Blackest Night in a nutshell
With all the respective Corps of the emotional spectrum in place (e.g. the Green Lanterns of willpower, the Red Lanterns of rage, etc.) following the War of Light, billions of black power rings flood the galaxy. Each latches onto a corpse and reanimates it as a soldier to bring about the return of Nekron, the entity of Death. The means to do this is to elicit an emotional response in the victim matching a color of the spectrum (blue hope for the return of a loved one, fer instance) and then kill them to collect their, I don't know, emotional energy, I guess.
Fer instance, seeing the violet light of love in Hawkgirl right before
zombies put a spear through her chest.
When enough energy had been gathered, Nekron was able to break out of his prison and materialize on Earth. Once there, he revealed his ultimate goal to find the White Entity of Life (from which the emotional spectrum sprang) and then kill it, ending all life everywhere.
The plan actually went pretty well, with the White Entity not even defending itself against Nekron's attacks until Sinestro took on the power of the white light and became a one-man White Lantern Corps.
The official ending had the heroes using the white light to bring Nekron's chief zombie lieutenant, Black Hand, back to life, severing Nekron's tie to the world and sending him back to the Land of the Unliving. For a grand finale, a bunch of characters, such as Aquaman and the just-killed Hawkman, were brought back to life.
I suppose that's one way to do it, but instead, let's fire up the Maybe Machine and run it through a slightly different ending.
When we left off at the end of Blackest Night #7, we were looking at this:
This is actually the opening panel of Blackest Night 8,
but the closing image of BN7 is kind of non-informative.
In the My52 version of BN8, this fight doesn't go so well for Sinestro. As in the original version, he discovers that killing Nekron's current body doesn't stop him as he just "jumps" into another convenient corpse. Sinestro fails as the universe's protector, and Nekron is able to land a killing blow on the White Entity.
As the entity is dying, and taking all of life with it, Hal Jordan gets a cunning plan. If the entities of the emotional spectrum are fractures of the White Entity, then returning them to the White Light should revive it. He acts on his plan, releasing Ion, the Green Entity of Willpower from the Green Lanterns' central power battery. When his plan starts working, and the White Entity starts to revive, the other corps are guilted into following suit, and eventually all the emotional entities are reunited into the White Light and the universe is saved.
A picture of Sinestro pondering the seven emotional entities,
just to prove that I didn't make them up.
That still leaves Nekron kicking around, though, which leads to significant story change #2. Nekron was initially able to access our world through the wide open door left by the return of such previously-dead characters as Superman, Green Arrow and, most recently, The Flash (Barry Allen). The only way to get Nekron out of this world is to close that door. Just as Barry Allen was willing to make the suicide run in Crisis on Infinite Earths, he accepts his fate here and volunteers to return to death if it means locking up Nekron forever.
Another side effect of this door closure is to declare that character resurrections will NOT be happening under my watch. This series doesn't end with the return of any characters, and any writers who killed off their characters expecting them to come back at the end are stuck gnashing their teeth in frustration. Hawkman dead, Martian Manhunter dead, Batman dead, Barry Allen re-dead.
And that's where we end our revisionist writings and from where we'll kick off our stories in the next blog post.
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