Ultimate Spider-Man S02E19-20 Review: Luke I Am Your Father

Ultimate Spider-Man, Season 2, Episodes 19-20:

Episode 19: The Parent Trap

While the previous Nova/Guardians episode was kind of bland and forgettable, episode 19, "The Parent Trap" is... interesting. It's Luke Cage's turn to get the origin story spotlight, and we get the bonus of tying into the Zodiac episode from the previous season.

And it's... the execution is still utterly bland. Luke Cage and Spider-Man's dialogue are trite and banal, there's an over-reliance on the vaguely-defined McGuffin, the parents are bland plot devices and none of the jokes land. Well, one joke did. That's actually quite hilarious. But at least the episode makes the stakes clear. Luke's origin story is delivered by a none-too-subtle flashback which is like a weird combination of multiple superhero origin tropes -- parents dying in a plane crash, parents leaving behind superpowers, dead parents turning up alive and working for the enemy, et cetera. It's got few in common with the real Luke Cage origin story, although I don't suppose that would fly for a Saturday morning cartoon.

Scorpio, who in this continuity is Nick Fury's estranged brother, is... he's  basically wasted. The episode basically flip-flops between "get the plot device" and "LUKE CAGE PARENTS ANGST", and Scorpio is sort of shoehorned in there without any real purpose, really. He gets mutated into a giant muscle-beast, blows up, turns up that him blowing up isn't fatal, and is arrested.

And even if the dialogue is bad and the plot really tries to hammer home the whole "I want to tell my parents who I am, but I am afraid that they're actually really evil" bit has the subtlety of a wrecking ball with loudspeakers taped on, at least there's some measure of emotional core into the episode. It's a badly-executed emotional core, sure, but it does make "Parent Trap" at least marginally more memorable than the horrid "Guardians of the Galaxy". Kind of an underwhelming one.

Episode 20: Game Over

Wow, we're just going on and on with underwhelming, boring episodes, huh? "Game Over" takes one of my favourite zany villains from Marvel, X-Men antagonist Arcade, and turns an episode where he fights Captain America, Spider-Man and Wovlerine into a bore-fest. I mean, wow, none of the jokes work. Arcade's plan makes absolutely no sense, the video game jokes really don't make much sense beyond "hey, Spider-Man is yelling out video game terms", and both Wolverine and Captain America are really kind of bland. Sure, there's the attempted theme of Spider-Man having some vaguely-defined insight about how video games work, and how that gives him an advantage over old immortal war-horses like Captain America and Wolverine... but I'm not sure which game lets you go into the previous level, hack the previous level's robot boss, and use it as a power-up. Honestly, for all of Spider-Man's supposed insight into video gaming, he's not really showing it.

Arcade himself, again, doesn't really make much sense. I get that Ultimate Spider-Man might be trying to upgrade him from a bored rich psychopath getting his jollies by setting up wacky, whimsical death-traps in carnivals and shit into a video-game technology-controlling mutant, but he's basically just a generic boss fight here. At least this episode does what the previous two didn't, and gave us some really fun visuals with the Sentinel robot and other wacky video game enemies. Ultimately, though, another pretty bland and unmemorable episode. We're having a couple of those recently.