‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ Asks: Why Settle For One MCU When You Can Have Several?

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The latest Spidey epic imports some familiar looking bad guys — and somehow retcons an entire comic-book multiverse under one mouse-eared roof

When we last left Peter Parker, our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, he’d just watched footage of his battle in London with Quentin Beck, a.k.a. the charlatan savior Mysterio, being broadcast throughout the greater Manhattan area. Then J. Jonah Jameson, a man who never met a webslinger he didn’t want to string up, outs Parker as the man behind the mask. 
When your face is plastered over a million giant midtown screens and Pat Kiernan is announcing that some whiz kid from Queens is the vigilante who “killed” a “hero,” little things like a secret identity, personal safety and getting into a top-tier college are now considered bygone luxuries.

That was how 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home ended — but you knew that already, because we have all seen these movies, every last one of them, we have no choice, resistance is futile. It’s not a spoiler to say that, when we meet up with him again at the beginning of Spider-Man: No Way Home, seconds after this revelation, many tons of feces have just hit a battalion of fans. Parker and MJ find themselves in the middle of a mob scene. 
Helicopters hover over the outer-borough apartment of Aunt May (Marisa Tomei). Both Parker’s girlfriend and his best friend, Ned (Jacob Batalon), are suffering the consequences of standing by their man. Supporters praise him, conspiracy theorists hound him, bricks get thrown this his window and everyone knows his name.

Luckily, Parker has an ace up his web-covered sleeve: He’s acquainted with a really good sorcerer. Call him Strange, or rather, Doctor Strange. The guy didn’t go to medical school for eight years, become a world-renowned surgeon, wander the remote areas of the far east in an existential funk and then train as a master of mystic arts  to just have you call him Stephen, for fuck’s sake. Show the goateed gentleman and his extremely manic cape some respect.
Peter has a favor to ask Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch). You know how to make elaborate hand gestures and open portals to other dimensions, Doc. Can you reverse time and change the course of history, just like they did with Thanos and the “blip,” so that the whole Parker-is-Spider-Man thing never happened? Strange has some runes and a spell he thinks he can cast that will help make people forget the revelation. Peter keeps asking for caveats and revisions. 
Because of that, the spell ends up going sideways. It’s shortly after that botched fix that our young hero encounters a strange villain wreaking havoc on a bridge. Parker has never met this bad guy before. But we have. It’s been about 17 years or so, but this is definitely not the first time we’ve seen those mechanical, writing tentacles….

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