himself cornered, being saved by Aunt May, who shows him that Peter wasn’t the only one willing to lend a hand to a stranger. With his help, Max is able to complete the Anti-Venom and use Groot’s spores to spread it out through the city, vanquishing the Venom threat. Yet while everyone celebrates the victory, someone eyes the Venom Seed that brought the other symbiotes here and grabs it.

OUR TAKE

Wait, we still have three more episodes, right? Seems weird to have the invasion wrapped up in the same episode it begins, especially since the advertising seemed to be implying this is what things were leading to. Also I guess this is this show’s introductions of Thor and Captain Marvel, only we don’t see them without the Venom on them. I don’t know if I needed to watch another show to meet them first or if they’re just throwing them in thinking “well they’ve probably seen the movies so they don’t need to explain who these people are”, but it still feels really sloppy. We’ve established Iron Man, Hulk (who may have been absent here?), Captain America, and even MISS Marvel, but no clear establishment of these other characters except to say “oh shit here they are possessed by Venom! What? No, of course we’ve met them before!” Consistency is all I ask for, friends.

But this episode did do a good job at laying on the hopelessness of seeing all of these heroes be possessed and turn against Spider-Man. Losing his friends one by one was certainly a horrible thing to see happen to Peter, as all of the people he once turned to for help became his enemies. It’s then that the second half with Moon Knight is also a bit confusing. We have yet another character who we’re acting like we’ve met before but haven’t, but also having him I guess taking the protagonist role for a bit because Peter’s already super hopeful and has nothing to learn from this experience. Oh, and the symbiotes blame Spider-Man for KILLING Venom, despite the fact that they are all also Venom and Venom-Groot says “I am Venom”. So who did Peter kill and why does it need to be a revenge thing when they could just want to conquer stuff!

And then there’s the fact that despite this season billing itself as having hour long episodes, it’s really just two separate episodes stitched together. This is something that I’ve noticed with the last two but this time really clenches it. At this point, I’m not sure why they didn’t just go with a typical 26 episode season, or even just 12 since these are not really six hour long episodes anyway. With another three left to go, I’m not sure what’s left to do after already having the alien invasion, but it seems like whoever got the seed (probably Curt Conners based on the laugh) is probably going to use it for something worth taking up that amount of time. Bleh.