The Biggest Change Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Makes To Peter Parker

This article contains spoilers for "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man."

Everyone knows the origin of Spider-Man; a nerdy kid from Queens gets bit by a radioactive spider, gaining super strong, wall-crawling, web-slinging superpowers he uses to fight crime (in red and blue spandex, of course).

"Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man," the newly-premiered animated series, mixes up the familiar beats. In this version, Peter Parker (Hudson Thames) doesn't get bitten by the spider in a laboratory on a school field trip. On his first day at Midtown High School, Doctor Strange (Robin Atkin Downes) emerges from a portal fighting what appears to be a symbiote monster, if not Venom himself. The spider comes out of the portal, and once the battle is over, bites him. Smash cut to weeks later, when Peter has become Spider-Man. 

The ongoing "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" comic is filling in the gaps, and it confirms something I pieced together later in the episode. There's an important detail missing here: Peter's Uncle Ben. Now, he does exist ... or did. In the opening minutes of the show, when Aunt May (Kari Wahlgren) is driving Peter to school, they vaguely mention Ben's passing — i.e., it happened before Peter became Spider-Man.

Look, adaptations can and should make changes, but this is backward storytelling. Spider-Man having a dead Uncle isn't just a backstory bit to check off a list. The important part is how Ben died, and that Peter himself was indirectly culpable for it by not stopping the man who'd go on to kill Ben.

"Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" is pulling a lot from the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Spider-Man, played by Tom Holland. Those films have earned some controversy (or at least confusion) from Spidey-fans for never referencing Uncle Ben. Instead, Peter appears to learn "with great power comes great responsibility" from May (Marisa Tomei) in "Spider-Man: No Way Home" — specifically his failure to stop the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) from murdering her.

The exclusion of Uncle Ben, to me, feels reactionary to the Andrew Garfield-led "Amazing Spider-Man" films, which never took off even as they made money. Part of the reason those movies got off on the wrong foot is that the first film replayed Peter's origin as Spider-Man, including Uncle Ben's (Martin Sheen) death, beat for beat. This is even though Sam Raimi's original "Spider-Man" film was only 10 years old and still well-regarded — from the beginning, "The Amazing Spider-Man" was arguing for its own redundancy. 

Since audiences had already seen Uncle Ben die, twice, Sony and Marvel Studios apparently took the lesson not to feature him in the Holland "Spider-Man" movies. People know the gist, and they can assume that some version of Ben's death played out, offscreen, before we met Holland's Peter in "Captain America: Civil War."

But "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" takes this further — and too far. Spider-Man has a perfect origin story, one that encapsulates how he's both more vulnerable and more heroic because he's a flawed person, capable of making mistakes and amazing feats. 

A piece of writing advice that has stuck with me is, if you want to give your character an effective backstory, don't write that something bad happened to them. Write that they made a choice that had bad consequences, and now they feel they have to make up for it. Spider-Man's origin stands as exempli gratia of this. If Peter Parker doesn't get a painful lesson in responsibility and why he must help others, then it feels like he's just Spider-Man for the heck of it. I think, by accident, that's the implication "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" has created for itself.

"Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" is streaming on Disney+, with new episodes released in batches of two on Wednesdays.