In Dark Nights: Death Metal – Trinity Crisis #1, Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman get ready to visit three famous events from DC history.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Dark Nights: Death Metal – Trinity Crisis #1 by Scott Snyder, Francis Manapul, Ian Herring and Tom Napolitano, on sale now.
In Dark Nights: Death Metal, the Mother of the Multiverse, Perpetua, and the Batman Who Laughs have almost finished destroying the Multiverse. The former only has a few parallel realities left to destroy before she is done, while the latter rules supreme in a remade version of the DC Universe. In Death Metal #3, Wonder Woman and Batman lead a rescue mission on New Genesis where they freed Superman and reunited with most of the world’s heroes.
Now, the moment has come to fight back, and that fight begins in Dark Nights: Death Metal – Trinity Crisis #1. Here, the DC Universe’s Trinity, Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman each go on a mission to help save all of reality, but they only end up trapped in the ultimate Elseworlds tales.
Trinity Crisis #1 picks up right where Death Metal #3 left off, with Wonder Woman and the other superheroes devising a plan to stop Perpetua. The Amazon Princess knows exactly what they have to do: they must steal the Chaos Energy that fuels the Mother of the Multiverse for themselves.
In the Dark Multiverse, the Batman Who Laughs has built three realities that recreate the most famous and important “Crisis” events in DCU history: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis. On those respective worlds, these three events run on a loop, creating a constant supply of Crisis Energy that gives Perpetua the power she needs to destroy the Multiverse. Therefore, to stop her, Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman each head to their own “Crisis” world, where they will instead collect the energy for themselves, cutting off Perpetua from the source of her power.
Their plan is relatively simple: Batman will head to the Crisis on Infinite Earths world, Superman the Final Crisis world and Wonder Woman will travel to the Infnite Crisis reality. Each of them plans to arrive at the time where the heroes are near their respective victories, so they can all collect the energy from that exact time.
However, once each of them arrives in their respective crisis, they find that while these dark realities recreate the events of these past battles, the Batman Who Laughs has also changed them tremendously. On all three worlds, the events have been changed so that the villains won instead of the heroes.
On the Crisis on Infinite Earths world, Batman expects to find the Anti-Monitor just before his defeat. But what he finds instead is a reality bereft of matter where a frightening Anti-Monitor rules over all with anti-matter. In the Final Crisis reality, Superman arrives expecting to see a defeated Darkseid only to realize the villainous New God has succeeded in taking over the Earth. Here, Darkseid has a menacing new look, and the entire Justice League has seemingly been turned into his Anti-Life puppets. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman travels to what she believes will be the moment when the superheroes triumph over Superboy-Prime in Infinite Crisis. However, here, Superboy-Prime reigns triumphant all over the world.
Trinity Crisis #1 essentially plays a massive game of “what if?” that reexamines three of the most important events in DCU history. While both Dark Nights: Metal and Death Metal were interested in ideas and characters from ersatz versions of the DC Universe, these are DC’s most defining moments, and DC’s biggest heroes have to face worlds where they failed and the villains won instead. The issue ends with this massive surprise, which means Death Metal #4 will almost assuredly show us more of these three alternate realities — and how things could have played out very differently in the DCU had the heroes lost.
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