9 years later, Spider-Man still can’t break from the MCU’s most divisive Peter Parker tradition

At the beginning of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is a pretty lonely guy. After Aunt May died in the last movie, and since his friends have no memory of him thanks to Doctor Strange’s spell, the only person he really talks to is NYPD detective Jean DeWolff. They mostly just discuss whatever crime is going on at the moment.

However, there is one non-human entity he also talks with regularly, his AI assistant E.V., which continues an odd tradition for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Spider-Man.

While we met the MCU Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War, his first AI didn’t arrive until his first film, Spider-Man: Homecoming. Built within the suit Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) designed for Spider-Man, Peter’s original AI was unnamed and only referred to as “Suit Lady” by Peter until he decided to call her “Karen” instead. That’s a name he maybe would not have chosen a year later, since the movie came out in 2017 and “Karen” became a pejorative term for entitled white women in 2018. But Peter’s Karen wasn’t complaining to the manager or calling the cops on anyone; she was just a comforting voice that helped Peter learn about the suit’s various features. She was voiced by Jennifer Connelly, who had previously played Betty Ross in the 2003 Hulk film and is the real-life wife of Paul Bettany, who provided the voice for Tony Stark’s AI JARVIS before he evolved into Vision.

Since she was Stark tech, Karen operated much the same as JARVIS and his successor, FRIDAY, where they kept an eye on the hero’s vital signs and activated the features of the suit by voice command. One particularly funny moment with Karen came when Peter was spying on some criminals, and she activated “instant kill” mode without being asked. The sequence where Peter is locked in a storage facility, and he chats with Karen is also memorable.

Unfortunately, Karen was destroyed in Spider-Man: Far From Home when Peter’s original Stark tech suit was obliterated with the rest of his luggage after Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) blew up the bus with his stuff on board.

Enter EDITH (Dawn Michelle King), an AI security system left to Spider-Man by Tony Stark after Tony’s death. Her name was even a joke by Tony — EDITH stands for “Even Dead, I’m The Hero.” Unlike Karen, EDITH was housed in a high-tech pair of glasses. Echoing back to Karen’s “instant kill” scene from the first movie, Peter almost blows himself up along with his classmates when he accidentally activates a weapons satellite connected to the AI. Peter eventually hands EDITH over to Mysterio after falling for the supervillain’s scheme. But Peter realizes that Mysterio is the bad guy, and he eventually gets the glasses back.

He loses EDITH at the beginning of the next movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home, once the world finds out he is Spider-Man. Peter is arrested, and his Stark tech is confiscated, EDITH included, who ends up in the hands of the Department of Damage Control. (That’s probably fine, right?) Later in the movie, EDITH is listed as offline in Peter’s suit. We haven’t heard from EDITH since, though given all the shady business the Department of Damage Control is up to in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, it’s possible she didn’t stay offline forever.

Image: Sony

Now, in Spider-Man: Brand New Day we have E.V. (Naomi Watts). Without any Stark tech to aid him in his crime-fighting, Peter built E.V. on his own and, according to director Destin Daniel Cretton, she is “sadly, the closest thing Peter has to a friend,” as he noted in an annotated script covered by Entertainment Weekly.

E.V.’s addition may be a bit of an unwelcome surprise to some. Many fans criticized the use of Karen in the first movie as making Spider-Man too reliant on tech. However, given how alone Spider-Man is in the new movie, it made sense that he needs someone to talk to, and the tech is useful in tracking the villain and for crime alerts. Overall, E.V. feels less intrusive than Karen did, and the balance works well, as Peter definitely feels like he’s left more to his own devices in this movie.

That said, I wouldn’t get too attached to E.V. either, because if she follows the same path as Karen and EDITH, she won’t be around for long.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now in theaters.