Spoilers ahead for “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” episode 1, “Amazing Fantasy.”
“Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” faces the unenviable task of once again explaining how Spider-Man (voiced here by Hudson Thames) came to be. The webslinger’s tragic origin has been revisited roughly as often as Batman’s, so the fact that the show focuses on Peter Parker’s early superhero days may have caused seasoned Marvel aficionados to roll their eyes in preemptive exasperation for having to sit through yet another radioactive spider bite and the death of Uncle Ben. Fortunately, “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” not only aces its version of the hero’s origin story, but does it so well that its episode 1, “Amazing Fantasy,” should be required viewing for all superhero showrunners.
After briefly introducing the main character as a chronically late teen who’s about to start in a prestigious school, “Amazing Fantasy” gives viewers a gloriously efficient CliffsNotes version of his superhero origin while masking it with a cool superhero battle. The spider that gives Peter his powers crawls through a portal while Doctor Strange (Robin Atkin Downes) battles a symbiotic alien (Kellen Goff) in front of Peter’s would-be school, and its bite is barely an afterthought amidst all the action. In a span of just a few minutes, the episode delivers Spider-Man’s origin and some new worldbuilding, including the introduction of Peter’s friend and obscure Marvel character Nico Minoru (Grace Song). It also finds time to drop copious hints that this isn’t the version of the character we knew, such as Uncle Ben already being dead before the show begins. The setting is something executive producer Brad Winderbaum had already confirmed beforehand, but the first minutes of “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” drive it home so well that he never really needed to.
The show tells more than just an origin story
As it tackles the origin story before the opening credits even roll, “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” also manages to set up what seems like several seasons’ worth of plot points. The spider that bites Peter descends through a portal that opens during Doctor Strange’s fight with a demonic creature, which savvy Spider-Man fans will no doubt recognize as setup for a Marvel Cinematic Universe-style multiverse — which, probably not coincidentally, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man explores with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” (Of course, the Spider-Verse movies have dipped into this territory as well).
The episode maps out other tentative avenues for the show to traverse, as well. The creature Strange battles is a Venom-style symbiote, which lays the groundwork for the character’s eventual appearance — and, by extension, everything from other symbiotes to the powerful Marvel villain Knull, who recently made his big-screen debut in “Venom: The Last Dance.” What’s more, the power-giving spider doesn’t die after biting Peter, but crawls away and hitches a ride on the backpack of another, unseen person who leaves the scene, thus setting up the potential appearance of further spider-powered folks on this show’s Earth.
From the moment the portal opens to the fateful spider bite is just a little over four minutes of screen time. This impressive economy of storytelling allows the majority of the episode to focus on Spider-Man’s street-level heroics and Peter’s struggle to maintain his work-life balance … in other words, the very core aspects of the character. While this isn’t quite the shortest version of Spidey’s origin story ever told (that honor goes to the live-action MCU version, which skips the origin story altogether), it’s hard to find a more effectively told version of the tale.
A couple of /Film’s editors spoke more about the first episode of “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast:
You can subscribe to /Film Daily on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and send your feedback, questions, comments, concerns, and mailbag topics to us at [email protected].
