DC Recap Round-up 2, Week 9: Breaking Time Once Again!

6 Dec

Welcome back! So this is really the last full Recap Round-Up of the year, mostly because next week will be TWO installments. One will be entirely on the Elseworlds crossover, the other will be involving the mid-season ends of Legends of Tomorrow and Black Lightning, plus another quick check-in on the first season of Titans. I hope that’s not too confusing. Anyway, let’s jump in…

“Bunker Hill”

Lots of stuff went down this episode, and I’m not talking about Brainy’s pratfall either. We discover Nia is really from another planet, and has the ability to dream the future, a fact that Brainy only has confirmed after a random talk with Kara. Brainy says she’s important in the future and maybe best not to alert her too much about that, so Kara has to play reporter with Brainy to help her figure out her newest dream: Agent Liberty murdering someone! Meantime, Ben is heading home to discover he has a special visitor waiting for him: Manchester Black!

Manchester has put together Ben is Agent Liberty and would like to get revenge on him personally, which is funny, because our trio of Kara, Brainy, and Nia have their search to decipher that dream put them in Ben’s hometown! Nia’s dream powers turns out to be useful in helping prevent Manchester killing Ben and his wife, and also, things line up that Ben’s secret identity is revealed at the same time, leading to him being arrested. If all of that seems too pat an end, well it is until Ben takes the opportunity to publicly call out Kara for hiding who she is, and to appease the public, the President orders her to reveal who she is. When she doesn’t, she gets fired from the DEO! Even worse, it looks like Ben’s crusade has gotten a jump start thanks to his arrest, so…we got all that to look forward to after the hiatus.

We’ve all had days where we’ve been held down by hot alien metal. Totally relatable.

–The Elseworlds teaser at the end was pretty good, featuring Earth-90’s Flash (you understand the joke when you see it is the Flash from the 90’s TV show) being the sole survivor of an attack by one of our big baddies of the crossover, The Monitor.

–Instead of revolting his wife when she learns the truth about his Agent Liberty activities, Ben is surprised to see his wife chanting for him as he’s being led into prison. So much for trashing his family life, Manchester.

–Speaking of Mr. Black, he gets busted and locked up too, but J’onn is still determined to help this man out of his rage. Good luck.

–Interesting to hear why Nia is an anomaly on her world, being a rare amount of women on her world have her power. Knowing what we know about the character this season, its a wonderfully progressive concept that this power only sees the woman, not the transgender.

–Nia’s roommate is pretty fun. Clearly someone is watching out for her when she’s not at CatCo, almost passing out.

–Kara lifts a whole building to escape that nth metal holding her down. Didn’t expect that.

–“Let me show you the wonders of laniards…”

–“I thought that was a class ring.”

–“I’m not struggling, I’m flying!”

“What’s Past Is Prologue”

Now that Team Flash know who Cicada is, they need to figure out a way to fight him and his power dampening weapon. It’s a convoluted thing to explain here, but here’s the cliff notes version: they have to retrieve specific items to create a magnet for Cicada’s weapon, but the only way to do that is to go back in time throughout the history of The Flash! Nora gets to tag along as Barry goes back throughout his history as a superhero, to collect key items like a chunk of Savitar’s armor, a speed device used against Zoom, and eventually have that charged by the particle accelerator explosion that started it all! That trip through the time stream is not without a few speed bumps (like say running into Eobard Thawne back when he was Harrison Wells), but father and daughter create their device and go off to fight Cicada…

…And it almost works. Turns out breaching that weapon into space doesn’t quite work, and it’s only Killer Frost who is able to scare Cicada off, because she’s technically not a metahuman. Meanwhile, Sherloque has become very curious about Nora’s notebook and that writing that looks like the markings Barry made when he was recovered from the Speed Force. While her explanation seems to satisfy Sherloque (maybe), we learn Nora has an ulterior motive for that writings in that she is doing it for someone else. That someone else is rotting in a prison in 2049: Eobard Thawne! Well, what is going on with that?

I’ve seen something like this before, but where?

–Ralph playing “Back In Time” as our Flashes take off into the time stream makes sense, since he hasn’t had the multiple dealings with time travel everyone else has. This is all new to him!

–The one surprise was the brief appearance of Zolomon from season two for a brief second to chase down the Flashes, at least until that Time Wraith showed up.

–That montage showing all the main people who got affected by the particle accelerator blast was a nice way to remind us how many characters have come and go in this show in the past 100 episodes.

–So why does Thawne look like Wells in 2049? And Nora is surprised he murdered her grandmom, which makes me wonder how much history is really represented in the Flash Museum.

–Hmmm, “The timeline is malleable” is an obvious thing, but I’m curious why it’s in Nora’s notes.

–“I got a vibe about you.”

–“I told you time travel was weird.”

“The Book of Rebellion, Chapter One: Exodus”

So the Pierce clan discover Jennifer has run off with Khalil, who is now being seeked out by Tobias, and have to realize maybe isolating their youngest daughter may not have been a great idea. On the other hand, the decision making of Jennifer and Khalil is actually worse, because no sooner do they decide to leave Freeland does Khalil end up in the middle of a shootout with The One Hundred over money due him. And then things really get worse because, they decide to lay low for the night at Khalil’s aunt’s place, and give slight notice to a bump on the back of Khalil’s head. Turns out it’s not a tumor, but a homing device for Tobias to track him.

Tobias sends an assassin with knives to bring Khalil back alive, with Black Lightning and Thunder arriving in time to stop the assassin. Only now, Jennifer and Khalil escape into the woods, now disabling that tracking device, while the Pierces are left to look for them. Also, Tobias is just curious about how Black Lightning’s appearances seem to have a link of happening near the Pierce family. Me thinks he’s finally putting the puzzle together about who his arch enemy really is…

Jennifer’s so excited, and she just can’t hide it!

–So Tobias is also having chats with a painting of his dead sister now. Yeah, he’s clearly losing his mind.

–Khalil finally loses his dreadlocks! And he trusts Jennifer enough to use her power to short out that tracker in his head. Personally, I would have been amazed if it went wrong and it blew up his head, Scanners style!

–The club The One Hundred has just has the worst night. First Khalil and Jennifer cause a mess, then Black Lightning shows up? Jeez.

–Lynn is just near a nervous breakdown at this point. I’m worried.

–Gamby’s back, and besides a little grief from Anissa, it seems everything’s cool now.

“Hell No, Dolly!”

Well, at least we know why the Legends won’t be part of this Elseworlds crossover. First off, the team has to hunt down a murderous spirit in 1920’s New Orleans that possesses dolls, and that seems to go well. It’s just when they bring the doll husk back in the Waverider does it find a new vessel to possess, namely the puppet of Dr. Stein from last season! At the Time Bureau, Mona ends up thinking about a relationship with the imprisoned wolf monster, and that leads to her being gored. Eww.

Meanwhile in New Orleans of earlier this year, Constantine is plagued by what we discover is a man he fell in love with, Desmond, who met with a rather horrible fate. You see, a demon called Neron tried to extort Constantine to help him control Hell thanks to owning a contract on his soul, and when that fails, John had to stop Neron, which somehow led to Desmond being sent to Hell. Now, John thinks he can solve this by interfering with his past self ever meeting Desmond. Unfortunately, no one has really told him about paradoxes, or maybe he doesn’t care, because either way, he succeeds.

And now, time has been radically affected, and Zari has been turned into a cat. I’m sure we’ll fix that next week. Maybe…

Been a while since our heroes truly destroyed time itself.

–I didn’t know until after the fact that Paul Reubens is the voice of the evil doll possessing spirit. Cute casting.

–Mick is just keeping his three-boobed creation around thanks to that haunted book he got a few episodes back. That’s just weird.

–Charlie agrees to help Constantine change time because he’ll help her get back her shapeshifting abilities, because…she’s scared of aging. Then she finds out how bad an idea that is after seeing what happens to Zari.

–Ray tries growing a mustache to impress Nora, and then ends up getting a half-stache thanks to that evil Stein puppet. Hope the time paradox fixes that mess.

–“Why do you get to have a fake girlfriend, and I don’t?” Ow. That was a sick burn, Mick. And fair question.

–“You can just say The B-Team.”

–“Sorry, ‘high school’ is a trigger word for me.”

–“Sirs, I ‘mustache’ you to calm down.”

NEXT TIME: Well, it’s Elseworlds time as we’ll have two posts next week: the crossover with The Flash, Arrow, and Supergirl; and then we’ll cover Legends of Tomorrow and Black Lightning!