There’s a lot to like in Prime Video’s new Spider-Man series Spider-Noir. Nicolas Cage is, of course, off the wall (and sometimes on the wall) as Ben Reilly/The Spider. Li Jun Li is stunning as the femme fatale Cat Hardy, showing off both her dramatic chops and crooning voice in equal measure. And then there’s the legendary Brendan Gleeson as mob boss Silvermane, who, it should be noted, does not throw his fingers at anyone throughout the eight episode run time of the series.
Hey Alex, I hear you say. What the actual f**k are you talking about? Great question, my best and only friend. In the 2022 multiple Academy Award nominated movie The Banshees of Inisherin — spoilers for 2022’s multiple Academy Award nominated The Banshees of Inisherin past this point — Gleeson plays Colm Doherty, a man who at one point was friends with Colin Farrell’s Pádraic Súilleabháin. But then one day he decides to stop talking to Pádraic out of seemingly nowhere. Things escalate ever so slightly from there, with Colm — a fiddler — threatening that if Pádraic keeps trying to talk to him, he’ll cut off his fingers one by one.
Slightly extreme, but then even more extreme is how Colm delivers those fingers: by throwing them at Pádraic’s house. Eventually, Colm cuts off a bunch of his fingers, and then later Pádraic burns down his own house with Colm in it, though Colm survives.
Anyway, that’s the abbreviated plot of Banshees of Inisherin, which you should really watch, it’s a great movie. It lost all nine Academy Awards it was nominated for!
Back to Spider-Noir. While I was watching the show (you can read my Spider-Noir review for more), I was struck by the fact that the inciting incident for the show was Silvermane’s house burning down, yet the mob boss somehow surviving. And if this was the start of Spider-Noir, would the show perhaps work backwards through the plot of Banshees, first choking a donkey to death and then showing Silvermane tossing his fingers at The Spider’s door, one by one?
And is it really that far-fetched? After all, you have a guy made out of sand (Jack Huston’s Sandman), and one who shoots electricity (Andrew Lewis Caldwell’s Megawatt) in the show… Why couldn’t Silvermane have the power to take off his fingers and toss them at people? In the comics, Silvermane is a cyborg so technically he could do that if he wanted to (toss his fingers at people). I don’t think he has done that since he was introduced by Stan Lee and John Buscema in 1969’s The Amazing Spider-Man #73. But the beauty of comics is that anything can happen, like, for example, a mob boss taking off his fingers and throwing them at Spider-Man. Why, I can almost hear Stan Lee saying “we’ll call him Fingerman!” in the Marvel bullpen while face deep in a pile of Columbian cocaine as if he was still alive!
Unfortunately, despite this being the extremely obvious go-to move for Gleeson’s character, as the curtain closes on the final episode of the season, Gleeson has all of his fingers intact. It’s a real missed opportunity to hide an Easter egg for the Inisheriniacs, and the sort of thing that made me tell the show, “I just don’t like ya no more.”
Listen to MarvelVision:
Share this:
Discover more from Comic Book Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.