After Quentin Beck frames Peter Parker for his murder and reveals Parker's identity as Spider-Man,Parker, his girlfriend Michelle "MJ" Jones-Watson, best friend Ned Leeds, and aunt May are interrogated by the Department of Damage Control. Lawyer Matt Murdock gets Parker's charges dropped, but the group grapples with negative publicity. After Parker, MJ, and Ned's MIT applications are rejected, Parker goes to the New York Sanctum to ask Stephen Strange for help. Strange casts a spell that would make everyone forget Parker is Spider-Man, but it is corrupted when Parker repeatedly requests alterations to let his loved ones retain their memories, ultimately causing Strange to contain the spell to stop it.

Under Strange's suggestion, Parker tries to convince an MIT administrator to reconsider the applications of both MJ and Ned but is attacked by Otto Octavius. Octavius rips Parker's nanotechnology from his Iron Spider suit, which bonds with his mechanical tentacles and allows Parker to disable them. As Norman Osborn arrives and attacks, Strange teleports Parker back to the Sanctum and locks Octavius in a cell next to Curt Connors. Strange explains that before he could contain the corrupted spell, it summoned people from other universes within the multiverse who know Spider-Man's identity. He orders Parker, MJ, and Ned to find and capture them; they locate and retrieve Max Dillon and Flint Marko.