DCeased: Hope at World’s End #15 just saw the heroes’ version of the Suicide Squad eke out a major victory, despite Lex Luthor’s scheming.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for DCeased: Hope at World’s End #15 by Tom Taylor, Marco Failla, Rex Lokus & Saida Temofonte, on sale now.
In the DCeased Universe, it’s hard to eke out a victory as the Justice League has found in years of fighting off the Anti-Life army. In the main book, especially the Dead Planet sequel, the likes of Superman, Flash, and many others have fallen, and in the prequel, Hope at World’s End, Stephanie Brown/Robin and Jason Todd were among the heroes that endured cruel deaths.
However, Issue #15 offers some modicum of a victory, and ultimately hope, when Lex Luthor’s Suicide Squad improvizes and takes out the Blighted Ones invading Poison Ivy’s sanctuary.
Lex has been plotting in the garden with Wonder Woman, as well as Wink and Pied Piper. He used the Speed Force to buy more time to work up a plan, and decided that Wink and Piper need to use the latter’s flute and pull the horde into Nightshade’s portal. Once there, they can kill her and collapse the rift onto itself, which would take everyone out inside. Sadly, it should kill Wink and Piper too, but Aerie, Wink’s lover, has a different plan.
Aerie jets in and finds Nightshade for them to kill, but when Piper stabs her in the head with his flute, it buys them enough time for Wink to teleport them out. The three heroes make it back to the land of the living, shocking Lex. Sure, he’s glad the horde got sucked in and are now gone, but he’s feeling a bit stupid as the trio didn’t need to sacrifice themselves. All they needed was to adapt and repurpose his plan on the fly, which leads to everyone celebrating their success. To make it worse, Wonder Woman was supposed to snap Black Adam’s neck when he lost his powers, but Superman did micro-surgery, taking his voice away, so Lex once again looks like a fool as his planning is too extreme.
With Wink and Co. home, Superman and the seniors are glad their juniors found a solution, inspiring others as they pulled off such a mammoth feat on their own. Now, the irony is in not knowing what ultimately happened to Piper and his flute as it was recovered from the portal and brought back, opening the door for another victory in the present.
If it exists in Dead Planet, the League (led years later by Jon Kent and Damian Wayne) could use the musical instrument to corral the legion of walkers, especially as Wonder Woman’s one of them on the outside seeking blood and desperately trying to kill her former colleagues. With it, however, they could bait the undead now that they have a cure, trap them and administer it, that is once Constantine’s secret plan or the Penguin’s cabal and their Amazo army don’t slaughter the horde.