Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man S01E03 Review: Deal with the Devil

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Season 1, Episode 3: Secret Identity Crisis

So yeah, we finally start this episode off with Norman Osborn actually being a proper character instead of relying on audience knowledge that he's normally a maniac that flies around in a goblin costume. I have criticized the amount of characters we are supposedly 'building up', but I enjoy the fact that at least one of the future main antagonists, Green Goblin, the Spider-Man antagonist, gets to be built up quite a bit as Spider-Man's mentor. This is a relationship that would never have worked anywhere as well in a movie series, so I'm happy to see some focus given to this more sinister mentorship in this series. If nothing else, I do feel like the idea of a version of the Spider-Man mythos where Norman starts off as Peter's mentor and confidant to be quite cool.

And it is interesting to see how my initial knowledge of who Norman Osborn is in the comics does make what he does a bit more sinister. It wouldn't be out of character for Tony Stark to also hire out a whole expensive restaurant in a none-too-subtle way to 'wow' Peter Parker, after all. But Norman reveals that the whole Oscorp internship thing has been a way to locate Spider-Man, with the relatively reasonable deduction that Spider-Man must be getting his fancy equipment from somewhere. And if not from Oscorp, one of the biggest technological firms out there, then from someone off-grid and very smart. Hence, hiring the four smartest youth to work for him. It's, allegedly, 'pure luck' that he hired Spider-Man himself instead of his supplier. Norman then spins this into a recruitment pitch, wanting Spider-Man to work for him. Peter turns this down, initially, which Norman takes surprisingly well. 

Lonnie Lincoln, the future Tombstone, who we've gotten to know a bit in the previous couple of episodes as a charming, super-popular school superstar athlete, gets a different 'deal with the devil' himself. His little brother has joined the 110th Street gang, and Lonnie charges in to confront the gangsters to get his brother out. His little brother feels utterly upstaged and inferior to Lonnie, but the 110th confrontation ends just about as well as you expect it for Lonnie. He ends up joining the gang in the place of his brother, and one can't help but think that the gang recruited Lonnie's little brother exactly for this response. It's an interesting start to the build-up of the gang wars storyline that's going to take over a significant chunk of this season, if nothing else, and a nice bit of social commentary. Lonnie is essentially 'held hostage' by this gang, despite having such a great future in front of him, and it's interesting to see what choices he makes in the season. Knowing that he's otherwise known as the supervillain Tombstone in the comics does take a bit of the wind out of the sails for me, but the setup is good, if nothing else. 

The episode then has its big fight scene against a supervillain Bonnie-and-Clyde duo -- the minor supervillain Speed Demon, and an even more minor one called Tarantula. They've gotten their hands on some supervillain tech, with Speed Demon having, well, super-speed; while Tarantula has some slashing blades. Spider-Man zips in to fight them, and gets into a bit more trouble... until Norman chimes in from an earpiece and ends up helping Spider-Man in a 'guy in a chair' manner. Just like Lonnie, Peter ends up taking Norman's offer by the end of the episode, though he insists that it be done 'his way'. 

This is another slower episode, but a bit of a nice set-up. I do acknowledge that a lot of the scenes could stand to be a bit more interesting, and I'm not sure if it's the voice-acting or animation that doesn't quite 'grab' me as well as it should. But we get some neat buildup for the Peter/Norman relationship and the genesis of Lonnie's relationship with the 110th. It's just rather slow, is all, but being a bit slower to focus on relationship growth isn't necessarily a bad thing. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• New characters:
• Speed Demon, a.k.a. James Sanders, is a supervillain that was part of the Squadron Sinister -- a group of supervillains who challenged the Avengers with powers "suspiciously" similar to that of Marvel's biggest competitors, DC comics' Justice League. 
• Tarantula, a.k.a. Maria Vasquez, is the fifth character to utilize the mantle of minor Spider-Man villain "Tarantula". Maria was a heroic character in the comics, being a member of the Heroes for Hire team. 
• Big Donovan, better known as "Big Ben" Donovan in the comics, is a lawyer and a supporting character and sometimes-antagonist for Luke Cage and Daredevil. He has previously already appeared in the MCU in Luke Cage, as an antagonistic lawyer fully aligned with the mob. 
• Norman shows a video of Spider-Man stopping a bus with his bare hands, alluding to how Tony Stark showed a similar video when confronting Peter with his superhero identity in Captain America: Civil War.
• When rattling off upgrades for the Spider-Man suit, Norman name-drops night vision lenses (seen in Spider-Man: Homecoming) and a drone (seen in Spider-Man: Homecoming). Hilariously, Norman dismisses the drone as being 'too much', which was one of the main complaints that a lot of the detractors of the 'Iron Man's protege' angle that the MCU takes.
• The other upgrades are a bit more non-specific, but 'a mild electric shock to ward off attackers' seems to recall the Batman movie The Dark Knight; while 'a police scanner wired into the mask' seems to be a general enough superhero gimmick. 
• Norman snarks that Peter would've had an easier alibi pretending to be Spider-Man's friend. This is a common handwave-excuse for a lot of older superhero comics, and Spider-Man himself has utilized this excuse many times. In particular, the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy had him use this excuse to justify him getting pictures of the superhero.