Your Friend Neighborhood Spider-Man, Disney Plus’ new Spider-Man animated series, takes a lot of creative liberties with Peter Parker’s backstory. For one, his spider powers came from a mysterious interdimensional spider that appeared from a portal seemingly conjured by Doctor Strange. For another, his high school BFF is none other than goth queen Nico Minoru. And though this version of Peter Park is slightly MCU adjacent, in that Peter has a super rich mentor figure to help finance his spider-activities, instead of Tony Stark, it’s Norman Osborn.
With all these tweaks to Peter’s story, there’s possibility for anything, really, and I have one big theory that might just shake the foundations of the Spider-Man story: I don’t think Uncle Ben is dead.
Hear me out! Unlike in the typical version of Peter’s story from the comics and various movie adaptations, Uncle Ben is absent before Peter gets bitten by the spider. Also, in the first two episodes, no one actually says Uncle Ben is dead. May and Peter just kinda talk about how he’s “not around.” Which leads me to believe that there’s a specific reason that the showrunners have decided not to explicitly say he’s dead.
We’ve seen Uncle Ben die many, many, many times in movies and TV shows and it’s always specifically so that Peter can wise up and realize he needs to use his powers for good. We don’t necessarily need to see that story play out again, but it is jarring that he’s already out of May and Peter’s lives before the spider. It’s even more jarring when everyone’s kinda talking around what happened to him. I get that maybe it would be clunky for Peter to go “Man, when Uncle Ben got shot by that mugger last year, things were rough for me and my aunt,” but also, every mention of Ben seems to be deliberately ambiguous.
So what happened to Ben? Did he leave May? Does he have a secret family in the New Jersey suburbs that he decided to live with full time? Or did he get kidnapped or disappear in some sort of super-powered incident? Has he been recruited by SHIELD to go deep undercover? Or is he in jail? Or did he get a job that relocated him to a different borough and now he can’t make the commute to see his wife and nephew, because damn, do you know how annoying it is to get from Brooklyn to Queens via public transport?
We’re only two episodes into the show, but I am side-eying the vagueness around Uncle Ben and will keep an eye out for any further Ben mentions that confirm or deny my theory.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’s first two episodes are now streaming on Disney Plus. New episodes drop every Wednesday.
