Warning: This article contains spoilers for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man episodes 9 and 10, “Hero or Menace” and “If This Be My Destiny.” So goes Spider-Man’s mantra: “With great power comes great respect.” Wait, what? Over its 10-episode first season, Marvel Studios’ animated series has put a twist on the Spider-Man mythos, from the fateful spider bite that occurred during Doctor Strange’s (Robin Atkin Downes) dimension-spanning battle with a Venom-like symbiotic alien (Kellen Goff) to Oscorp CEO Norman Osborn (Colman Domingo) mentoring Peter Parker (Hudson Thames), a 15-year-old high school freshman and superhero prodigy/protégé.
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Wednesday’s two-episode season finale circled back to the premiere, where a spider of mysterious origin descended from a strand of web, bit Peter, and then scurried away on a classmate’s backpack. In the months since, as a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, Peter has been working with Norman and Harry Osborn (Zeno Robinson) to get dangerous new weapons supplied by Otto Octavius (Hugh Dancy) off the streets amid a turf war between rival gangs: the 110th, led by Big Donovan (Leilani Barrett), and the Scorpions, led by the ruthless and psychotic Mac Gargan (Jonathan Medina).
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With Great Power…
After suffering the piercing sting of the Scorpion’s tail and failing to stop his friend Lonnie Lincoln (Eugene Byrd) from going after Gargan, Peter received an unsparing pep talk from Norman, who told him to stop pulling his punches and holding back because “with great power comes great respect.” Outfitted with a new red-and-blue costume, a reinvigorated Spider-Man swung into action to stop the 110th from intercepting a truck loaded with gear and tech seized from Octavius’ lab following his arrest by the Sokovia Accords-sanctioned armored Avenger Iron Man (Mick Wingert).
Lonnie became entrenched within the gang as the season progressed, only to become its de facto leader when Big Don was scared off by the Scorpion. As Lonnie hurriedly raided the truck to give the 110th an advantage over Scorpion’s gang, he accidentally knocked loose a canister of the chemical gas Diox-3 that hardened his skin, making him as strong as his namesake: Tombstone.
The Scorpion Stings But Once
But when Scorpion seemingly killed Lonnie, an enraged Spider-Man nearly impaled the Scorpion with his own stinger before being talked down from going too far. After all: with great power must come great responsibility.
With the Scorpions defeated, the near-invulnerable Tombstone took control of the 110th, and Norman claimed the Octavius Tech to finish Oscorp’s secret project: experimenting on spiders to replicate Spider-Man’s DNA and create more Spider-Men.
Strange Tales
All plots converged in a bunker beneath Oscorp, where Norman unveiled Project Monolith, a gateway to outer space made possible by Peter and fellow Oscorp interns Jeanne (Anjali Kuanpaneni), Asha (Erica Luttrell) , and Amadeus Cho (Aleks Le). By harvesting the limitless resources of the galaxy, Oscorp could make humanity as formidable as the Avengers and the alien invaders who assembled Earth’s mightiest heroes during the Battle of New York.
But before Norman could activate the gateway, the sorcerer Doctor Strange portaled in and warned against opening a door to the cosmos. While Peter recognized Strange from orientation day at Midtown, Strange denied ever visiting the school. Curious. As Norman lashed out at superhumans like Strange and the Avengers, blaming them for causing the destruction that made Project Monolith and the Superhuman Registration Act necessary, he activated the wormhole — and opened a portal to Klyntar, the planet of the symbiotes.
If This Be My Destiny…!
As Spider-Man teamed up with Doctor Strange to fight the same symbiotic alien from the first episode, not-Venom made it so that Oscorp’s animal experiments —a lizard, a snake, a tarantula, a mouse, and one genetically-altered spider — escaped captivity. By using the Eye of Agamotto to open a portal to return the symbiote to its home dimension, the spider, Strange, and the alien ended up where the series started: at Midtown High orientation day.
The timey-wimey season finale revealed that Spider-Man shut off the gateway at the exact moment the closing portal severed the Oscorp spider’s strand of web, which resulted in it falling from the sky and biting Peter. (Which came first: the spider or the bite?)
Spider-Man and Strange shut down the portal with the symbiotic alien back on the other side of the interdimensional doorway, but a small piece of symbiote was left behind and recovered by Norman. As Spider-Man and Strange pondered what might have changed by going back in time — say, a branched timeline — Spider-Man realized it was his destiny.
“I believe that things that are supposed to happen always find a way to happen,” he told Strange. “Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don’t. And sometimes they really, really hurt. But it’s okay… Because those things put us on a path to becoming who we’re meant to be. And this is who I’m meant to be.” This momentous event had a secret, silent observer: Uatu the Watcher.
Peter, no longer able to trust Oscorp or Norman, made the decision to end his internship. But he’s not going solo. With Harry funding their own company for young geniuses, they sent out invitations to the first class of WEB: the Worldwide Engineering Brigade. In the finale’s closing moments, Spider-Man swung out into an uncertain but bright future, and Aunt May visited an inmate in jail: Peter’s father, Richard Parker.
All 10 episodes of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man season 1 are now streaming on Disney+, and the series has been renewed through season 3 by Marvel Studios.
