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Ultimate Spider-Man
#30 - Kraven The Hunter
Original Airdate - February 3rd, 2013
Spider-Man helps White Tiger come to terms with her powers and origin while she is hunted by a villain from her past.

Ultimate Spider-Man is produced by Marvel Animation and carries a TV-Y7-FV parental guideline.

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This... this was actually a pretty good episode. Easily the best episode of season 2 so far. Who would've thought that the White Tiger episodes of either season would be the standouts?

Kraven was effective and competent, proving to be quite the threat even without any mutant powers. I liked his design, his high-tech hunting gear, and the voice work [by Diedrach Bader]. It was weird to see a version of him that wasn't obsessed with hunting Spidey, but in the context of the series it worked. Though considering Spider-Man's ruining of his hunt in this episode, he may just start shifting his focus away from the Tiger and to the Wall-Crawler...

White Tiger's origin was used well, contributing to what we already knew about Ava, her being a perfectionist, while adding to the show her family's history and the double-edged sword that is the Tiger Amulet. Sure, the creators didn't come out and say that Kraven murdered her dad, something that I thought a modern superhero cartoon didn't have to worry about, but I think it was clear enough to where I was fine with it. Let's just say I've seen worse attempts to avoid using the "D" and "K" word.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say there was some ship tease with Peter and Ava at the end. Too bad I know better than to expect romance from this show...

It was nice seeing the flashback to Spidey confronting Uncle Ben's killer, though it seems that in this continuity Peter hadn't met the killer before that night. Usually a Spider-Man origin story has Peter helping the killer get away and the guilt of having done that is what prevents him from killing the crook and drives him to be Spider-Man. There's a chance he just didn't want to go into all the details of what happened, but it seems it was just Uncle Ben's words that inspired him instead of any guilt.

All in all, a few badly place fourth wall jokes aside, this was a pretty great episode of Ultimate Spider-Man! Do I expect them to keep up this quality? No, but there's always hope.