Warning: This article contains spoilers for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”
In “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” Peter Parker invents new technology that could accidentally change the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The tech, created after a conversation with Bruce Banner, is used as a means of combating Peter’s unwanted transformation into something that’s more spider than man. It also has potential ramifications for other Marvel superheroes going forward.
So what is the inhibitor, and why is it such a big deal? Read on to find out.
What is the inhibitor in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”?
Peter’s isolation, caused by the world forgetting his identity at the end of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” is a severe change for the character in “Brand New Day.” His powers start going out of control — changing his personality, heightening his spidey sense and giving him organic webs — as the arachnid DNA in his body starts mutating him into a more spider-like being.
So Peter goes to Bruce Banner, asking the scientist (who is no longer walking around as the merged Smart Hulk first seen in “Avengers: Endgame”) what he did to keep his own transformations at bay. In their conversation, Peter proposes an “inhibitor” that could change someone’s biology, taking out all of the unwanted mutations (in his case, putting his powers back to normal). It’s an idea that concerns Bruce, who asks Peter how he would decide what’s good and what’s bad.
Peter proceeds to make an inhibitor chip, which does exactly what he wants and returns his powers to what they were before. In a concerning development, he also creates a universal inhibitor: one that can seemingly take the powers away from any enhanced human whose body has been scientifically altered.
Though Peter initially intends to use this inhibitor on Jean Grey (Sadie Sink) to keep her telepathic abilities at bay, he later attempts to give it to Bruce to keep him from turning back into the Hulk. While Bruce can’t put it on in time to stop his transformation (this time to a more primitive, raging Hulk), he flashes a temporary look of horror at Spider-Man’s invention.
Why is the inhibitor a big deal?
So far, mutants have been only rarely seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with only a small handful popping up on the native world of Earth-616. Sadie Sink’s introduction as Jean Grey, one of the founding X-Men in the comics, teases the wider world of mutants that will occupy the post-“Avengers: Secret Wars” MCU.
The fact that Peter’s inhibitor chip works perfectly on Jean is cause for concern. A great many X-Men stories feature human villains who, scared of mutants, search for ways to suppress their abilities and make them second-class citizens. In the comics, one of the most prominent of these methods is the inhibitor collar, introduced in Chris Claremont and John Byrne 1980 classic “X-Men #141” as a means of putting mutants in internment camps in the dystopian world of “Days of Future Past.”
Inhibitors have been hinted at in the MCU before through projects like “She-Hulk,” but they have never been shown as a means of suppressing mutants (which are distinct from altered humans, like Bruce and Peter). Making Peter the inventor of such technology could place him at the forefront of some dark stories in Marvel’s future — especially since the inhibitor was temporarily in the possession of the Department of Damage Control, shown to tinker with and reproduce technology that could be weaponized. It’s a move that could haunt him for years to come.
Has a hero created inhibitors before?
There have been some Marvel comics where superheroes create anti-mutant technology that puts them at odds with the X-Men. Reed Richards found himself at the center of such a story in Chip Zdarsky and Terry Dodson’s 2020 miniseries “X-Men/Fantastic Four.”
In this book, Professor X, Magneto and a collection of mutants come to the Fantastic Four intending to take Reed and Sue Storm’s son, Franklin Richards, to the mutant nation of Krakoa, believing him to be a mutant (which was true at the time, but later retconned). To prevent them from taking Franklin through a gate to Krakoa (one only mutants can walk through), Reed invents Code-X, a device that can cloak mutant genes and cut off their abilities.
After the Fantastic Four and X-Men reach a truce at the end of the book, Professor X and Magneto confront Reed, destroying the device and erasing his memory of how to create it.
It’s a chilling scene — one Spider-Man could one day find himself taking part in if his role in creating the inhibitors ever comes back into play.
