Eventually, Smythe's criminal career came to an end when the radioactive materials used in the robots' manufacture poisoned him, dooming him to a slow and agonizing death. Blaming Spider-Man and Jameson equally for his impending demise, Smythe handcuffed the two together with a bomb scheduled to detonate in 24 hours, determined to make the two suffer the agony of inescapable death that he saw the two as having condemned him to. Unfortunately for Smythe, his disease was too advanced for him to survive the 24 hours himself, and he died convinced that he had killed off the two responsible. Peter Parker, however, had a pretty good grasp of what made mechanical devices tick, and was able to abort the bomb by freezing its controls mere moments before it would have detonated.