This issue opens with the very cinematic idea of a 2-page spread looking over Peter’s lab as the last video of his father talks about how cancer affected his dad and how he wanted to cure it so no other kid would have to go through what he did.
The ever-present “Reed Richards.”
As Peter slams into and is dragged across the ground, he thinks he has to get this away from the school. This is too much for his secret identity, and he doesn’t even have his webshooters on him. Throughout, he continues to appeal to Eddie to fight the suit. Eddie then screams, and Peter realizes the suit is killing him. That someone without his powers won’t last nearly as long in there. But when he tries to get closer, it slaps him away.
Even if the suit has a biological memory, how would this sample remember anything about Peter? Did he destroy the wrong one by accident? Kinda shaky.
Peter begins freaking out even harder because now people are in danger. For a second, Eddie seems to have broken free, but when Peter gets close, it envelops him.
Eddie is thrown to the ground next to those really conspicuous live wires he snapped a few pages back as some cops show up. The cops see the big monster and unload on it, with seemingly far greater effect than when Peter was shot in it. Maybe it’s the hail of gunfire as opposed to a single bullet. Eddie spends several panels getting shot up and screaming.
Chekov’s live wires.
Brutal. “Ultimately,” Ultimate Venom isn’t much better than regular Venom, just mercifully shorter. Felt like kind of a rip off that Peter wasn’t even in the suit for their fight. At the end of the day, the book isn’t called Ultimate Peter Parker, after all. But Bendis really boiled the Venom thing down and made it way less convoluted and absurd, and Bagley gave us the craziest looking, creepiest Venom ever, so there’s that. Is Eddie really dead? Will we ever see him again? Seems like we would! It strikes me that this would have been a good story to stretch out as a background element. Let Peter and Eddie bond a little, maybe make the Gwen part less rushed, let Peter be in the black suit longer, maybe. But in this era of stories needing to be collected in a neat trade paperback, I guess they didn’t think they had time.