All Venom: The Last Dance’s confusing comic book references, explained

Venom: The Last Dance may be 1 of those “You just had to be there” experiences. It feels cluttered, confused, and yet remarkably inconsequential. We’re told that the full universe is at stake in this story, and yet nothing in the movie feels peculiarly threatening or even meaningful. So many different threads, ideas, and characters are introduced and then dispensed with, ignored, or contradicted, to the point where nothing lands — not even the expected ending of this movie series.

As Polygon’s amusement editor, I’ve learned that erstwhile a comic book movie baffles me this much, I’m most likely missing something that was mangled from the origin material. It’s always possible the communicative made more sense in its first form. So I turn to our resident comics super-expert Susana to aid me unpack what I just saw. I asked her my large questions from Venom: The Last Dance to see if there’s any way bringing in any extra background lore could aid save this messy, overstuffed, suspiciously goofy movie.

[Ed. note: Widespread spoilers ahead for Venom: The Last Dance.]

Tasha: Susana, let’s start with the McGuffin at the center of this movie: The codex, a nigh-magical hoobajoo that only the Eddie Brock/Venom symbiote (both voiced by Tom Hardy) share, and that the movie’s villain, Knull (Andy Serkis) wants, for Reasons.

Did you follow any of that, Susana? We’re told Venom has a codex due to the fact that Eddie died at any point in these movies, and the symbiote revived him. But the movie beautiful pointedly doesn’t explain what a codex is or why it would be so rare, much little why it would work as a key to break Knull out of cosmic prison.

Susana: That’s easy adequate — the “codex” is an thought adapted from Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman’s 2018 run on Venom. In the comics, a “codex” is simply a small trace of symbiote stuff that symbiotes naturally leave behind in the bodies of their hosts, peculiarly the tense system. In a pinch, it can be utilized to get into the symbiote hivemind. (In the comics, all symbiotes are connected in a species-wide hivemind, natch.)

In comics, it isn’t one codex that’s the key to freeing Knull, but lots and lots of codexes. That’s the main difference here: In the comics, codexes are the furthest thing from rare. They virtually happen any time a symbiote bonds with a host for more than a fleeting moment. And thanks to the Venomverse and Venomized events, which were based around symbiotes bonding with all your favourite characters so you can see how cool they look in a Venom-ized suit, fundamentally everybody of note in the Marvel Comics universe has a codex.

Knull was freed in the Absolute Carnage event, in which a Knull-communing Carnage went on a spree of ripping out people’s spines and eating them, in order to connect their codexes up to Knull, which would let the god to regain control of the symbiote hivemind.

Tasha: In a way! It at least tells me more than the movie does about what a codex is expected to be or how 1 is formed. And I can see why people making a movie would want to control the dynamic from “This thing is available all over the universe” to “Our protagonist is simply a unique and peculiar snowflake, and his McGuffin means the action will follow him from scene to scene, wherever he goes.”

So why would a codex/a lot of codexes free Knull from alien space jail? And given that we get no information about him in this movie but “He’s the god of symbiotes, and also, they hatred him,” is there a backstory to him that would make him make more sense? Like, why does he want to destruct the universe, and why would this rando death-metal-guitarist guy have the power to destruct the universe?

Susana: In Cates and Stegman’s comics, Knull is simply a primordial god of the void, who ruled over the formless black nothing that stretched between the demolition of the 6th Cosmos and the creation of the 7th (our current one). He sees anything that isn’t the darkness of empty space as an encroachment on his domain.

Tasha: That is the most metallic thing you’ve always said.

Susana: Oh, I’m just getting started. Being the Most metallic is what cosmic superhero comics are all about!

When the Celestials started making the 7th Cosmos, Knull took that as an insult. Bathed for the first time in the light of creation, the god of the void reached into his own shadow and created the first symbiote, in the form of the Celestial-killing blade All-Black, the Necrosword. (All-Black was invented by Jason Aaron and Esad Ribić for their series Thor: God of Thunder. Cates and Stegman retroactively gave it an origin with Knull.)

The Celestials cast Knull back into the void, but he spent his time manifesting symbiote life from pure darkness, creating a shape-shifting, parasitic horde species full controlled by a hivemind linked with his own divine consciousness. Then he launched that horde into the universe to devour all that it found.

Eventually, Knull’s control momentarily lapsed after a large fight with a young Thor (immortalized by human storytellers as the epic of Beowulf), and his symbiote army bonded with mortal hosts, discovering the concepts of “honor” and “nobility,” as Knull put it. The freed symbiotes rose up and imprisoned Knull in a massive ball of their own bodies, which, until 2018’s Venom #4, had always been understood to simply be the symbiote home planet.

Tasha: OK, gross. And this is why the symbiotes in Venom: The Last Dance are willing to bond with any and all human, including the ones who imprisoned them in tubes in an underground bunker, if it helps them fight off his creatures?

Susana: By comics canon, yeah. The symbiotes hatred him due to the fact that he was a god-tyrant, and they don’t like being his slaves. He wants to kill the universe due to the fact that it is anathema to him. And he can do it due to the fact that he’s a primordial cosmic entity.

Tasha: And why does he have an army of unkillable CG mega-bugs?

Susana: Oh, those are from a completely unrelated Venom comic. I got nothin’.

Tasha: Speaking of unrelated Venom stuff, I assumed all those symbiotes who show up for the large conflict at the end and have distinctive colors and powers are from the comics? That full series smelled like fan-candy to me, apart from the fact that most of those characters immediately get mulched. Was there anyone in there that Venom fans would care about?

Susana: It’s fundamentally fan candy, but for just… an unspeakably tiny group of fans. The list of times Marvel Comics creators have tried to make a fresh symbiote/host hero or villain stick is longer than my arm, and most of them don’t rate more than a footnote. I’m checking wikis for all of these guys, but the ones on display seem to be based on Toxin (Officer Mulligan’s green form), and 5 more symbiotes about inspired by Venom: Lethal Protector. That 1993 miniseries, written by David Michelinie and drawn by respective artists, introduced a litter of high-key toyetic offspring of the Venom symbiote.

Those 5 symbiotes were Riot (gray, turns his hands into hammers, etc.), Phage (brown, turns his limbs into spikes), Lasher (green, has extra back tentacles, attaches to the woman with a Christmas tree pin), Agony (purple, uses hair tentacles, attaches to Juno Temple’s Dr. Teddy Payne), and Scream (orange/yellow, besides weaponized hair), and they seem to be the templates for Last Dance’s extra symbiotes. It’s complicated, though, due to the fact that the movie doesn’t name any of them, and Riot was technically already utilized as the villain of 2018’s Venom (played by Riz Ahmed).

There’s besides a two-headed symbiote at 1 point, but that 1 seems to be an first design, as best as I can research.

Tasha: How large a deal is Agony in the comics? large adequate to support her own movie? While The Last Dance’s post-credits scene leaves Sony a possible beginning for a further Venom sequel, the movie (title and all) seems to be aimed at shutting down the Tom Hardy Venom series, though Hardy has signaled he’d return if Venom got to fight Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in another Sony Spiderverse/MCU crossover.

So much of the way this movie treats Dr. Payne — as if her motivations and backstory are important, even though she doesn’t actually do much in the film, and as if her getting her own symbiote is simply a climactic, cathartic triumph for the communicative — only truly makes sense if this movie is besides being positioned as an Agony origin communicative that could be utilized to launch a fresh symbiote franchise. Which feels a lot like Sony trying to usage Madame Web as a cinematic origin communicative for a bunch of fresh Spider-Women, but I digress. Clearly Agony doesn’t have Venom’s cultural cachet, but is there anything notable or interesting about her that could support a movie?

Susana: So, Teddy Payne appears to be a genderbent version of Dr. Thaddeus Paine, who featured as the villain of 1996’s Venom: The Hunger, by author Len Kaminski and artist Ted Halsted. But his backstory has nothing in common with Dr. Payne’s another than a homophonic name and the fact that they’re both scientists, and he’s never merged with a symbiote in comics history. Payne is, in everything but name, an first character.

As for Agony, I’m going to be honest with you as a comics expert: If I’ve always read a communicative with Agony in it, I don’t remember. Commenters are free to call that a gap in my knowledge, but I’m going to call it an indication of Agony’s deficiency of an established footprint in Marvel Comics canon.

Tasha: I mean, I’ve never read a Venom-centric comic, and I knew who Venom was well before the first movie, but I had to ask you who Agony was. I’m coming to all of this in ignorance, so I’m certain not going to claim you should know more about a character I’ve never heard of.

Speaking of characters I’ve never heard of, though, any thought who the mysterious guy in the control area is? The secretive silhouetted guy who’s so crucial that he can single-handedly shift control of the seemingly massive government-run Imperium task from Dr. Payne to General Strickland on a moment’s notice? The guy who has someway put up identical networked facial-recognition surveillance cameras all around the world, from downtown Vegas to random alleys in Mexico? Clearly this dude, whose presence and power and intentions and motives are never explained, is any truly crucial and breathtaking comics reference, right?

Susana: I have no fucking thought who that man is. possibly we’ll find out in Kraven the Hunter. possibly it was just a dropped plotline.

Tasha: I admit that after seeing the first Kraven trailer in a theatre last week, I have a truly hard time believing the speech that movie seems to be going for could jibe at all with the hot-nonsense speech Venom: The Last Dance is keyed to. Speaking of which… A lot baffled me about this movie, including how the Venom symbiote is constantly abusing and overruling Eddie — virtually ripping food out of his mouth or shoving food into it, grabbing and controlling his body, not to mention wrecking his career, his relationships, and his life. And yet Eddie calls the thing his best friend.

But the thing that alarmed me the most was erstwhile Eddie wants to leave Vegas ahead of the various threats coming after them, and the symbiote wants to hang out and dance with Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), who… truly seems to have a thing for Venom. I mean, the full “Dancing Queen” scene is clearly a goof, but it besides involves kinda hentai levels of tentacle-caressing. (Completely apart from being a series that makes no sense, since the symbiote is clearly frightened of the Xenophage coming after him and Eddie, and yet after an hr of avoiding merging into Venom due to the fact that it’s dangerous, he drops that concern entirely in order to force Eddie into a dance sequence.) Is Venom… flirting? Do I gotta consider Venom a sexual being now?

Susana: Do you have to consider Venom a sexual being now? I don’t know if that’s my question to answer, Tasha. What a man and his goo-monster do in the privacy of their own home is no of my business.

I didn’t read that series as having a flirtatious vibe, but that might have been due to the fact that I was furiously scribbling notes on how chaotic it was to cut to that scene from 1 of Dr. Payne sadly contemplating the childhood failure of her duplicate brother.

Tasha: I mean, what they do in the privacy of their own home is 1 thing, what they do in a Vegas penthouse is… well, even as I’m typing this, I’m realizing that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. I’m just saying, there are already so many consent problems around Eddie and his bestie and their merged Venom form, and this movie truly seems like it’s aimed at feeding the fandom debates (and the fanfiction) about whether Eddie’s tolerance of the symbiote comes from any kind of submissive kink.

But the little said about that, the better. I have so many more questions for you here. Why does Area 51 demolish its buildings with vast tanks of acid? Why does acid that dissolves concrete and rebar into dust within seconds not have any effect on the ground or anything below it? Why is simply a giant never-ending dust waterfall considered a subtle cover-up for a secret base? Why do the acid-tank biometric controls seemingly have settings for “some acid” and “more acid” which should be activated separately?

And why does Eddie lie to that mediocre kid Leaf about aliens not being real? I get that he’s trying to be comforting in the moment, but this is simply a universe where not believing in aliens can get you killed highly messily, and the lie doesn’t come across as helpful, just crass. And cowardly. And ironic. And evidently a setup for Eddie having to take it back 20 minutes later.

Susana: Some questions are beyond even the power of your friendly vicinity comics expert.