Spider-Man: No Way Home Explained: Untangling the Venom, Electro and Avengers Questions

Spider-Man: No Way Home seemingly has a lot of plot holes in it that not only break the multiverse but also the rules of the film itself. The first of those is how Venom was able to come across into the MCU at all, given the movie tells us that characters jump over because they know Peter Parker is Spider-Man.

How Venom crossed into the MCU without ever meeting this version of Peter Parker

When the spell was broken it brought across a lot of villains, including the Green Goblin, Dr Octopus, Sandman, the Lizard and Electro. It also brought across Venom, and because he never actually interacted with Peter, people are confused as to how he ended up in this universe at all. To understand it, I think we have to look at the end of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, specifically its post credits scene, where Venom tells Eddie Brock he will show him a fraction of the knowledge his hive mind has collected across the entire cosmos.

Venom comes from a race of symbiotes called the Klyntar that all had a collected consciousness at one point. They used to worship a god called Knull, who in the comics created them as one branching mind spread among the stars. At the start of Loki episode 6, the camera pulls out from our own solar system and flies into a nearby universe to show the branching path Loki had gone on after Avengers: Endgame. Whenever the multiverse is depicted in the comics it is often shown as worlds sitting beside each other, and it makes sense that the same principle would extend to the universe too.

So if the multiverse in the MCU works by simply traveling far enough to reach the space beyond space, that matters here because Venom talks about his species having collected information from as far as 80 billion light years away. You would assume that includes things from other realities and dimensions. When Venom and Eddie tapped into that hive mind, they likely could have gained some of the wisdom from the symbiote in the Raimiverse that also knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man. As they tapped into it, they happened to be doing so at the exact moment the spell was being cast in the Sanctum, and that is possibly what pulled them across.

Whether Peter Parker still counts as an Avenger after the spell wipes him from memory

The spell at the end of No Way Home completely erases the information from everyone's mind that Peter Parker existed. Peter has had a lot of connections to other characters in the MCU, including the Avengers, and unless Marvel gives an answer themselves, I think there is going to be a lot of back and forth over whether Peter is still on the team or not.

Personally, I do not think he is in the group. I believe the Avengers will remember fighting alongside him, but they will not remember that he is part of their ranks, because they would have no idea who is beneath the costume. He clearly introduced himself to Captain Marvel in Avengers: Endgame, and after Civil War most of them knew he was just a kid, so they probably knew his real identity, and I think that is tied into his membership too.

I also have a meta reason for thinking this. After Far From Home, Sony and Marvel had to renegotiate the contract around the character, and I very much think those discussions played into the ending of this film. No Way Home pretty much culminates in a way that lets Peter go off on his own and be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, and because of this he will not be tied as closely to the MCU. To get into the Avengers he would have to reveal his identity, and Peter has already seen the kinds of issues that crop up when people learn who he is.

Because of that, I very much think Spider-Man will remain a vigilante tackling low level stuff, and I think that will actually work better for the character. The MCU threw him in at the deep end, and though I have enjoyed watching him go toe to toe with Thanos, I do prefer him fighting more human level threats. We will of course see, and it is even possible that by the time I put this out Marvel will have proven me wrong, so let the comments come in.

How the spell hides the physical evidence that Peter Parker is Spider-Man

There are a lot of questions on the spell and how the physical evidence of Peter Parker's existence would be handled. There is a cabinet at his school with his face and Spider-Man's side by side, there are all the news reports, and there is the Flashpoint book, which may or may not have been Marvel poking fun at the Flash movie.

All of that still exists, and you could easily look it up, but the population is hypnotized so it does not matter. Peter would still be something that exists in those records, but people would either not process the information or would not be able to remember the details. If you have ever seen someone go to a hypnotist, people can lose simple details like their own name or how to count temperature properly, and I think the spell works the same way, leaving Peter as something people just cannot seem to remember.

The comparison I would draw is to the forgetting spell in Harry Potter, where people can somewhat remember things but not to the point of recognizing the details. It is a bit like trying to recall a specific episode of Daredevil: you might vaguely remember that Matt and Foggy took on a mysterious client and talked to Wesley, but you would not remember the details of that conversation unless you had just binged the whole show. As a test of this, I actually asked my grandad who Peter Parker was, and he said "who's Peter Parker", so the spell does seem to work. I would also compare it to the Silence in Doctor Who, aliens you forget the moment you look away, or to sleeper cells.

The Electro plot hole: how could he cross over without knowing Peter's real identity

As for how Electro knew, I think that is probably the biggest plot hole in the film. We are told that people who know Peter Parker is Spider-Man come across when the spell breaks, but later on Electro is surprised to learn that the Spider-Man of his universe is white, so how could he have crossed over if he did not actually know the identity of the webhead from his own world?

My theory goes back to the end of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, where Electro is absorbing all the energy so he can become one with data, which would let him tap into everything on the planet, similar to Cyborg from the DC universe. He would have access to every piece of technology on Earth and all the data on the internet, so I believe when he did this he learned Peter's identity, but it stayed locked away in his mind and he simply never tapped into it.

Electro sees the Tom Holland version of the character early on, and by the time of the fight he was probably too preoccupied with that to really delve into the identity of the Peter Parker from his own universe. That could be how he ends up crossing over, or it could just be a plot hole. Maybe. I would love to hear other theories on it.

So did Electro really carry that knowledge across without ever using it, or is this simply a plot hole in No Way Home?