Welcome back to Fun City, USA, where Harry continues to beg Peter to kill him, and Peter makes an impassioned speech about how they’ve been friends since they were kids and he wants to help him. The Shaw in Harry’s head says Peter won’t do it, that only his father can end this. So the twist is Harry was being pushed to find his dad… to have his dad kill him? I mean, obviously Harry is Not Well, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense. He coulda just drowned himself or something. And Shaw was clearly telling him they had to go rescue his dad in previous issues, not supporting his quest for death. It’s a Mark Millar-style “twist,” meaning really more of a bait and switch. Not great. Anyway, Shaw tells Harry he has to push this further, so he takes Peter’s hand, but then, of course…
Whatever Harry is telling himself will have to wait, as we go see Nick Fury being interviewed at the Triskelion when the news finally reaches him of the battle. He quickly learns his agent monitoring Harry is unresponsive, and then, while scrambling Hulkbuster units, is told by Agent Woo that they tested and re-tested Harry’s blood and DNA for months, and found no trace of Oz in him. “And yet, here we are,” says Nick, as we return to the battle, where Spider-Man is trying to save a news crew too stupid to run for their lives as Fury & his Hulkbusters show up. Harry just bellows “Thank you” as they threaten to put him down, and Spider-man rushes to try to prevent Harry’s suicide-by-cop.
So, all the SHIELD guys shoot the crap out of a Harry yelling “Doo iiittt!!”, and then he falls down, and turns back into a regular guy.
In both the Ultimate and Original Recipe universes, it is my opinion that Bendis becomes too dependent on SHIELD. They show up to just about everything. It becomes very predictable, which is bad enough, but more and more stories are “What happened?” “SHIELD won’t say.” “Well, that sucks, The End.” And for USM, in particular, it just feels like Nick Fury is around too much. I get it, I do. Why wouldn’t SHIELD show up to a fiery battle in the middle of Manhattan? It’s that most-beloved of words at 2000s-era Marvel, “realistic.” But it’s just not too satisfying most of the time. “How will Spider-Man stop the rampage of his friend who wants to die?” “Oh, he won’t.” Not the most thrilling conclusion. But wait, there’s more:
Not hard to see that coming. “The hero walls himself off and pushes people away” is pretty well-trod territory, but not for these 2. And since these 2 are more real than basically any superhero comic characters before them, it has a lot more weight than it sometimes has. More on that next time.