This episode has a lot to do. As the last episode before the hiatus, it has to make sure that the story has progressed to a certain point where we want to come back, and on that point it succeeds.
Mia and Constantine are still trying to revive Oliver, but now they have Diggle on their side. Their first stop is Earth-666, home of Lucifer Morningstar, who owes Constantine a favor which comes in the form of a Get Out of Purgatory Free card. The trio spend most of the episode in Oliver’s purgatory, a facsimile of Lian-Yu, but once they find him and convince him to come back the Spectre shows up to tell him he has to stay gone because there’s other plans for him. They head back to the Waverider without him.
Iris, Ray, and the newly arrived Elongated Man head to find one of the last Paragons: Ryan Choi, who you may recognize as the new Atom. At first, he doesn’t want to help but Iris gives him a pep talk that inspires him to go help anyway. They head back to the Waverider.
The Flash, meanwhile, has gone with Cisco (who has been forcibly re-Vibed) and Killer Frost to investigate the thing Harrison Wells found that turned him into Pariah. It turns out to be the source of the Anti-Matter Wave, where they find the Flash of Earth-90 running against his will to keep it powered. They remove him from it, but ol’ 90-Flash tells them the device has a fail-safe and it’ll blow up and destroy everything if he’s not running. They manage to stop this from happening thanks to the arrival of Black Lightning, who keeps it from overloading before they realize that if someone runs backwards on the treadmill it might neutralize the wave and destroy the device. While our Flash thinks it’s his time to shine and also die, 90-Flash steals his speed and does the job instead, vaporizing himself in the process. The rest head back to the Waverider, thinking they won.
Unfortunately, even though they have all the Paragons there’s one episode of this left so something has to happen. In this case, it’s Harbringer showing up possessed by the Anti-Monitor and she handily destroys Earth One (which at this point was the final surviving Earth) but not before Pariah zaps the seven Paragons (which includes Barry and the Martian Manhunter) to the Vanishing Point outside time and space. Except Lex Luthor used the Book of Destiny to replace the Kingdom Come Superman, so who knows what’ll happen with that?
So now all that’s left is the final episode, in January, where the seven Paragons and Lex Luthor have to figure out a way to undo the destruction of the Multiverse. Stakes have been sufficiently raised and while it’s a cinch they’ll come through on the other side all right, I can’t fathom how they’ll be able to pull that off.
OTHER NEAT STUFF
We didn’t get many other Earths this week since the number of surviving Earths rapidly diminished over the course of the episode. We did get:
-Earth-203, which is where the Birds of Prey show took place.
-Earth-666, where Lucifer takes place.
Supergirl and Batwoman had some fun back-and-forth about using the Book of Destiny to restore Earth-38 and then about Batwoman’s Kryptonite, but they come through it stronger. They’ve done a good job of setting up these two as friends.
Black Lightning geeks out when he meets the two Supermen. It’s a cute moment.
Fictosphere Entertainment 