2020 Memories: Maximum Venom
The Marvel's Spider-Man animated series, much like fellow 2017-launched series DuckTales, hit something of a peak back in 2019, but there were still angles worth exploring and business left unfinished at that time, so it needed at least one more season to close it all out. Well, we got that in 2020, but not in the traditional sense. The show had been renewed for only 12 more episodes. So the showrunners and the Disney XD Network had those episodes packaged as six full hour specials (about the amount The Owl House should have been granted for its own unconventional third and final season!) and gave this season a subtitle - "Maximum Venom", a play on the famous "Maximum Carnage" storyline of the Spider-Man comics. With a title like that, you'd think that would mean we were set to get a whole lot of Venom front and center. And it wasn't quite that. Venom was the central overarching Big Bad and final opponent for Spider-Man, but he thankfully wasn't all over the place. There was more going on here, particularly the long overdue reckoning of Max Modell was the mistakes, misjudgments, and sins he'd committed in the past as he built up Horizon High, the proper debut of Mary Jane Watson, the exploration of further Symbiote lore, more team-ups with other guest star heroes, Peter's identity finally getting revealed to Gwen and Anya, and settling things with major villains from the first season that had been MIA for a while - the Jackal and Norman Osborn, with the latter finally assuming his Green Goblin form. The real reason for the subtitle is revealed in the grand finale - Venom calls himself "MAXimum Venom" because it turns out he'd latched on to Max Modell to wear as his new host. Clever, yet at the same time ugh, really??? In any case, after one last planet-endangering showing from one of the best iterations of Venom I've seen in Spider-Man media, Max sacrifices everything he built in order to save the world and do right by his students, and from the ruins of Horizon, W.E.B is built, making the perfect "coming full circle" kind of ending.
My biggest nitpick with the season would probably be that I do not understand why Grady Scraps was promoted to a regular character, and why his hair is mud brown rather than auburn now. I assume that they had Scott Menville on the cast for every season, and maybe in the early development stages Otto was going to survive Season 2 and be one of the main heroes here, so once Otto was definitively killed off they still needed Scott to voice someone, so they brought his earlier one-shot character back in a mainstay role (and Otto does get a cameo via a video recording where he talks about Max). Grady is alright and everything, but it just bothered me the whole while.
