Title: Flashpoint
Issue: 5
Date: October 2011
Publisher:
DC Comics
Writer: Geoff Johns
Penciler: Andy Kubert
Inker: Sandra Hope, Jesse Delperdang
Colorist: Alex Sinclair
Letterer: Nick J. Napolitano
Editor: Eddie Berganza, Rex Ogle
Cover: Andy Kubert, Sandra Hope, Alex Sinclair
Disclaimer: I didn't read any other issues of this series. But, having read this one and skimmed
the Wikipedia Page, I don't really feel like I needed to.
In the midst of a whole bunch of mayhem, Zoom confronts Flash and restores Barry's lost memories by "resetting your internal vibrations". Apparently this is extremely painful. Probably because the human brain has a limited tolerance for horribly contrived pseudoscientific nonsense.
It is then revealed that...
SPOILER WARNING
The entire Flashpoint miniseries is nothing more than a good old fashioned time travel story about how you can't just go an change the past because all kinds of unforeseen stuff will happen. That's all there is to it.
Five issues. Sixteen different miniseries. A whole bunch of one-shots. And a map of Africa featuring the words "Ape Controlled" (Really, DC? Really?).
And the whole point was to tell the same story about what happens if you go back in time and
step on a butterfly kill Hitler save your mom from a supervillain that every SF author since HG Wells has been telling.
So, in terms of the actual explanation it was a bit underwhelming.
The big climactic battle suffered from the same problem that the big climactic battles in these crossover series always suffer from: Too many characters need to get their big final resolution scenes. The result is a series of quick deaths with no emotional impact (and even less in this series because of the "Elseworlds" nature of the whole thing and the looming DC Universe reboot that will restore most of these characters).
That being said, Zoom gets a pretty good comeuppance that works well in the context of the story and delivers some satisfying impact. And the story does get quite a bit better once we enter epilogue mode and have dispensed with the mass battle stuff. The resolution of affairs between Barry and his mom is a nice touch and the fact that she goes knowingly to her fate is an interesting choice of plot direction. Likewise the final scene with Barry and Bruce Wayne is excellent and it gets a full seven pages.
The actual "reset the timeline" bit was a full two-page spread featuring some hooded woman who I probably should recognize but don't explaining (non-explaining, really) that there were three timelines because the "history of heroes" was shattered, and that they will now merge into one. Okay. This will probably make sense to some of the serious DC fanboys. For people like me, they kept it short and provided lots of random pictures of different version of DC superheroes in the background.
The problem I had with this series in general is that nothing in it really matters. Everyone knew going in that the reset button was going to get hit. Like most time travel stories, the final goal is simply to put the universe back to what it was before (or in this case a very slightly altered version to coincide with the relaunch). So there's no real emotional investment in the end result, nor are there any real stakes being decided while we're in Elseworlds mode. Or, to use Marvel's terminology, this entire series was a huge "What If?" story. And the appeal of "What If?" is to give us a glimpse of an altered version of the world. The altered version presented in this series was nasty, brutish, and ultimately uninteresting.
Given the limitations of what DC set out to do, I'm actually surprised that this final issue had anything worth reading in it at all. It did, and that's something at least. But I'm not exactly regretting not reading the rest of this mess.
Rating: 5.5/10
Title: Action Comics
