If you’d asked me what my predictions were for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man a few months ago it probably would have been a lot different to what I feel now. While I quite liked the change ups in the original cast and thought the Steve Ditko inspired animation style was pretty cool, my initial stance was to wonder if we really needed another brand new Spider-Man cartoon at all, especially when Marvel had such success bringing back the 90s X-Men Animated series and there’s a Spidey one from the same decade was just sitting right there.
However, in fairly short order, this new take on the web swinger proved to be an amazing and spectacular breath of fresh air as it took the MCU version of the character and made a sizable change when they swapped out Tony Stark for Norman Osborn to pull surrogate father duties for the fledgling superhero. While this may actually sound like an extended episode of What If…? (made all the more concrete by a cameo of the Watcher near the end of the episode), YFNS-M managed to rise above all the doubts and complaints to become and incredibly gripping, well written show that managed to give us yet another new take at comicdom’s most endearing do-gooder. But wait – we ain’t done yet…
After finally earning his superhero stripes by defeating the deranged Scorpion and not betraying his own personal ideals by listening to Osborn and taking his adversary out permanently, Peter Parker is settling into his new red and blue costume nicely as he awkwardly juggles school life with punching out car thieves. However, while his chaotic life has reached some sort of equilibrium, a few searing questions still remain, such as what has Norman Osborn been having Peter and his fellow Oscorp interns build for him and where did the spider come from that fave him his powers in the first place? Well, buckle up buckaroos, because answers to both of these questions are rapidly forthcoming.
You see, Norman has rather foolishly merged all of the projects his interns were working on to create project Monolith, an attempt to build a gateway to the cosmos to explore the universe and possibly strip mine it for new resources. Obviously, the majority of the interns and Doctor Connors are horrified at Norman’s underhanded tactics but the web fluid really hits the fan when Doctor Strange shows up to demand that the machine be destroyed, but as he was involved in the fight with an alien lifeform that destroyed Midtown High six months ago (something that Strange bizarrely has no memory of), Osborn refuses and switches his machine on regardless.
What should emerge by the very same symbiote creature that brawled with Strange before, but this time, Peter is able to join in more due to the fact that he now has spider powers that were bequeathed to him that day by an errant, mutated spider. But where did the fate changing arachnid actually come from and how come Strange doesn’t remember fighting this creature before?
As we start to wrap our heads around the paradox that’s about to occur, the pieces in Peter Parker’s orbit continue to move around the board that includes Nico, Otto Octavius, Daredevil and *checks notes* Peter’s father!?!
Just as I’ve started to think I’ve got a bead on YFNS-M’s unpredictable nature, it completely wrong foots me again in a way I didn’t see coming and anyone betting the farm on us finally seeing a full villain turn for either Osborn or Lonnie Lincoln may be quite surprised. However, you know a show is good when you don’t actually mind being ambushed by a completely different plot thread entirely as the writers finally choose to address the nature of the spider that started this whole mess in the first place. Essentially choosing to go a whole more complex route than just having Pete gnawed on by an irradiated creepy crawly, the whole twist is that due to a spot of time warping fuckery courtesy of Strange, the origin of Spider-Man proves to be much more paradoxical than ever before.
Remember back in the first episode when Doctor Strange suddenly showed up fighting what looked to be a symbiote of the Venom variety and none of it made sense? Do you also remember that the genetically tricked out arachnid that bit Peter came out of the same rift, seemingly out of nowhere? Well, it came from Pete’s future (our present) which means the spider that bit him was created by Oscorp months later in order to create more spider men and tumbled through the same portal through time that allowed Doctor Strange and the symbiote to trash Midtown High. The result may seem a little needless complicated and a tad “show offy” as we’re suddenly given an origin story that’s nothing like anything we’ve seen before, but not only does it make the randomness of that first episode make sense, but it shakes you out of your complacency by delivering a finale that’s nothing like you were expecting.
However, while some could argue that the actual episode is a little slight, the all-action nature gives way to a final parade of epilogues that sets up a whole bunch of potential adventures for the already green-lit second and third seasons. The big hitter is the fact that Richard Parker is not only alive, but in prison is a doozy and not just because The Amazing Spider-Man 2 already took a swing at it in a deleted scene, but while such a twist may tip over the line from ballsy to ill advised, the writers haven’t let us down yet. Elsewhere we continue to get threats that Octavius will escape and Lonnie “Tombstone” Lincoln will go full villain (check out the skin on his hands already starting to turn white), but I have a feeling that that’s more of a story that will play the long game rather than peak too soon; but we get some tantalising glimpses of what some of the good guys will be up too. Nico is delving more into her supernatural necklace and Peter’s fellow intern, Jeanne, turns out to be Finesse, an undercover vigilante partner of Daredevil who is having Norman Osborn put under surveillance due to his increasingly worrying busssiness practices. Speaking of Norman, the increasingly amoral entrepreneur closes out the season surprisingly well considering that he almost caused a full blown symbiote invasion of the planet because he’s got himself a sample of the gooey alien creature to fiddle with and anyone who has played Spider-Man 2 on the Playstation knows that Norman in possession of the organism that will soon become Venom is very bad news indeed.
On a more happier note is the fact that Harry Osborn is priming himself to step out from beneath his father’s stifling shadow by attempting to create W.E.B. (Worldwide Engineering Brigade), an organisation that will attract young geniuses to a independently run thinktank that will hopefully stop them being corrupted and exploited by his father. The potential for this last tease will undoubtedly provide maximum drama as it will not only provide Spidey with much more funky tech, but will put Harry in direct competition with his father and that’s the wonder of this show in a nutshell. The one thing more fun than watching all the plot threads come together in various, surprising ways is trying to anticipate how it’s all going to go down in advance.
With two seasons already planned out, the sky is the limit for this overachieving series that effortlessly makes everything old new again. But with some of Spider-Man’s biggest hitters still in the embryonic stage (we haven’t even touched on the main bulk of his rogues gallery yet) it’s good to know that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man hasn’t emptied both its webshooters in the early going.
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