Ultimate Spider-Man, Season 2, Episodes 8-9:
Episode 8: Carnage
These two episodes are basically sort of following up on plot threads introduced in season one, and it's... I'm not sure if I like Ultimate Spider-Man basically turning the Dr. Octopus and Green Goblin stuff into recurring villains as opposed to arc villains. There's a distinctive difference between villains that keep showing up every couple of episodes to be a menace, or to have a villain whose conflict is built up across multiple episodes. Green Goblin, in this episode, ends up being reduced into basically the former. He shows up, attacks Spider-Man and his buddies, and goes after his "son", who, in his warped mind, he has ended up considering Peter Parker more of his son (thanks to the whole "Spider-Man was created because of Oscorp science" stuff) than Harry, and injects a perfected version of the Venom symbiote. Which turns Peter Parker into this show's version of Carnage.Which... yeah, I guess you can't really get a proper Carnage adaptation in a lighter-and-softer kid's show, but Carnage is honestly treated like an afterthought in an episode named after him. Unlike the slow buildup to "Harry Osborn is Venom in this continuity", the fact that Carnage is just a glooped-up Peter Parker lasted for all of three minutes as he throws around the Junior Avengers, before the symbiote goes back to Harry.
There's a rather bland team-up between Spider-Man and Venom as they fight Green Goblin and basically go through the same song and dance that they did in season one, only with significantly less drama. There's also the genuinely funny bit where Iron Fist has to don the Spider-Man suit and has to improvise the whole deal, getting a couple of namaste's out while in the suit.
Overall, while it's not bad, "Carnage" is definitely a pretty bland and uninteresting 20 minutes of animation that really just felt like it's lacking any sort of energy and passion to really tell its story.
Episode 9: House Arrest
This is sort of a plot thread that's been going through the second season's first half... and it really hasn't amounted to anything at all beyond some genuinely bad joke-cutaways in some of the Sinister Six villain episodes. The fact that the Junior Avengers are crashing in Peter's house and sort of crowding him out ends up being resolved in a very, very anticlimactic way as the Helicarrier is finished almost offscreen, and the team basically leaves Peter at the end of the episode. The entire episode is spent mostly on the five of them accidentally activating the house's SHIELD defense systems and having to fight robot fridges and bullshit like that -- it's a lot funnier than the premise is, and the premise isn't even that funny. There is an attempted aesop/moral of Spider-Man having to appreciate his friends and not think bad about them, but the episdoe doesn't go hard enough to Spider-Man being unappreciative or a dick to his friends that the lesson seemed to be tacked on randomly just to try and handwave this episode as some sort of character moment. It's just 20 minutes of genuinely uninteresting action. They're not even trying to tell a story here. There's just no story. It's just 20 minutes of uninteresting action scenes and bad quips, like the episode was cobbled last minute or something.
This is sort of a plot thread that's been going through the second season's first half... and it really hasn't amounted to anything at all beyond some genuinely bad joke-cutaways in some of the Sinister Six villain episodes. The fact that the Junior Avengers are crashing in Peter's house and sort of crowding him out ends up being resolved in a very, very anticlimactic way as the Helicarrier is finished almost offscreen, and the team basically leaves Peter at the end of the episode. The entire episode is spent mostly on the five of them accidentally activating the house's SHIELD defense systems and having to fight robot fridges and bullshit like that -- it's a lot funnier than the premise is, and the premise isn't even that funny. There is an attempted aesop/moral of Spider-Man having to appreciate his friends and not think bad about them, but the episdoe doesn't go hard enough to Spider-Man being unappreciative or a dick to his friends that the lesson seemed to be tacked on randomly just to try and handwave this episode as some sort of character moment. It's just 20 minutes of genuinely uninteresting action. They're not even trying to tell a story here. There's just no story. It's just 20 minutes of uninteresting action scenes and bad quips, like the episode was cobbled last minute or something. 
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