Spider-Man: Brand New Day ends on an ambiguous note. It will likely be years before we get real confirmation about what it means, so Marvel fans are doing what they always do and looking at old movies for any sort of hint they can find. Sometimes speculation leads to nonsense that gets too in the weeds to be even plausible, but there’s one theory that’s started spreading around arguing that a scene from No Way Home that originally seemed like a bit of a throwaway moment may actually hold the key to explaining Brand New Day’s ending.
The last scene before the credits start rolling in Brand New Day shows Peter Parker meeting up with his best friend Ned at a New York City store. Like everyone else, Ned forgot who Peter was at the end of No Way Home because Doctor Strange used a spell to wipe him from everyone’s memory. Ned and Peter haven’t fully reconnected at this point, but they did spend some time together while Peter was masked up as Spider-Man. When Peter re-introduces himself, he starts to do the pair’s signature handshake, and Ned, to his surprise, is able to replicate it as if from muscle memory. He then says Peter’s name, and then the movie ends.
There have been a lot of debates as to whether or not Ned actually remembers Peter here. Some think Jean Grey’s psychic blast in the climactic battle may have rattled his brain into remembering his old friend, but that’s just speculation at this point. However, there is another theory that feels a little more grounded in something that No Way Home set up.
In the previous film, Ned was revealed to have latent magical powers similar to Doctor Strange. He isn’t out here making worlds collide against one another like Strange, but he does manage to open some portals. As Ned is learning this about himself, there’s a scene in which he and Peter do their handshake and at the very end, magical sparks fly off Ned’s fingers.
The theory here is that Ned may have unknowingly cast a separate spell activated by his and Peter’s handshake, and that doing it could have restored his memory. Again, all speculation, but it is actually based on something we see, rather than something folks are pulling from thin air.
The big question at the end of Brand New Day isn’t “How does Ned remember Peter?” It’s “Does he actually remember Peter?” I, and many others, have read the handshake recall as muscle memory kicking in, and him saying Peter’s name at the end may also be because he remembered finding out that Spider-Man’s name was Peter earlier in the film when MJ let it slip. That ambiguity is what folks are debating, and some think Marvel might not have even settled on an answer yet. Whatever the case, we probably won’t know for sure until, at earliest, next year when Spider-Man likely appears in Avengers: Secret Wars, and even then, it might not come up until Peter gets his next solo movie, which seems like a given considering just how huge Brand New Day has been.
