Ultimate Spider-Man, Season 1, Episode 17: Snow Day; Episode 18: Damage
Episode 17, "Snow Day" is... it's a neat, if simple, episode. It's a pretty light-hearted one that involves the Junior Avengers going off on a vacation, and thanks to Nova not understanding the meaning of "classified", they end up having their vacation on a remote island in the Bermuda triangle, which is a prison island for a superpowered villain, classic Spider-Man baddie Sandman. The episode actually is structured pretty well, with the episode starting with a fun montage of the Junior Avengers fooling around until the legitimately creepy "Sandy" and "Flint" show up. Obviously I'm familiar enough with Marvel comics to know what's going on, but the execution and the little suspense and mystery is pretty neat. We quickly learn that Sandman is apparently this crazy dude, seemingly with some regression symptoms and split personalities (it's never really made clear), and we get a fight. There's not much to the episode beyond that, but thanks to Sandman's unique powers, we do get some fine, fine visuals.
Of course, after the Junior Avengers retreat back to the Helicarrier, turns out that Sandman hitched a ride on the fuck-ton of sand that was stuck to the Junior Avengers' costumes, which is actually a pretty well-done moment. The fight in New York is pretty short, with a standard "turn him into glass" solution.
Overall, taken on the surface, the episode isn't that much. It's just them fighting Sandman, and eventually imprisoning him in this rotating prison. What is interesting, though, is the deus-ex-exposition hieroglyphics that Luke and Spider-Man find in Sandman's sand labyrinth, detailing how it's Nick Fury and SHIELD that caught Sandman and dumped him in an island in the middle of nowhere. And, as Fury later admits -- forgot about. No wonder Sandman got crazy! Yeah, while Fury might be nominally on the side of good, the evidence of nasty shit he does is just piling up by the episode, huh? I've seen the episode titles so I know who the final villain of this season is going to be, but it's still not a good look for Fury, especially after the whole Zodiac thing.
Still, "Snow Day" is a deccent episode. Episode 18, "Damage", where the episode opens with the villainous team, the Wrecking Crew doing the whole "wrecking" thing in the middle of Times Square.
Also, apparently the superheroes still haven't came up with a name for their little group, with Nova's lame attempt at introducing themselves amounting to "some people to stop a Wrecking Crew". Nope, the SPTSAWC isn't as catchy as Junior Avengers. The battle is destructive as all hell, what with, y'know, the villains being called the Wrecking Crew, although Spider-Man ends up causing a pretty cool (if horrifying) action sequence when he drops a bunch of huge rubble pieces strung together with web.
Enter: Damage Control, a part of the Marvel universe that I was genuinely unaware of until this very moment. It's apparently a little group (and I think a subsidiary of SHIELD?) that is made up of a bunch of dudes in construction vehicles, equipped with shrink rays, and deal with all the collateral damage caused by all these superheroes and supervillains fucking shit up all the time. (Their logo is a bulldog's face, for... some inexplicable reason)
That's actually pretty clever!
And then Nick Fury, pissed at the SPTSAWC's wanton destruction, ends up assigning them to Damage Control as punishment. And as much as he insists they go "undercover", they also go undercover in costume. And JJJ's mook is allowed to live-record Spider-Man. A huge chunk of the episode ends up with Spider-Man and a shrunken Nova to try and figure out who is working with the Wrecking Crew. Spider-Man noted that when the Wrecking Crew rampaged, they left the bank unmolested, but when they arrive with Damage Control, the building next to it has an entrance to the bank.
Spider-Man ends up immediately suspecting Mac Porter, leader of Damage Control... with the only real reason being that Mac was the last person to enter the building in question. Then Nick shows up and acts like a dick -- apparently, he never really cared about the whole 'undercover' deal, and doesn't even care to listen to any of the SPTSAWC's explanations about what they were doing. This demoralizes everyone and gets them to abandon the whole chase for the supervillains and focus on cleaning up... which is just bizarre, but okay. I'll buy White Tiger and Iron Fist keeping calm, and Luke's like joined at the hip to Danny.
Spider-Man ends up investigating Damage Control headquarters on his own, followed by Nova (who... who snuck inside Spider-Man's costume somewhere somehow) and aided by a stealth technology that never comes up before and to my knowledge doesn't come up anywhere else in this season. Kay. It's a bit of a weird sequence of events, honestly, but eventually, Spider-Man and Small Nova end up fighting against the Wrecking Crew on top of the Damage Control building, there's some half-assed moral about not wrecking too much shit, and they win. Spider-Man is exonerated, and becomes best buddies with Mac Porter and Nick Fury again.
Overall, I like this significantly less than the previous one, which is perhaps a bit more boring, but far more solid. "Damage" feels (and I know I sound like a broken record) like it really should've taken another step in the editing stage. I did enjoy it, though. I guess this is the obligatory Nova-focused episode, since Spider-Man mostly teams up with him? It really feels bland, though, and I genuinely didn't even consider it until writing this final paragraph. Compared to the episodes where White Tiger, Iron Fist, Luke Cage and Nick Fury took the spotlight -- regardless of the qualities of those individual episodes -- they really short-selled Nova into what's essentially a one-note joke, didn't they? Eh. It's not bad, I suppose, other than Nick Fury's bizarre idiocy and his flip-flop on whether he wants the Junior Avengers to look for clues or to just do some community service.
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