Did No Way Home's Ending Ruin Peter Parker's Supporting Cast?

The premise of Brand New Day is, structurally, a five-years-later consequence of a choice Peter made at the end of No Way Home: asking Doctor Strange to erase the entire world's memory of him, including MJ (Zendaya) and Ned's (Jacob Batalon). RogerEbert.com's review describes the result plainly — MJ and Ned “remember that Spider-Man saved them a few times when they were in high school, but have no memories of his secret identity, including their relationship to it.” Marvel's own official synopsis confirms it's still the engine of the story: “a world that doesn't remember him.”

Five years and one entire movie's worth of consequences later, was that choice good storytelling — or did it strip Peter's closest relationships down to something the franchise has been quietly trying to rebuild ever since?

The Case That the Memory Wipe Damaged the Cast

The core complaint is simple: MJ and Ned are two of the strongest supporting characters the Holland trilogy built, largely through three films of specific, earned history with Peter — and No Way Home erased all of it in a single spell, with zero input from either of them. That's a real cost, not just a plot inconvenience. Our own coverage of the fan theory that MJ retains subconscious traces of Peter exists precisely because so many people found the clean-erasure premise unsatisfying enough to go looking for a loophole. And structurally, it means two characters who used to drive scenes now spend Brand New Day reacting to a situation rather than shaping one.

The Case That It Was the Right Call

The counter-argument is that the alternative — MJ and Ned simply knowing and dealing with Peter's secret again, the way they had for three films — had genuinely run out of dramatic road. Tallerico's review frames the isolation this creates as the source of the film's “most interesting thematic thread”: whether erasing the parts of Peter that made him a “man” lets the “spider” side take over. That's not a thread you get access to without the erasure. Our theory coverage on MJ as collateral damage makes a similar case: keeping her away from Peter is framed in-story as protection, which is a very different narrative function than "the writers ran out of ideas."

Where MarvelGossips Lands

The strongest evidence the wipe wasn't wasted is what Tallerico's review says it produces: “longing and awkward pauses between the two” that reviewers across outlets keep calling the emotional center of the film, not a weakness in it. Erasing history and then spending an entire movie on the ache of that erasure is a genuine use of the premise — the test was always whether Brand New Day treats the reunion as earned rather than convenient, and on the reviews so far, it does.