Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man S01E04 Review: Unlocking New Suits

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Season 1, Episode 4: Hitting the Big Time

Another episode, another set of 3-5 new characters to keep track about. At least this time around the new players are organized to villainous factions? The first two episodes were honestly quite rough in its attempt to introduce so many supporting characters, but "Hitting the Big time" does it a bit better. 

And one major thing that it does is to have its three primary players -- Peter, Norman and Lonnie -- be focused on their own thing. Make no mistake, the focus of the episode is more about Lonnie's time in the 110th and the introduction of the Scorpion gang, but Peter and Norman have their own storyline going on. We've been beating filler villains like Butane and Speed Demon every episode, and it's nice that the show recognizes the repetitiveness of one-off villains. This episode is also a nice tie-in to Captain America: Civil War, where Norman gets some pressure from General Ross to get a superhero that would be a bit more amenable to listen to orders. That is totally something that a non-Goblin Norman Osborn would get up to, and trying to make Spider-Man "marketable" in all the wrong ways. For fans of the comics, it's a cute nod to the 'Secret Identity Crisis' storyline with Spider-Man's various alter egos, but it also makes for a nice (if not the best) parallel to Spider-Man: Homecoming and the revelation that Peter's super-duper-high-tech suit that he got from Iron Man actually has 'training wheels' on. Norman just gives Spider-Man a whole lot of fancy high-tech suits and expects him to be able to function, which ends up just about as well as jumping into a video game without a tutorial. 

That's cool, and we just keep cutting back and forth between Spider-Man's very poor attempts to utilize the variant suits until the episode ends with Spider-Man donning the 'Future Foundation' white-and-black suit from the comics to rescue a group of civilians trapped around vehicles on fire after a breakout from next episode's villains -- the future Rhino, Chameleon and Unicorn. And one extra. The little 'Russian gang' don't get to do much other than bicker and get arrested, but it's a nice setup for villains that will be recurring in a bit.

Three of the gangsters are captured, but Mila escapes... and at the end of the episode, she goes into a random garage where a bunch of supervillain tech lie around, and she meets Dr. Otto Octavius, another one of Spider-Man's biggest foes! 

Meanwhile, while the second and third episode focuses a lot on Peter Parker trying to juggle his various commitments and responsibilities, Lonnie finds his life crumbling around him. He's essentially 'held hostage' by the 110th and has no way to really explain this to the people in his life, like his coach or his girlfriend. We get to see some manipulation tactics from the 110th's boss, Big Ben Donovan, who sends Lonnie on an errand to 'pick up some food', very knowingly setting Lonnie up to walk into the Scorpions' gang territory and nearly get shanked by them. Again, further holding Lonnie hostage -- there is some attempt on Big Ben's part of trying to play the 'noble mafia' and 'people's guardians' angle telling Lonnie that it's better to be friends with the devils that he knows will protect him, but the entire episode does deliver Big Ben and the 110th essentially trying to pull off a Stockholm Syndrome deal on Lonnie. They celebrate Lonnie's induction into the group, but really, at this point, Lonnie doesn't have much of a choice, does he? 

Again, I was a bit pessimistic about the Lonnie storyline, and while I'm not the biggest fan of how we were introduced to it in the first couple of episodes, this one is probably the first episode that sells me on it. Ditto for the Spider-Man/Norman relationship, with a nice balance of Norman's control-freak tendencies showing through while also being believable enough that Peter would stick around with him as an ally. Speaking of Peter's allies, this episode also ends in a bit of a cliffhanger as Peter accidentally reveals his identity to Harry Osborn. Okay!

Where I wasn't the most pleased with the rapid-fire introduction of side-characters, I feel like the Scorpion, Dr. Octopus, and the Rhino/Chameleon/Unicorn gang were done quite well here. The way they are integrated into the story and our primary established characters feels a lot more natural, and I also like the fact that they're being built up for the longer haul as opposed to the throwaway one-shot enemies like Tarantula or Butane. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Dr. Otto Octavius is, of course, the future Dr. Octopus. Like most incarnations of the character, but particularly the one from the PS4-PS5 Spider-Man video games, Dr. Octopus has a huge rivalry and is estranged with Norman Osborn. Other villains:
• Mikhail Systevich is better known as the supervillain Rhino, although the name has been swapped around a little. Rhino's traditional name is Aleksei Mikhailovich Sytsevich.
• Dmitri Smerdyakov is better known as the supervillain Chameleon, the shapeshifting spy.
• Way more obscure than the other two is Mila Masaryk, a gender-flipped version of Milos Masaryk, a.k.a. the Unicorn. We'll see her in action next episode.
• Mac Gargan is another well-known Spider-Man villain, the Scorpion. In live action, a version of Mac Gargan as a criminal with a scorpion tattoo appeared in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
• Mac's lieutenant Carmilla Black is better known in the comics as Scorpion II, or sometimes Scorpia. 
• One of the 110th is identified as Bulldozer, a member of the Wrecking Crew. The entire crew has previously appeared in the MCU in She-Hulk.
• The various suits that Norman created for Peter are nods to the Identity Crisis storyline, which involves Peter having to go superheroing with different costumes to clear the name of Spider-Man. Notably, his 'Hornet', 'Prodigy' and 'Dusk' costumes make an appearance here.  
• Spider-Man's white-and-black suit is based on the "Future Foundation" suit provided to him by the Fantastic Four in the comics. 
• The events of Captain America: Civil War, sans Spider-Man's involvement, happens around the time of this episode. The Sokovia Accords, the U.S. government's response to it and snippets of the airport battle are mentioned throughout the episode.
• Other MCU nods include mentions of the Chitauri invasion from The Avengers, Hulk's rampage in Johannesburg in Age of Ultron, and an Avenger-created AI going rogue and decimating a country, also from Age of Ultron.
• Roxanna name-drops the Tracksuits, the villainous gang from Hawkeye, as a rival that might hit the stash house they are robbing first/
• The episode's title card with a silhouetted Spider-Man surrounded by 'floating heads' is a homage to the cover of issue #100 of the original Amazing Spider-Man run. 
• At one point, Spider-Man rescues a kid's balloon that floats off, a reference to the old PlayStation 2 Spider-Man 2 game where a similar mission is a recurring side-quest that became a bit of a meme.
• The guy that Spider-Man saves from a burning car calls him 'Amazing', one of the associated with the hero.