Hi! Welcome to my episode-by-episode recap of, and reaction to Justice League. There will be no spoilers beyond the current episode. As is my custom with recaps, I will give you a short summary recap followed by a long and unnecessarily helpfully detailed version. My reaction will follow at the end if you just want to scroll past all of the recap.
If you want to see my prior Justice League episode reviews, click HERE:
THE QUICK AND CLEAN SUMMARY:
An ancient lunar crystal called the Black Heart is discovered. Unbeknownst to the members of the Justice League, it harbors an evil snake spirit with the ability to possess its bearer, and hum or whistle an eerie evil tune. The crystal’s power contaminates almost all of the League, except for the Flash, who must save the League from a weapon that will destroy both the Sun and the Earth.
THE EXTRA DUSTY RECAP:
The episode opens with a military operation. On the mouth of a cave, they see the word “Kawe.” One of the soldiers thinks it stands for cave, but a fellow soldier explains the word is Latin for “beware.” As they explore, they find a mountain of skeletons. As they continue looking, they find a black gemstone.
Just then, an old man, wearing an amulet of his own, and carrying a sword, flies down at them, attacking, warning them to touch not the Black Heart.
“Mophir preserves the world.”
Just as he says this, the old man is knocked out. While he is down, one of the soldiers – Burns – takes the gem, called the Black Heart. As he walks away, he begins to quietly chant. He attacks his fellow soldiers and collapses the mouth of the cave on them, trapping them.
We see Flash fighting some of his henchmen. When they have him down, a boy tosses a bar toward him. Flash then begins advertising for Lightspeed Booster bars It’s an ad. We pan away from the ad to find a man named Godfrey complaining about the Justice League , arguing that they work for whoever has the deepest pockets.
We cut away from Godfrey to see GL turning a TV off, and then laying into Flash for opening up the League to that type of criticism. GL asks him why he needs that much money, so they go outside and Flash shows him a new van he has purchased, complete with red paint adorned yellow lightning striping. The van hops up and down and has a bed inside.
Inside the van, Flash turns on a TV and finds Godfrey again, with a large crowd, chanting at the Justice League that they’re not super heroes, they’re super zeroes.
Flash: It’s not my fault!
GL: Of course not. You just handed that jerk a weapon. You didn’t tell him to fire it.
Flash then zips away to appear in front of Godfrey, face to face, and live on his program. Godfrey then begins laying into Flash, who is unprepared to answer. He accidentally adds to Godfrey’s narrative. When the show ends, Godfrey thanks him for dropping in and tells him it’s nothing personal, just show business.
We see the old man from the beginning of the episode again, Mophir. He is watching Godfrey on TV. We cut away to the soldier we met, Burns, whistling ominously in a truck with another soldier. He asks the man about weapons to kill mammals. After Burns fires a gun, his fellow soldier says that the most powerful weapon they have is a nuke, which can kill thousands, maybe millions.
Burns: It’s a start.
Godfrey continues blaming the JL for problems that are universal, but his crowd eats it up. WW watches on TV.
WW: What a rude little man. Somebody needs to put him in his place.
GL advises against it, but just then Godfrey starts showing pictures of Wonder Woman.
Godfrey: Role models? I’ve seen showgirls with more modesty than this so-called Wonder Woman.
WW breaks the TV and tells GL that she will not tolerate this. GL tells her that he also doesn’t like the man, but notes that he is entitled to his opinion in this country.
Flash: Democracy in action. Hey, didn’t the Greeks invent that?
[pause]
WW: AND WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WAY I DRESS?!
We cut to an announcement about the creation of an anti-fusion device, an advancement in defense technology.
Burns drives through a barrier, toward the AFD test location. He is stopped when his truck is crashed. When he wakes up, guns are pointed at him.
Next we see Flash cutting another promo, this time for gastro-intestinal distress. He complains about having to talk about itching, scratching, and bumps. Flash’s agent talks him into going through with it again, but before he starts, Flash insults everyone and then leaves. His agent is on the hook for the cost of the ad, so he sends footage of Flash yelling at everyone to Godfrey, in exchange for payment.
Burns is being interrogated. He doesn’t remember anything. Another soldier now has the Black Heart gem – it’s a general. As the General is stealing the AFD, we see Godfrey airing clips of Flash yelling at the crew of the commercial.
The general sees this air and asks a captain how one could contact the Justice League, and he is told to put on a gaudy costume and to then threaten to hurt a lot of people. The General thanks him sincerely.
Flash talks to his agent, who pretends not to know how Godfrey got the footage. Wonder Woman is there, as is GL. The agent suggests they do a swimsuit issue, which infuriates WW. Just then an explosion goes off nearby at a power plant. The three of them go to investigate.
They find the General in a gaudy costume, threatening to hurt a lot of people. Mophir is on the scene, too, and knows that it is nearby. The JL fights the general, stopping him, but WW ends up with the Black Heart. She throws the unconscious general off a balcony, and he is only saved by a last second catch by Flash. Flash asks if she is feeling alright and she tells him that she is fine, but adds that there is still so much to do.
The episode ends with WW humming ominously.
[Part 2]
The episode opens with a man named Godfrey giving a rally wherein he complains about the wanton destruction that follows the “Just Us” League around and calls for the government to ban them.
The next thing we see is The Flash having financial contracts canceled by his PR rep, who then pretends that their call cuts out.
GL interrogates the General about a theft. He claims he cannot remember what happened. The General tells GL that the object stolen, the AFD, is not a weapon but defensive, in that it stops nuclear fusion.
General: Unless you’re planning to go knock out a star the only thing it’s good for is protection against nuclear attack.
We see that Wonder Woman was watching the interrogation. When Flash approaches her, talking about how terrible the night has been, she aggressively asks if he ever shuts up, and then leaves. Sometime later, Flash, GL, and WW are outside together and being watched nervously by a crowd of people.
Flash: Godfrey’s got ’em scared.
WW: Men are fools.
When they turn to watch her walk off again, they are attacked by Mophir, carrying a sword. He knocks them both out from behind before beginning a fight with Wonder Woman. He gets the upper hand with WW, after an amulet he is wearing blasts her, but just before he skewers her with his sword, GL gets back up and blasts him with his ring. GL flies WW to the Watchtower and tells Flash to handle the lunatic.
Later we see Mophir in an asylum. Flash asks the doctor what the deal with the guy is and why he attacked his friend. The man mutters and Flash is struck by his words and asks for clarification.
Insane man: Now man’s time, forever eclipsed.
Flash: Say what?
Insane man: Man’s time, forever eclipsed?
Flash: Okay, that’s the second time I’ve heard this tonight so either you’re sharing your delusions with a general or… why don’t you tell me all about it.
Mophir begins to tell a tale about humanity fighting snake-like humanoids long before civilization. After years of struggle, humans were winning. Then during an eclipse, the snake-people performed a ritual and all seemed to die, with their spirits leaving their bodies. The old man narrating the past says that here was born a thing called Black Heart and that all who touch it are possessed by vengeful spirits. He says the goal of the spirits is to destroy humanity. The old man says that since that time, the Black Heart has been guarded, but it’s not his fault the spirits escaped.
Flash asks why he attacked the Princess. He answers that he tracked evil to her, and that the was trying to stop her, but the ring man prevented him from doing so. Flash asks him to assume that he believes him and then asks him how to stop them.
The old man answers that there are two ways. The first is pure light from his gem will drive the evil spirits back into the Black Heart. The second is to remove the head from the host body.
Flash tells Martian Manhunter about what he was told and seems relieved that MM seems to believe him. MM adds that Diana has been acting strangely since her recovery.
Flash checks on her and she seems herself, but confused. Flash races back to ask MM if he can read her mind but before that becomes possible, MM announces a security breach in the javelin bay. Flash says it must be those snake things. Hawkgirl, who arrives, says she has been in the sick bay the entire time. Superman and WW then join them and he suggests they look at the security footage.
The footage shows MM as the culprit. He is confused and says he has no memory of this. Flash zips away and suggests that they all submit to having the old man’s bright light shined on them. Flash scans MM and WW, but before he gets to Superman, GL destroys the amulet.
GL: Pathetic humans, we shall lay waste to your world.
There is a brief battle, but GL is subdued and before asking any questions, Hawkgirl destroys the Black Heart with her mace. Something seems to leave the object when this happens. When Flash looks up, the rest of the Justice League appears to be possessed.
Superman: Humanity has witnessed its last sunrise.
The rest of the Justice League attacks Flash, but he manages to evade them. As he is hiding on the Watchtower, he hears Wonder Woman remark upon how fitting it will be that humans die from their own weapons of war. The missing weapon mentioned earlier, the one designed to stop nuclear reactions, is aboard the Watchtower. They commend that when they use it on the sun, humanity will be destroyed.
GL hurls the device at the sun. Flash makes a call from Watchtower to Batman, who is not present, but Superman hears him and blasts the comms device with his heat vision. Flash escapes Superman and goes to the javelin, but when he arrives, he sees that it has been disabled. GL then finds Flash and begins to attack him.
At a distance, we see the sun going dark and the people of earth panicking.
Flash escapes the Justice League again, and lures them into a lower level of the Watchtower. Whenthey track him down, he says that they may have won and maybe it is hopeless.
Flash: But why curse the dark when you can light up a 700,000 watt candle.
He flips a lever and springs his trap, flooding the room with bright light. The reptile entities flee the Justice League’s bodies. When they come to, he warns them about what htey’ve just done. Martian Manhunter suggests a way to stop it.
MM: We need to create an Einstein Rosenbridge to drain off the infecting anti-fusion matter.
GL suggests using the javelin’s wormhole generator for interstellar travel, at which point Flash announces more bad news. The decide the javelin will take too long to repair, but they can use the generator. Superman notes he cannot fly fast enough to get it near the speed of light, but GL points out that Flash can go that fast, noting however, he’ll need to help.
GL flies Flash into space. He explains that the wormhole needs to open at a precise distance to both drain the anti-fusion matter and to avoid destroying the sun. GL flings Flash forward and then lays out a ring-generated track upon which to run.
At precisely the correct spot, the wormhole opens and the sun is saved. We see people on earch cheering. After, Flash seems to be unconscious. GL returns him to the Watchtower.
When he wakes up, Wonder Woman asks hm how he’s feeling.
Flash: Actually… kind of faint. I think I need some mouth to mouth.
Hawkgirl: He’s fine.
Later, we see Godfrey doing a broadcast, where he points out that the JL saved everyone. He adds that he knows he has been hard on them, saying though that if he is guilty of anything, it is caring too much. Flash gets a call from a call from his agent, who tells him that he is popular again, but Flash down endorsement offers this time. He suggests Mophir, the old man who was the previous guard of the Black Heart.
We see him cutting an ad as the episode ends.
REACTION:
This is a kind of goofy (a word I’ll use a lot in this review), Flash-centric story, but it was entertaining and had a lot of potential to be darker if the writers had wanted it to be so.
Michael Rosenbaum is a lot of fun as Flash, doing a great job of balancing pure of heart, irreverent, and naive all at once. He’s kind of treated like an overgrown teenager in his characterization, which is a relatively necessary change of pace from the other male cast who are all permanently over-serious and fun-avoidant. So Rosenbaum’s version of Wally West would absolutely purchase a “pimp my ride” style van and sign up to do commercials for money/fun. This was goofy, but it worked.
The best part of the two part episode was the furious Wonder Woman reacting to Godfrey, calling him a rude little man, and then later even more furiously asking GL and Flash (in response to Godfrey’s criticism) what’s wrong with how she dresses. The two part episode reaches a little too far for comic relief at times, but this was outstanding.
The overall story arc was made most goofy by Mophir, the ancient guardian of the Black Heart (Heart of Darkness) gem, who was hunched and kind of monkey-ish. (I prefer my ancient guardians of relics to be more like the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword, or better, a Medieval Knight.)
But the rest of the episode was really cool and plausible in a Middle Eastern supernatural kind of way. If someone ever wanted to do a live-action version of this type of story, it would have a lot of potential to be very dark. There is a strong demonic possession and exorcism feel to it. The Ophidians (snake people) are also sufficiently real-world adjacent.
Overall, this was not my favorite story, but it was one of the funnier ones. Angry and naive Wonder Woman should not be comedy that gets overdone, but when it’s done well it’s very funny. Flash was funny throughout. But given how close the bad guys came to exterminating the human race, I kind of also wish I’d seen a version of this story played straight and more seriously, too.