Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man – Season 1, Episode 7: Scorpion Rising (2025) – Review

It seems that my theory concerning the peaks and troughs of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’s plot is pretty much bang on the money and that every two or three episodes kind of counts as it’s own mini arc to give us slight bits of closure when they come to an end. Of course, the way Disney+ is releasing them all but confirms this as its dropping of two/three episodes a week creates little neat, self contained packages as the main, overarching arcs continue playing the long game.
The last arc concerned itself with introducing Otto Octavius (with only the four limbs at the moment) as sort of a supervillain arms dealer who is selling physical enhancement tech to finance some predictably dodgy deal, but this one seems to be going even further into antagonist territory by finally giving one of Spider-Man’s more formidable dance partners an immensely intimidating glow up. It’s time for the Scorpion’s tale.

After Harry Osborn accidently let Peter’s secret identity slip to Nico, the perpetually dumped-on Parker is attempting to heal their friendship only to find that his best friend simply doesn’t deal with secrets and lies particularly well. However, in an attempt to try and patch things up, an incredibly awkward swings by Nico’s foster home in order to try and fix the damage his loose lips caused. As a result, after a bit of initial strain, the boy Osborn manages to get his target to warm up to him after letting Nico drive his car, but finds she’s still frosty on the subject of all things Parker.
Speaking of Parker and the effect Osborns gave on him, we’re maybe starting to discover the reason Norman chose to single out an groom Peter as Spider-Man and it seems like he needed a super-patsy of his own in order to locate Octavius with whom it seems Norman carries a hefty grudge against. In fact, despite starting out as Spidey’s friendly neighborhood sponsor, the closer they come to locating Otto’s lair, the more distant and driven the billionaire captain of industry becomes. However, as Spider-Man is sent out to finally pin down Norman’s target once and for all, it seems that two plot threads are about to violently collide as the escalating gang war between the 110th Gang and the Scorpions takes another brutal turn.
In an effort to squash this beef, Scorpion leader Mac Gargan has paid a visit to Octavius to get himself a scorpion themed upgrade to wipe out his enemies once and for all. But as he starts wiping out victims left and right, Spider-Man follows the trail of destruction that can only be left by a maniac wielding a giant robotic tail and soon engages Gargan in a savage battle.
However, while Spidey soon starts to find that he’s bitten off more than he can chew, it soon becomes apparent that Norman is more concerned with tracking down Octavius than keeping an eye on his young ward which could spell doom for Parker.

Now that I’m nicely familiar with how Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is using its ability to zip in and out of each plot thread and change the speed of the momentum to build up the drama at the absolute, optimum point and episode 7 is an utterly perfect example of this in action. Thanks to the previous episode’s cliffhanger we already know that we have one of one of Spidey’s real heavy hitters, the Scorpion, in the mix, but while we anticipate a brawl between our hero and the first of his more major villains to make the show fully formed (I mean, the Unicorn and Speed Demon can hardly be described as A-list), the episode catches us unawares with another villain in waiting finally starting to show his true colours and I’ll give you a hint: it’s green…
The main bulk of the episode plays a rather neat game of taking your eyes off the prize by mostly concentrating upon the gradually thawing relationship between Nico and Harry after the latter managed to out Peter’s Spider-ness to his best friend and while Parker is still in deep water with the understandably hurt former. Not only does it bring Nico much deeper into the central plot line by bringing her into the loop, but it gives us a chance to show Harry in a more giving light as he tries to heal the rift by letting her learn to drive in his flashy car which eventually leads to a weird, Fast & Furious style adventure. However, while it’s a break from the more overtly superhero related threads, there is a nugget of a future story that concerns Nico possibly having supernatural powers and anyone familiar with her comic book history knows that she’s a spell casting member of the superhero team The Runaways.

However, while it’s great for the characters, this rather sweet side story has rather a more impressive role – to leave us utterly unprepared for what happens when Spider-Man butts heads with a man with a razor sharp scorpion tail. The fight, when it happens, is something of a sobering prospect thanks to the fact that it’s surprisingly way more brutal than I thought a Disney+ Spider-Man cartoon would be. Oh sure, it starts the same way that most other Spidey fights do, with our hero ricochetting all over the place like a rubber ball while bamboozling his foe with a rapid fire mixture of quips and thwips, but shit soon gets plenty serious thanks to Norman Osborn taking his eye off the ball.
Simply put, after seemingly putting Gargan down by using up all of his reserves of webbing, the villain pushes his gamma-powered suit so hard it heats up to the point that it not only melts his bonds, but fuses his suit to his skin and the resulting pain allows him to not only beat Spider-Man to a bloody pulp, but stab him with his tail too.
The main reason for this is that Norman – who is supposed to be Peter’s “dude at the desk” is so obsessed with tracking down his old colleague, Octavius, that he completely neglects the fact that his talked a teenager into fighting a stone cold killer with a scorpion tail fused to his skin. In fact, he’s so nonplussed with the superhero brawl he incited, he even takes his earpiece out to focus on his more preferred mission. It’s a telling trait that reveals Osborn to be not quite the samaritan he’s been posing as, thanks to his ownpriorities selfishly ranking higher than making sure Peter is doing OK. While it’s hardly up there in the villianous stakes as shooting yourself full of unstable super soldier serum, dressing in a Halloween mask and murdering girlfriends, it’s definitely the first non-benevolent act of a man destined to do horrendous acts.

However, in a truly exciting twist, when Osborn realises that he’s fucked up, he ultimately saves seriously wounded Peter in a way that triggers vast amounts of nerdgasms. When things look their bleakest, Parker is saved when Norman dispatches a very familiar looking remote controlled gadget to yank a busted up Spidey out of the fire. That’s right, he’s saved by a prototype Goblin Glider and it’s yet another expert example of the show drip feeding us ominous foreshadowing in the form of plot wrinkles that once again puts a superlative show over the top and delivers a narrative sting worthy of the Scorpion himself.
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