Gwen Stacy is a joy to watch in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. She moves the story along with Miles and Peter B. adding a level of grace and wit. But there are a couple things that make a viewer go "huh…" in her story. Some of them are small, tiny curiosities that the script either didn’t have time to fill in and some are glaring holes that could use a little patching.
Whether they left out these explanations to focus on other plots, like Peter B.’s growth and, of course, Miles’ rise to being the new Spider-Man, Spider-Gwen still rocks her roll, even with a little confusion in the mix.
10 Time of Arrival
It’s implied that most of the Spider-folks showed up in pretty quick order after the explosion that killed Peter Parker in Miles’ universe. But Gwen, in her own words, was “blown into last week”. In fact, we meet Gwen well before things start to go spidery for Miles. There’s no explanation to this particular puzzle. Maybe Gwen’s universe was closer, cosmically, to Miles’ and the blast sent her further? We will never know. But she’s there early, ready to watch Miles make the change.
9 Visions Academy Enrollment
Miles got into Visions Academy in a lottery, but he still had to write tests and qualify to be there. That was made pretty explicit in the first part of the movie, while Miles is moving in. So how did Gwen get in with just a week in this dimension to do so? Did she have help?
It doesn’t seem like the kind of school you can just walk into and ask to be tested either. Maybe she just grabbed a uniform, sat down, and hoped for the best.
8 Gwen Doesn’t Glitch
Even in the final battle, with worlds crashing together and all the Spider-people glitching at once, Gwen is not among them. Not once, throughout the movie, does Gwen suffer a glitch. Now, given that she’s been in Miles’ dimension for a week, and Peter B. was glitching after only a few hours, there’s some serious inconsistency there on how exactly the cellular decay works. Does this involve dimensional proximity, like our first plot hole? Who knows?
7 Aunt May
Now, granted, Gwen would know who Aunt May is and where to find her, and that would probably link up to some of Peter’s Spidey gear location. But how did she know for sure that Aunt May would have the necessary equipment handy to fix the goober?
It is possible that Aunt May was the first person she looked for, but her arrival was even before that universe’s Peter died, and that brings up many more questions.
6 Where Was She When Peter Died?
We’ve established Gwen time jumped when she was thrown through dimensions, and that she might have sought out Aunt May when she got there—both to help her figure things out and maybe help get her into school—so why wasn’t she there to help Peter out against Kingpin from the beginning? There could be some multidimensional time-jump rule that she couldn’t be there because stopping the explosion would have stopped her dimension hop, but it’s not a rule we—or Gwen herself—can easily be aware of.
5 Her Reactions to Peter
We see repeatedly how Peter B. reacts to any image of Mary-Jane throughout his time in Miles’ world, not to mention his rather overemotional apology about bread. But we don’t see a lot of reaction from Gwen about working with Peter. Granted he’s older and not the Lizard version of her Peter Parker in her dimension but aside from a short “I’ve been there” comment, we don’t get much from her on this. Whether she’s actively shutting that reaction down or it was left out of the script for flow reasons, Gwen’s closure doesn’t come from another version of her dead friend. It comes from her new friend, Miles.
4 Peter B. Vollunteers to Die
Given that she had yet to reach her closure about her own best friend’s death, watching Peter B. willingly sacrifice himself for the rest of them seems like something that should get an on-screen reaction from Gwen. We don’t see anyone putting up a fight to send Peter B. home except Miles.
Gwen might assume that this Peter is as stubborn as the other ones, but she doesn’t seem to pull punches with less life-or-death decisions. Why this one? She offers to stay, while everyone is glitching and she isn't, why not put up more of a fight?
3 “15 months older than you”
When did Miles and Gwen have a birthday conversation during all this? She seems smart enough to do some basic research, maybe shortly after her haircut, but this comment comes out of nowhere in those last moments that the two of them have in the same dimension. Maybe this version has something akin to Madame Web’s powers, or Peni Parker's psychic connection to her spider let her in on it, but we never see anything like that, and Gwen’s got the standard Spider-power package here and in the comics.
2 Inter-Dimensional Calls
From the beginning, we’re shown that pulling things from dimension to dimension is capital-B-Bad. The repercussions, while only really Banksy-esque, are shown to be dangerous to everyone in all the effected dimensions. That’s the whole reason that Dr. Ock’s machine has to be destroyed. But when it’s all said and done, Miles and Gwen seem to be having a pretty casual inter-dimensional conversation.
Why is this safe, but the big version isn’t? It’s doubtful that either crimefighter would be happy with risking dimensions just to say hi. It could just be a set up for some future sequel, but as we don’t know when that will be or what it’ll focus on, this seems pretty reckless for both of them.
1 Setting Off Miles’ Spider-Sense
Throughout the movie, whenever Spider-Folks meet, they get a signal that they are, indeed, Spider-Folks. While we see in a flashback that Gwen’s Spidey-sense went off for Miles, we don’t see him pick up anything on her. One could say that his powers were too new, but he picked up the signal with his dimension’s Peter right away only a little while later. Maybe Spidey-sense kicks in after the sticking. We sadly don’t have a spider-power manual. Though everyone would no doubt like one, right off the bat.