Why Doctor Octopus Tried To Kill Peter Parker (Not Spidey) In Spider-Man 2

Towards the end of Spider-Man 2, Doctor Octopus nearly kills Peter Parker by throwing a car at him, and while this may seem like a perplexing move for someone trying to reach Spider-Man through Peter (unaware that they’re the same person), this was probably part of Octavius’ plan. In need of tritium for his experimental power source, Doctor Octopus confronts Harry Osborn, threatening to kill him if he doesn’t hand it over. Likely not having the tritium on hand, Harry makes a deal with the mad scientist: He’ll obtain the tritium in exchange for an alive and subdued Spider-Man. Learning about Peter Parker photographing Spider-Man for his work, Octavius goes after Peter, trying to kill him in his quest to capture Spider-Man.

Peter Parker, meanwhile, has been struggling with his double life throughout Spider-Man 2, finally deciding to abandon his costumed persona when his powers seem to be failing him. Although his life feels back on track for a time, he’s painfully aware of the good he did as Spider-Man, so he tries to resume his heroism. Despite his best efforts, his powers seem gone for good, until Doctor Octopus attacks him and Mary Jane Watson in a café. With his and Mary Jane’s life in danger, Peter’s extra-sensory perception, aka his spider-sense, kicks in, and he gets himself and Mary Jane out of the way of the car Doc Ock threw at them. If not for Peter’s powers, the two would have been killed.

Doctor Octopus believed that Peter and Spider-Man were two separate people, with Peter having a personal friendship with the masked hero and taking pictures of his heroics for a newspaper. With this in mind, killing the only person with a connection to Spider-Man seems like a foolish choice, but considering Doctor Octopus’ actions in the comics and the rest of Spider-Man 2, this unnecessarily brutal approach makes sense. Doc Ock was trying to draw out Spider-Man by killing the one person he knows that Spider-Man cares about and taking another person hostage.

Having been told about Peter and Spider-Man’s connection by Harry, Doc Ock, according to the Spider-Man 2 novelization, wire-tapped Peter Parker’s phone and learned that he’d be meeting his friend Mary Jane at a particular place and time, and sought him out. By throwing a car at Peter, he believed that he’d kill Spider-Man’s friend and photographer, which would draw out the seemingly absent hero to confront Doc Ock. It’s a horrifically Machiavellian way to achieve his goal, which fits Doctor Octopus’ personality in the rest of the film and the comic source material.

As evidenced by the rest of the scene, Doctor Octopus stuck to this plan even after Peter jumped out of the way of the car. Taking Mary Jane hostage as additional motivation to lure Spider-Man into his trap, Doc Ock tells Peter where he’ll be waiting for Spider-Man, before violently throwing Peter into a wall, causing him to be covered in debris. If not for his superpowers, this most likely would have also killed Peter, albeit not as quickly. If Peter and Spider-Man were separate people, the masked hero would have found his friend in the café, fatally injured. The dying Peter would tell Spider-Man where Doctor Octopus was and that he had Mary Jane held hostage, motivating the hero to seek out Octavius.

Doctor Octopus is one of Spider-Man’s most dangerous and intelligent enemies in both the comics and films. Staying true to the source material, Alfred Molina portrayed Doctor Octopus to be as brutal as he was intelligent, creating a horrifyingly large body count in the process of rebuilding his tritium-powered device. Once a good man, Octavius was turned cruel and violent by the wayward artificial intelligence in his prosthetic “smart arms,” just as his comic counterpart became megalomaniacal after receiving brain damage in a laboratory accident. For this, Doctor Octopus’ trying to kill Peter Parker to draw out Spider-Man was a fittingly horrific action in Spider-Man 2.

About The Author

David Miller
(625 Articles Published)

David Miller is a staff writer for Screen Rant, indie comic writer, and life-long lover of all things Star Wars, Marvel, and DC. He was born and raised in New York and has a degree in English from Rider University. He relates to Peter Parker maybe a little too much.

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