Summary
- Too many Spider-heroes may hinder Peter’s development in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
- Introducing multiple heroes early on can diminish Spider-Man’s uniqueness and delay his personal struggles.
- It might have been more impactful to reveal Ghost Spider later in the series and focus on Spider-Man’s solo heroics first.
How does the old saying go? If you’ve got one, you’ve probably got an infestation? That’s the issue that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man could be running into with heroes, and more specifically, Spider-heroes, before even beginning season 2. Season one established best friend sorceress Nico Minoru, girl-crush water-master Wave, and whiz kid Hulk-lite Brawn among others, not to mention Daredevil and almost half of the Avengers.
Seeing Marvel comic heroes team up on page and screen is one of the most thrilling aspects of comic book fandom. But, ensemble teams don’t always work. It’s already ruined an earlier Spider-Man show. Too many spiders on the web might make for too many cooks in the kitchen before viewers are served up a fully realized Spider-Man. Teammates are great, but Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man‘s grounded interpretation of the character is jumping too fast into Spider-Verse territory — without the intensely-focused Spider-Man origin offered by the first Spider-Verse film.
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Jeff Trammell, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man‘s creator, is a fantastic writer. He is clearly capable of featuring Spider-Man’s “street-level” stories, as he described them to IndieWire, even amidst sweeping superhuman powers and timelines. While season one may have hinted at Silk, an under-featured organic web Spider-Woman, Trammell did indeed announce Gwen Stacy’s Ghost Spider to join the gang for season 2. The thing is, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man didn’t go out of its way to connect viewers with Spider-Man. So, what happens when everyone around him is essentially another version of the same hero? It worked great on the silver screen, but didn’t fare so well on the small one.
Too Many Spiders To Feed
Thanks to Jeff Trammell, Spider-Man is finally getting a great TV series to star in after Marvel’s disappointing Spider-Man (2017) on Disney XD. That show was panned for focusing too much on alternate Spider-People while featuring questionable animation — points also raised against Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Friendly Neighborhood‘s Peter develops into Spider-Man by the first season’s end. Eventually, Peter trusts himself as the hero he’s destined to be. But in this timeline, fans don’t witness Spider-Man’s real suit until the last two episodes, and neither of those episodes feature a fight Spider-Man solely wins.
At the same time, a barrage of superhumans, heroic and villainous, appear throughout the piloting season. While it’s exciting to see Spider-Man’s rogues gallery take shape, it can be less exciting to see other heroes crop up around him during his personal origin story. Spider-Man’s powers are new to Peter, even if they aren’t new to the audience. This Peter is still developing as a character. Why does it seem as if everyone around Peter is also super? While the implication that everyone is powerful is true and inspiring, it does kind of make Spider-Man seem less special in his own story.
In Into The Spider-Verse, audiences meet to Miles Morales as he’s writing about great expectations and what he’s meant to become. He’s passionate about art, and visits his shady Uncle Aaron, who is similarly passionate and inspires Miles’ personality while contrasting his cop father. Then, he’s bitten by a radioactive spider. By the time Miles is bitten, audiences already feel like they know him. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man‘s Peter is bitten in the first episode of the season after being invaded by Dr. Strange and a symbiote monster. Who is this Peter? Unclear. His background ends there.
Too Tangled A Web
Maybe it’s unnecessary at this point to get another Peter Parker backstory, but it’s also clear that this Peter is from an adjacent timeline, and we haven’t officially met him yet. That’s for sure, because viewers haven’t seen him with any friends introduced in this show before. Thus, it makes sense their stories are being fleshed out. Still, it would be nice to see Peter have a personal struggle or two unrelated to Spider-Man’s heroics before Spider-Gwen swings in to do what fans haven’t seen Spidey do for more than two episodes yet.
Gwen Stacy is an integral piece of Spider-Man’s development. As a love interest in the comics, her tragic story arc teaches Peter a hard lesson about the dangers his loved ones are placed in by his heroics. In turn, the audience gets a decent allegory about the importance of work-life balance. She also becomes Ghost Spider in the Edge of Spider-Verse comic book series; this is the version of Gwen most likely to be represented in Season 2 of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
Great Power, Great Respect
Trammell initially marketed his series to IndieWire as a “street-level Spider-Man” show. The show still needs to tell street-level Spider-Man stories. While it will be cool to witness Trammell’s spin on Ghost Spider, it might have been cooler to reveal her later in season 2, maybe after audiences see Spidey solo a villain without getting beaten to a pulp. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is a well-written show, but its pacing is becoming questionable. Trammell has earned his respect so far, so maybe the alarm is false. Still, it would feel best to get to know Peter before his many, many friends.