Spider-Man isn’t a cop anymore, he’s a firefighter
In Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Spidey is a firefighter, a city engineer, a one-man medical airlift, an open-source GMO chemist, and a protector of New York’s precarious bee community. But there’s one thing this Spider-Man is not: a cop.
This is a momentous career shift for Peter Parker, who didn’t help the police in the original Spider-Man so much as he was the police.
To unlock the 2018 game’s map, Spidey powered on NYPD surveillance towers. He arrived first to every crime, with the actual NYPD officers always arriving late — if at all. He jokingly went by “Spider-Cop” and did impressions of hard-boiled detectives. I’m not here to litigate that creative decision (plenty of thoughtful writers have done an excellent job already), but I am here to celebrate the change in the sequel, which is immediate and affecting.
After the game’s opening sequence, in which a kaiju-sized Sandman demolishes chunks of NYC, Spider-Man gets to the most pressing issue: supporting the survivors. He runs up an avenue covered in dust and smoke, shocked office workers, and first responders tending to fires and the injured. Then he helps transport a certain familiar face to the nearest hospital. The moment is a tone-setter: Peter Parker and Miles Morales now use their gifts to heal communities.
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The Spidey pair sling people onto their shoulders and deliver them to hospitals. They learn from neighbors that laws aren’t inherently helpful, and can even punish those who need help. They repeatedly engage with overlooked members of their community (particularly the elderly), and show them the simple kindness of listening. And they fight the prejudicial assumption of recidivism, quite literally spending the bulk of their time protecting reformed
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