Plot summary: With Eclipso possessing various members of The Justice League, the fate of humanity rests in the hands of The Flash.

For background on the creation of Justice League and info about how I’ll be covering it, check out the Series Primer.

1. Notes and Trivia
2. Recap
3. Best Performance
4. Episode Ranking
5. Rogues Roundup

Notes and Trivia

Episode: 40 (S2.E14)

Original Air Date: November 8^th, 2003

Directed: Dan Riba (22)

Written: Joseph Kuhr (4)

Animation: Koko Enterprise Co. LTD. (34)

Music: Kristopher Carter (16)

By freaky coincidence these episodes aired on the same night as a total lunar eclipse occurred over North America.

Two of the cops who interrogate General McCormick are the same ones who grilled Flash in ‘The Brave and the Bold‘.

J’onn’s plan involves creating an Einstein-Rosen bridge. This is what Jane Foster was researching when she first met Thor in the MCU.

Flash’s ‘Lightspeed Energy Bars’ and his decision to endorse them will come back up a surprising number of times in the DCAU.

Recap

General McCormick pleads ignorance in his interrogation, but his comments about a missing experimental nuclear weapon defence system give Eclipso (in Diana’s body) an idea.

Mophir ambushes his ancient foe and seems to have a killing stroke, but Flash and Green Lantern defend their friend, unaware she’s possessed.

John takes Diana back to the Watchtower, while Flash decides to hear Mophir out. He tells of a war eons ago between humanity and the ‘Ophidians’, leading to the creation of the ‘Heart of Darkness’.

Flash races to the Watchtower to warn The League, but Eclipso has already hopped to Green Lantern and attacks the rest of the team.

They manage to disarm him, but in trying to smash the Heart of Darkness, Hawkgirl inadvertently embeds tiny shards in everybody but Flash, who desperately evades his comrades.

Eclipso unleashes the stolen device, which begins to snuff out the sun. Flash ends up cornered by the League, but then activates an enormous spotlight, which drives the spirits out of the team.

The team form a plan to use Flash’s speed to power a wormhole generator from one of their damaged ships to syphon off the dark matter that has infected the sun. It’s ridiculous, but it works.

In the aftermath The League become more popular than ever, Glorious Godfrey’s career is ruined, and Flash turns down an offer for a new line of endorsements.

Best Performance

Diminished returns on Part I, really. Everybody that was good last time is still decent here, but with their dialogue slashed significantly.

I suppose it’s time to recognise the work of Michael Rosenbaum. He has a thankless task, taking the comic relief dialogue of Wally – which often drifts into sexual harassment – and trying to keep the character likeable. Sometimes he whiffs, because it’s too big of a challenge, or he doesn’t have enough lines to make it work. But when he’s given sufficient time or focus he has demonstrated he’s one of the more underrated members of the cast. It’s the moments of sincerity, where he thinks all hope is lost, where I think he really shines.

Episode Ranking

We finally got our explanation of the true nature of the Heart of Darkness and Mophir’s whole deal. A little too late in my opinion, but still, helped the story. Prehistoric man going to war with a reptile tribe was very Chrono Trigger. Big fan. I liked the touch of a possessed Green Lantern conjuring a giant cobra with his ring, and then the possessed Martian Manhunter turning into one himself.

Jospeh Kuhr found a nice hook by setting up the idea that the only ways to remove Eclipso’s presence from a host was to drive it back into the crystal using Mophir’s amulet, or killing them. We get a very brief riff on The Thing with each member of the team having to be subjected to the amulet to see if they’re the monster. By having Hawkgirl smash the Heart of Darkness in the second act, only for the tiny fragments to get stuck in The League, you’ve functionally removed the only non-lethal way to win, as there’s no longer a crystal in which to return them. It also pits Flash, their meekest member, against the extremely powerful rest of the team, who hunt him in the dark like horror movie monsters. They even start humming Eclipso’s theme while stalking him at one point. That’s an extremely solid backbone for the episode, night and day compared to the overly floaty ‘Part I’.

The only problem with this hook is there was no explicit mention of light in general being a weakness, but Flash is adamant that the possession would wear off by morning. I suppose we’ve only seen Eclipso operating at night, so it holds up from that perspective, but Mophir definitely doesn’t present it as an option, so it ended up feeling a bit of a copout when Flash just switched on an huge lamp to purge all the spirits from The League. Not that I wanted him to kill them or anything, but as a writer YOU contrive the ‘no win’ scenarios you put your characters in, and thus their miraculous solutions. I’m also unclear why the light would make the embedded diamond shards fall out of them. And what happened to those shards? Are they not semi-impossible to gather up without getting possessed???

On top of that, I really did not care for their plan to save the day, with Green Lantern generating a runway that extends all the way to the freakin’ sun, so Flash can sprint right up to it, with his speed generating enough power to make a wormhole generator work, and then he just chucks the damn thing into a star. This generates a huge wave of energy that would SURELY kill Flash, and yet he’s absolutely fine. It has very comic-booky vibes (compliment), but not thought all the way through.

I have no idea if it was on purpose or not, but we’ve gotten two Flash vs Evil Superman fights in a row now, with the creative team seemingly trying to emphasise that despite his goofy antics, Wally is extremely powerful. It makes more sense here as it’s an explicit Flash-centric story, what with his flirtation with celebrity and Glorious Godfrey’s hate campaign. Speaking of which, it was a good bit to have G-Man put on an Uncle Sam hat at the start, but the whole thing felt a little too neat by the end. The League save the day (which they’ve done MANY times) and that’s enough to destroy this guy’s popularity and banish him to 4am broadcasting in a mostly empty box-studio?

And THEN they cap all of that off by taking Mophir, a character whose culturally icky portrayal I delved into in ‘Part I’, and despite vindicating him by revealing his ‘crazy crusade’ was legitimate, he ends up as a big punchline as he takes Flash’s spot shilling embarrassing medication. Woo.

While there are some great visuals during the action scenes, I was disappointed in some sloppy corner cutting in the quieter moments. It always happens in cartoons to some extent, but it was very noticeable to me how often the background characters were completely static. There were several instances of characters talking (or even screaming in Diana’s case) while nobody’s lips were moving. It happens in the interrogation scene, when Mophir is babbling in the hospital, and when Eclipso was driven out of Diana. Just kinda sloppy.

So while this episode is a big improvement in some ways, there are still enough low bars for it to trip over and keep the ranking exactly where it is. I think the Flash vs The League sequence is about as strong as Draaga’s surprisingly solid character arc in ‘War World’, with both sets of episodes being rife with negative material. I suppose these two episodes were slightly more fun, albeit in an extremely dumb way?

1. The Savage Time
2. Legends
3. Only a Dream
4. Twilight
5. Hearts and Minds
6. Injustice for All
7. Paradise Lost
8. In Blackest Night
9. Tabula Rasa
10. The Enemy Below
11. Secret Origins
12. A Knight of Shadows
13. A Better World
14. Fury
15. Maid of Honor
16. Eclipsed (–)
17. War World
18. Metamorphosis
19. The Bold and the Brave

Rogues Roundup

Eclipso (Susan Eisenberg/Phil LaMarr/George Newbern/Carl Lumbly/Maria Canals-Barrera) (second appearance)

I know it’s even more flimsy to call him Eclipso given they establish their own new origin for the Heart of Darkness, but whatever. It’s obviously Eclipso, albeit significantly less powerful.

I suppose we’re now packaging up the Ophidians with him, and their extremely slow-burn revenge of suiciding themselves in a lunar ritual that causes anyone who touches the Heart of Darkness to become possessed into trying to wipe out humanity. I know they’d all but lost their war, but that’s quite the Hail Mary.

The true juice here is the possessed Justice League stalking Flash around the Watchtower. I liked how the little crystal shards constantly glittered in the darkness, and their eyes glowed so you really knew they were evil in case you have zero attention span.

Unfortunately I don’t think there’s enough here overall to argue Eclipso out of the lower part of the list. It’s a solid gimmick, but I think we would have needed to see the far more dangerous version of the character for there to be sufficient impact to place high. More plot device than villain, basically.

1. Darkseid
2. Dr. Destiny
3. Lex Luthor
4. Despero
5. The Joker
6. The Injustice Guild (and Brainwave!)
7. Amazo
8. Vandal Savage
9. The Injustice Gang
10. The Imperium
11. Brainiac
12. Hades
13. Draaga
14. Aresia
15. Deadshot
16. Orm
17. Simon Stagg (and Java!)
18. Colonel Vox
19. Felix Faust
20. Eclipso (–)
21. Morgaine le Fey
22. The Manhunters
23. The Justice Lords
24. Kanjar-Ro
25. Mongul
26. Gorilla Grodd
27. Doomsday