[6.8/10] There’s just way too much going on here. Once again, Ultimate Spider-Man tries to go epiq and ends up feeling a little too jumbled and unclear in a capstone episode.
I will say that I enjoyed the Rhino/Agent Venom story (even though Cloak seemed to disappear kind of randomly?). Look, two guys being at odds but then learning to work together when someone they both care about and admire is in danger isn’t exactly groundbreaking stuff. But it’s solidly done here, and also informed by the history between Flash and Alex that the audience already knows.
But the material with Spidey vs. Zola just goes off the rails. Trying to do more villain mashups, a fight with a Zola-bot who can absorb our heroes’ powers, a fight in a digital world where you can also somehow steal people’s powers, and a plot to not only take over the world, but take over Spider-Man’s body is just too much at once, especially in a half hour episode. Nothing has time to breathe or get developed, and the episode just whips the viewer from one insane, poorly-explained scenario to the next.
I’m not one to demand a lot realism or logic in my superhero stories, but at times the rules, if any, for what Zola and/or Spidey can do in this situation are downright incoherent. Who’s inhabiting whose body, where everyone’s “mind” is, how the power absorption thing works and where, are all completely unclear. I’m not saying I want technobabble or shoehorned-in exposition, but it was just very hard to follow any of what was happening in the various skirmishes between Spider-Man and Zola, and what impact a fight or power-borrowing in one realm had on another, to where setbacks and triumphs each had a deus ex machina quality to them (no pun intended, given the circumstances.
It doesn't help that the CGI in this episode was really dodgy. If we’re being charitable, you could say that Zola’s robot body has an intentional uncanny valley quality to add to the creepiness. But realistically, it just looked poorly composited and awkward when mixed with the hand-drawn animated material. The same goes for the rebuilding of the Triskellion, which looked sub-PS2 in quality.
I was also underwhelmed by the tacked on “it’s the people who make a school, not the building” moral, though the running gags between Spidey and Flash about proper quipping got a smile out of me.
Overall, this probably should have been its own two or three episode arc rather than one jumbled pseudo-finale, but there’s some cool (albeit mostly unmotivated) action sequences and a decent story with Rhino and Agent Venom to make this one watchable.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2019-02-10T05:46:33Z
[6.8/10] There’s just way too much going on here. Once again, Ultimate Spider-Man tries to go epiq and ends up feeling a little too jumbled and unclear in a capstone episode.
I will say that I enjoyed the Rhino/Agent Venom story (even though Cloak seemed to disappear kind of randomly?). Look, two guys being at odds but then learning to work together when someone they both care about and admire is in danger isn’t exactly groundbreaking stuff. But it’s solidly done here, and also informed by the history between Flash and Alex that the audience already knows.
But the material with Spidey vs. Zola just goes off the rails. Trying to do more villain mashups, a fight with a Zola-bot who can absorb our heroes’ powers, a fight in a digital world where you can also somehow steal people’s powers, and a plot to not only take over the world, but take over Spider-Man’s body is just too much at once, especially in a half hour episode. Nothing has time to breathe or get developed, and the episode just whips the viewer from one insane, poorly-explained scenario to the next.
I’m not one to demand a lot realism or logic in my superhero stories, but at times the rules, if any, for what Zola and/or Spidey can do in this situation are downright incoherent. Who’s inhabiting whose body, where everyone’s “mind” is, how the power absorption thing works and where, are all completely unclear. I’m not saying I want technobabble or shoehorned-in exposition, but it was just very hard to follow any of what was happening in the various skirmishes between Spider-Man and Zola, and what impact a fight or power-borrowing in one realm had on another, to where setbacks and triumphs each had a deus ex machina quality to them (no pun intended, given the circumstances.
It doesn't help that the CGI in this episode was really dodgy. If we’re being charitable, you could say that Zola’s robot body has an intentional uncanny valley quality to add to the creepiness. But realistically, it just looked poorly composited and awkward when mixed with the hand-drawn animated material. The same goes for the rebuilding of the Triskellion, which looked sub-PS2 in quality.
I was also underwhelmed by the tacked on “it’s the people who make a school, not the building” moral, though the running gags between Spidey and Flash about proper quipping got a smile out of me.
Overall, this probably should have been its own two or three episode arc rather than one jumbled pseudo-finale, but there’s some cool (albeit mostly unmotivated) action sequences and a decent story with Rhino and Agent Venom to make this one watchable.