Headscratchers / Spider-Man

• Dozens of his fellow high school students saw Peter Parker with webbing exactly like Spider-Man's coming from his wrist, and subsequently saw him demonstrate obvious super-strength and agility exactly like Spider-Man's. And yet none of them figure out he's probably Spider-Man when the hero emerges before the end of the school year?
  • If you saw some kid hurl lunch at someone by hurling the tray with some sort of thread, you'd probably just assume that they were just playing a prank with some string. As for the fight with Flash, it's likely that some of the students did at least wonder about the possibility. I can imagine them maybe just occasionally hurling the thought at Peter, like, "hey, you're Spider-Man aren't you?" as a half-joke, and Peter just casually laughing it off as ridiculous. Don't forget that Peter's personality and general presence is so wildly different to when he's being Spider-Man, outside of that one incident. No one would be able to take the notion that the socially awkward nerd kid could be the heroic, courageous superhero.
  • Say they do figure it out. What are they supposed to do with this information? Go to the police? The newspapers? The Mob? They have no evidence, since this was before the age of smartphone abundance, and I suspect they would be reluctant to rat on a guy who just punched Flash Tompson across the corridor.
  • It's more egregious in Mary Jane and Harry, they do appear after and never suspect that Peter is Spider-Man, maybe they're just that stupid.
    • Actually, MJ starts to suspect in the end after her and Peter's second kiss.
  • Then again, all we know for sure is that Peter demonstrated his strength, reflexes, and a brief burst of webbing on that first day, and afterwards ran off and spent some time training. Even assuming that the wrestling competition took place shortly after he got his powers, there's no indication that the fight itself was televised, and after that there's nothing to indicate that Peter started being Spider-Man on a regular basis until after graduation, which could have been weeks if not months away from the fight. With all that in mind, so long as Peter didn't use his webbing again, he could just claim that he'd been working out to justify him being in better shape, and nobody would immediately assume that he's Spider-Man unless he did something like use the webbing again.

• The man at the wrestling match who gave Peter the $100 knows Spidey's identity (or at least what he looks like if he doesn't know Peter's name) and has a legitimate grudge against him (if not for Peter letting the robber get away, the guy would still be $2900 richer). Considering how big of a prick the guy is, wouldn't he try to use this knowledge to extort/attack Peter?
  • Because he's not an idiot. Peter just beat the ever loving hell out of Bonesaw, and that robber is mysteriously killed soon after by someone showing off the same abilities as Peter. If he is at all capable of putting 2 and 2 together, he's also going to figure out, "Hey, if I try to extort this guy, he's going to beat the shit out of me or kill me."
  • Also... what, exactly, is he going to extort from a kid who's desperate enough for cash that he's doing underground wrestling? That's not exactly something you do when you have loads of cash for someone to blackmail away from you.
  • And to extort him, he'd have to have tangible dirt on him. He's seen Peter's face, but just has that memory to go by; no name or other information on the teenager. At best, he could threaten Spider-Man to tell a police sketch artist what he vaguely remembers the kid looking like.

• Why is Norman not arrested for killing Dr. Stromm in the beginning? He's told that he was murdered the morning after, but did the police not look for finger prints around the laboratory to see who else was him in there? Norman even grabs Stromm by the neck before he throws him, so wouldn't that just be all over for Norman, assuming the police even tried to find out who killed him?
  • Who says they didn't? Norman blacks out and we don't see what happened after he kills Strom. The Goblin is as smart as Norman, he could've wiped the place down or something.
  • It's also Norman's building. He can do pretty much whatever he wants until the police get dirt on him, if they even can once he's done getting rid of any evidence.
  • It's literally a laboratory of Norman's company. It would be more suspicious if the cops didn't find any fingerprints of him in the room.

• Green Goblin kills the other members of the OsCorp board with some sort of bomb that destroys people instantly by disintegration. Why doesn't he use this incredibly powerful and deadly weapon against his archenemy, Spider-man? I get they didn't want to show chunks of old men blowing up in a family movie, but the "one-use instant death bomb" was really lame and the biggest plot hole in the whole thing.
  • Weirdly enough the disintegrator bomb shows up again in part three. Look close when Eddie and the Black Costume get killed. Eddie turns into a skeleton.
  • He's a mad supervillain; vaporizing his flesh instantly would take all the fun out of it.
    • As noted in the Jekyll/Hyde dialogue by the fireplace. The Green Goblin doesn't just want to kill Spider-Man; he wants to hurt the little bastard. Or maybe those disintegro-bombs are really expensive, and he used his only one on the board.
  • To elaborate further, the board members were in Osborn's immediate way, so the Goblin killed them immediately and the company stayed with Osborn for future villainous purposes. Spider-Man was another matter; at first Gobby tried turning him, but it didn't work. All Spidey could do was react to whatever dangers Goblin created (different threat, different tactics). When he discovers Spider-Man's identity, Goblin/Osborn takes his interference personally (considering Harry is involved) and decides to get personal in his own way, namely terrorizing Aunt May and threatening MJ, to make the web-slinger suffer (more painful than quick disintegration).
  • Perhaps you should try throwing pumpkin bombs and other explosives at a character that can not only sense danger before it happens, but can also backflip twenty feet away from any bombs you might care to throw.
  • Probably Goblin realized that Spidey could theoretically throw back any of his bombs with a web throw or while he was dodging. He probably figured he could take one of his own explosions better than an instant disintegration.
  • And who knows how hard those bombs are to make. He may not have had many left. Remember, everything he stole from Oscorp was in the prototype phase, and if he runs out of supplies, he'll have to make them from scratch. It's probably a lot easier to assemble a standard explosive than whatever that thing was.

• What exactly was the Green Goblin trying to accomplish at the end of the first film? He attempts to stab Spider-Man with the glider, and when he dodges it, it becomes clear the GG doesn't have the reflexes to dodge it as well. Even if Spidey hadn't dodged the blades, simple inertia would've carried it right through Peter's guts and stabbed GG anyway, making a hero-villain shish kabob. Was it meant to be a Taking You with Me?
  • Fact is, sometimes Norman just gets sloppy. He's a smart guy, but he does make mistakes. As we see, it was a mistake for him to even try and attack a guy with spider reflexes and precognition from behind in the first place.
    • To be fair, I don't think Osborn knew the guy had spider-sense and heightened reflexes. None of their battles up to that point had showcased it, if I remember. He was just faster and stronger than most in Goblin's eyes, but there was nothing to indicate he would *sense* the glider without seeing or hearing it.
  • I'm now imagining the image of the position those two would have been found in by the cops. Thank you and good night.
  • The blade wasn't that long, I think, and Norman was wearing body armor.

• So what exactly did the Goblin do to Aunt May? He doesn't seem to have physically assaulted her, because she probably wouldn't have survived a beating from a super-strong lunatic. Did he seriously just fly up, blow a hole in the wall, scare the shit out of her, and fly off? Because that image is just hilarious.
  • He probably did just scare her and fly away. If traumatizing an old lady is enough to drive Spidey up the wall, why kill her when you can keep on coming back and tormenting her for shits and giggles.
  • She's an old woman. He may have given her a heart attack.

• The Green Goblin asking Spider-Man to join him. Why would he do that? What possible use could he have had for Spider-Man? It's not like he had some sort of plan to take over the world, or something. All he had been doing up until that point was killing all the people who were mean to Norman Osborn, and by the time he talks to Spider-Man, they're all dead anyway; mission accomplished. After that, there is no reason for him to continue being the Goblin. But instead of hanging up the glider, becoming even more rich and powerful and drifting into reclusive madness, he decides to try to recruit Spider-Man for... something, and then launches a personal vendetta against him after he refuses.
  • I can only answer your question with another: What was the Goblin trying to accomplish in the first place? After he kills his board of directors, he talks to Norman about obtaining "power", but never what kind, how they plan to obtain it, or what they'll do with it. It's possible Norman's just schizophrenic past hope of a coherent game plan, but it sounds like there's a goal in mind that's being left too vague for the audience to grasp.
  • He was channeling Magneto with the idea that people with superpowers should work together and crush the Muggles.
  • There just happens to be another dude with amazing inhuman abilities dressing up in a silly costume. He is having the time of his life murdering random innocents and destroying all in his path. You know how some video games are more fun when played on Multiplayer. Same deal, really? Gobby's just a pissed gaming nerd.
  • This isn't canon, but this troper has always had a suspicion that the Osborn-Goblin situation isn't schizophrenia so much as demonic possession. It wouldn't always look like Linda Blair, you know…
  • It was probably Goblin's typical "I will rule New York!" type deal.
  • Perhaps he saw potential in studying SM's powers and probably replicating them, either for himself or to market them.
  • Maybe Goblin thought that Spider-Man was the only one who could beat him after their initial encounter. In Goblin's eyes having Spidey as an ally would make him unstoppable.
  • One of the side effects of the gas was explicitly given as "insanity." The plan not making sense is probably because he's just that nuts.

• In the climax of the first movie, what the hell are Girl Scouts doing on a field trip to Roosevelt Island at one o'clock in the morning?
  • When did it outright state the time the scene took place? It's entirely possible it was around 9 pm or so.
  • The World Unity Festival earlier in the film may have been intended to be followed up with fireworks, which are generally shot off over the harbor in NYC. Possibly the Goblin's attack on the event caused its fireworks show to be postponed to a later night, and the children (who were dressed like a kiddie sports team, not Girl Scouts) were taking the skyway to have a good view? That would also explain why so many pedestrians were on the bridge at that hour, to throw things at the Goblin: they'd come to watch the display from the bridge.

• When and how did Peter built that finely detailed suit in the first film? Did he ace home ec or something? (Although if you could bet on a guy who would be an ace at home ec, it would be Peter.)
  • In the mainstream comics, some ballet theater was throwing out a bunch of old uniforms, so he found one that fit him and added the designs himself.
  • I always assumed that he spent that hundred bucks he got from the wrestling match to get the stuff needed to make the suit.

• Spider-Man's origin story. Originally it was a radioactive spider-bite, which makes no sense but at least this explains why it doesn't happen again, because it was a freak accident and the spider probably died from the radiation shortly afterward. But the movies changed it to a "genetically-engineered" spider. This means that someone designed that spider to give superpowers. Surely this plot point should have come up again? Maybe one of the scientists that worked on the spider gets a little suspicious once a spider-powered superhero starts making headlines? Tries to duplicate the results? No?
  • I was under the impression that the power-granting bite was an unintended trait. The scientists just sounded like they were trying to make a cool hybrid spider. The Ultimate comics also used a GE spider, and they explained the lack of other Spider-Men by having it stepped on shortly after it bites Peter.
  • Possibly the spider in question had been slated to be bred soon to produce another generation of hybrids, and its body (venom included) was saturated with plasmids or catalysts to ensure its eggs bore the desired traits. No one else got superpowers because these things didn't linger in its system long enough for it to bite anyone else.
  • It's entirely possible that Peter already had some odd factor in his DNA which the spider bite interacted with. Maybe he's a one-in-a-million kind of guy who's capable of getting powers from a spider bite.

• In the first film, Peter gets revenge on the guy who cheats him out of a prize money by allowing the robber to escape. The guy then gives him a "What the hell?" type question. Surely he must have known the reasons why Peter did what he did and how we would respond, he definitely can't get indignant about it.
  • Simple enough. He was selfish and thought he could get away with it. Peter's mistake was not recognizing two wrongs don't make a right.
  • He's a brazen hypocrite, obviously. He had no problem with cheating Peter out of the prize money even though he knows it's morally wrong, but he expects Peter to do the morally right thing and stop the thief.

• Why didn't the Green Goblin just kill Aunt May? He said he wanted to make Peter suffer and "wish he were dead.", and if he just popped by to scare her, then at least at the end of the day Peter can say she's still alive. If he had killed her, Peter would be that much more alone, hopeless and possibly angrily reckless in battle.
  • Probably he just didn't stop to check. He popped in, gave her a heart attack, then left. Alternately, Peter's family suffering might be considered worse for him than his family just being dead.
  • There's a saying that goes something like, "If you shoot a soldier and kill him, you've taken one man out of the battle and pissed off all his friends. If you shoot a soldier and wound him, you've taken out three — the man you wounded and two of his friends dragging him back for help." A dead Aunt May creates a vengeful Spider-Man who has nothing distracting him from kicking Goblin's ass up between his ears. Aunt May in the hospital means Spider-Man is going to be off-balance and worried.
  • Peter is an orphan and a teenager - possibly even a minor, if he's ever skipped a grade - and Ben's death left Aunt May as his only guardian. The Goblin can't mess with Peter if he winds up living out-of-state with some distant cousin's family.

• When Peter and MJ are talking in the hospital, and Peter says he "knows" Spider-Man, MJ asked if he's (Spider-Man's) mentioned her. First off, how would Mary Jane even assume Spider-Man knew her name? In her encounters with him, she never told him her name.
  • Peter tells MJ that he knows Spider-Man, so it probably didn't occur to her that Spidey knew her name until right when he mentioned that.
  • "He mentioned a girl he had a slight moment with after the Green Guy attacked, and then later kissed upside down. If that's you then definitely." The interactions between the two were pretty definitive without Spidey necessarily needing to know her name.
  • It wouldn't even have to be that specific. For all she knew, Spidey might just have asked "Who's the redhead?" in passing, having seen Peter in her vicinity and being curious about the girl he'd encountered. It's well established in the press that Spider-Man sometimes people-watches from roofs and walls, if only to spot crimes in progress.

• Should Norman's glider really have killed him like that? The stab came somewhere around his groin, it seems, so no vital organs were hit, and the blades blocked the wounds so he shouldn't have bled out so quickly.
  • He probably went into shock first, then bled to death when the glider was removed.
    • Removed by Peter... Which is a huge and obvious no-no in such a situation... Holy crap, Peter DID kill Norman!
    • Peter probably isn't a medical expert, so he might not have known if Norman could still be saved in time.
  • "No vital organs" isn't going to mean much if the glider's blades severed his inferior vena cava or one of the common iliac arteries, which would've been fatal even with immediate surgical intervention. Hell, if it'd sliced his abdominal aorta, he wouldn't even have had managed any last words.

• Norman Osborn/Green Goblin killed his board members in plain sight, and not one person made the connection between Mr. Osborn and the goblin? It doesn't help that Norman died around the same time Green Goblin mysteriously disappeared. No one finds it suspicious that the people who fired a guy end up dead?
  • Norman wasn't fired, not quite yet. They just expected him to resign in a month's time. They also didn't plan on announcing that they would be selling the company until after the event where the board members happened to be killed, and as they were the only people that knew about the company being sold other than Osborn, they took that information to their graves. For all people knew, it was just some random masked lunatic that managed to get his hands on Oscorp's glider and a few explosive devices.

• The first time Peter tests his powers, he ends up running from school in fear. He fails at web-swinging and crashes against a poster. Sudden camera cut and he gets home late at night. Just what the hell was he doing that took him HOURS to get back home?
  • He was probably in detention for fighting Flash Thompson.
  • I always thought that that was the joke: He slammed into the building so hard that it knocked him out for an hour or two. Though his reaction to his jumping skills just before the swinging could also suggest that crashing into a wall wasn't enough to make him quit testing these cool new powers, so he just kept practicing web swinging and wall crawling until he realized he'd lost track of time.
  • I also thought he just hit the board hard enough to knock himself out. Not particularly consistent with later power levels but justified by Rule of Funny.

• Why doesn't MJ recognize Peter's voice when he's Spider Man? He doesn't even try to sound different as Spidey. Norman Osborn/Green Goblin also makes the same blunder. He only figures out that Parker is Spider Man after seeing the cut he made on his arm, even though he should have recognized Peter's voice earlier.
  • You naturally sound different to others when speaking through a mask. It just doesn't sound different to use because that'd be useless and get pretty annoying real fast if we heard it all muffled all the time, in the way everyone else presumably must.
  • Peter's also been so tongue-tied and bashful in MJ's presence, up to then, that she may not recognize his speech because Spider-Man sounds more confident than the boy next door ever has, at least to her. Having a mask on brings out a side of Peter that he's never had the nerve to show Mary Jane.

• Did Spidey lose his spider sense during the fight with Bonesaw? Because in one scene, Bonesaw hits him with a chair and his spider sense doesn't warn him about it in advance.
  • Spider sense is somewhat of a Story-Breaker Power that has to be ignored to make certain scenes happen. That said, this was Peter's first fight, and his confidence clearly wasn't though the roof, so he might've felt the chair and most of the attacks coming, but was too scared to respond.
  • Thing is, it's not a "fight". Wrestling is fake, and the people who do it are just putting on performances. Peter's sense didn't work there because Bonesaw wasn't actively trying to hurt Peter.
  • The film never makes it clear it's 'not real', as Bonesaw definitely whacks Peter with a chair, and they put him in a cage match without clearing it with him first. Kinda weird and shady to be honest.
  • Additionally, even if it's true Bonesaw wasn't trying to hurt him (he was) Spidey Sense isn't a magical power that can tell people's intentions. If it looks like a threat and acts like a threat and actually hurts, his Spidey Sense should have picked up on it.

• How does Harry reach the conclusion that Spider-Man is the murderer of his father? Norman had a VERY specific type of death and one sight of his flesh stabbings would imply that Spider-Man wasn't the one who did it. Denial and emotional baggage aside, it makes it strange to conclude that Spider-Man is the killer. It's possible that he was indeed beyond all reason at that point, but it makes one wonder.
  • It's been a while since I saw the movie, but did Harry know that Norman was the Green Goblin in this movie? Or was it only at the end of Spider-Man 2 when he found out? If not, he probably assumed Spider-Man stabbed him. As for why he'd assume Spider-Man would do that, well he woke up to find his father dead. I doubt he's going to think 100% rationally.
    • Harry only found out that his father was the Green Goblin at the end of the second film. He probably just assumed that Spider-Man stabbed his father. Also, I think he believed J. Jonah Jameson’s libel about Spidey.
  • He comes into the room and sees Spiderman placing his dead father on a setee`(?). Aside from the fact that looks bad on it's own, Spider-Man makes a hasty retreat and doesn't offer up any explanation. The assumption that Spidey is the killer is pretty fair.
    • Except that there's no motive, and also no precedent for thinking that Spider-Man is a murderer, even with JJ's exaggerated libel. Harry didn't know yet that his father was the Goblin, so if spider-man is the murderer, it would appear that he just randomly murdered Norman for no reason whatsoever, when he has never demonstrated that tendency in the past. It would make much more sense for Harry to conclude that Spider-Man just "knows something" about Norman's death that he's hiding or at worst that Spider-Man was indirectly responsible for his death in some way (like maybe Norman was a bystander caught in one of Spidey's battles), rather than jumping straight to the conclusion that Spider-Man committed murder.
    • I think the implication is that Harry is angry at his father’s death, and is far more interested in having someone to direct his anger against than in thinking rationally about it. If Spider-Man didn’t do it, then Harry wouldn’t know who did it, and he would be filled with frustration and uncertainty. But if Spider-Man killed Norman, then Harry has an enemy he can scheme and plot against and Harry can fill his life with purpose. Therefore Spider-Man MUST be the killer, evidence and logic are irrelevant.
    • Harry also already had reason to resent Spider Man at least a little, since Mary Jane's crush on him was the first crack in their relationship.

• Why didn't Peter immediately try to get in contact with Mary Jane once he realized the Goblin knew who he was and attacked Aunt May? Is he so absent-minded that he can't realize other people can't see his full-blown crush?
  • Most likely. Peter was so socially awkward and lacked so much self-confidence as his normal self that he probably saw himself as a complete nobody towards Mary Jane. At most someone she knows, but that's about it. And when you lack confidence in yourself to that extent, you often times also manage to convince yourself that that's just how it is, and the world around you is like it too. Which often times causes you to not realize how obvious your feelings towards a girl/guy actually are to those around you. You assume that because you feel detached from that person yourself, people around you won't attach you and them together either, even in terms of noticing you like them. To put it simply, Peter probably assumed that no one actually realized because in his head, he was the last person anyone would even think to associate with MJ.
  • Mainly so he can have his heart-to-heart with Aunt May first. Generally speaking, he probably thinks he keeps a better lid on it than he realises, as can often be the case. The second May indicates that 'everyone' knows, he runs for the nearest phone.

• Why didn't Green Goblin ever use that gas he put Spider-Man to sleep with again? Wouldn't that have allowed him to instantly win the fight?
  • The gas only really worked because it was a surprise. Norman had to hold his arms straight out and very still for a few seconds to hit Spidey with it — now that Spidey knows about the gas, that's a few seconds that he's going to be using to punch the Goblin in the head.

• How wasn't Harry killed when the disintegrating pumpkin bomb killed the board of directors?
  • He was out of range of the blast.

• How come Peter never suspected that Norman was the Goblin after the latter saw that "bike messenger" wound and left in a hurry? Especially since this is, in-universe, some hours before Goblin terrorizes Aunt May and makes the enmity personal. Unless Clark Kenting is in full force here (which it could be, as unlike the Goblin, Spidey doesn't change his voice at all when in costume and yet nobody deduces either person's identity), it's surreal that nobody, especially Peter, never even started to put the two together.
  • Did it happen only some hours later? I thought there was more of a passage of time, at least days if not weeks. Anyway, not only does wearing a mask alter your voice even somewhat, the biggest thing is context. Peter has had mutually calm, level conversations with his best friend's dad and mild-mannered CEO Norman Osborn. Spider-Man has fought the maniacally laughing, taunting, and threatening Green Goblin, who's a public and violent murderer wearing a green suit and flying around on a hi-tech glider. Why would Peter have any reason to connect them?
  • Additionally, Norman walking out is immediately followed by a tense argument between him and Harry regarding Mary Jane, which may have seemed more important to Peter. The focus, as it were, would be less "hmm, Norman just left suspiciously after seeing the wound the Green Goblin gave me" and more "my best friend's dad called the girl I'm crushing on a gold digger, my best friend apparently thinks that's not important because he has an apparent raging inferiority complex and really low self-esteem, and then they all walked out on Thanksgiving." The whole "balancing my personal life and being Spider-Man" thing is somewhat of a theme.
• Would killing the board really stop the sale of Oscorp? Won't the shareholders just vote for a new board with the same agenda?
  • Maybe Norman was planning to talk a new board out of it, or perhaps not so subtly threaten them.
  • It's also possible Norman didn't care and was pulling a Taking You with Me gambit.
• The Goblin attacks the Daily Bugle and threatens Jameson because he wants to know who Spider-Man's photographer is. Wouldn't he just have to read the fine print? One would think the Bugle is legally obligated to credit Peter for his photos, and the third film does credit Eddie for his fake photo right under the picture.
  • Maybe he requested to be credited anonymously at first.

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