as much as i like seeing really smart guys with no powers take down really powerful guys (see, like, every Batman vs Superman fight ever), the Deathstroke fight was lame.
OK, i'm going to be a fanboy for a second here:
first of all, it's almost impossible to overstate how fast the Flash is, and so you kind of have to look at time and the sequence of events very critically here. Deathstroke shows up, words are exchanged. Wally goes to whoop his ass, and i think i'd be generous if i said that he had to cover about 50-60 feet of open terrain to get there. here's what happens in the time it takes the Flash to get to Slade:
- photons bouncing off Flash's body travel the distance Flash himself is trying to cover and hit Slade's eye
- receptor cells in Slade's eye fire a signal down Slade's optic nerve
- Slade super-brain (and don't even get me started on that whole "normal people only use 10% of their brain" nonsense) processes the incoming signal and Slade realizes that the Flash has started moving.
by now, the Flash should pretty much be all up in Slade's face, and commencing to beat on him like a red-headed stepchild. but no, he's still trying to cover 50 feet of open terrain. we go on:
- Slade's brain sends a signal to Slade's hand.
- Slade's hand pulls out the detonator thing.
- Slade's thumb presses the button.
Wally is still not there. what, did he go get lunch or something? that's kind of insensitive considering he's supposed to be going after the guy he thinks butt-banged Sue Dibny and set her on fire. come on, man, quit slacking.
- The detonator triggers a signal, which is presumably some kind of wireless transmission.
- The wireless signals reach the charges scattered all over the place.
- the charges receive the signal, and the chemical reaction in the explosives starts.
OK, so now Wally has to dodge all the bombs going off, but he should have been there well before that was even an issue.
let's pretend Slade had a gun, instead of a detonator for a bunch of bombs (it's about the same level of complexity of action), and that Slade decided to act first, instead of waiting for Flash to move and then reacting to him. if you were going to say that Slade had time to spontaneously pull a gun without warning, aim it at Green Arrow, pull the trigger, and shoot Green Arrow in the head before Flash had time to get across the street to knock the gun out of his hand, that would be stretching credibility to the breaking point, and to go even further and say that Slade would have time to do all that as a reaction to Flash moving first would be absurd.
OK, so, basically, Slade should have been taken down before he even had a chance to hit his detonator button. but let's pretend that didn't happen.
let's move on. the Atom. the Atom has shrunken to the size where he is smaller than the individual photons Slade uses to knock him around, but Slade sees him with the naked eye. WTF?!? yes, he has "really good eyesight," i know, but how exactly does that let him see something smaller than a photon? i never read any Teen Titans, i will freely admit, but i wasn't under the impression that Slade had Clark-level supersenses. seeing something smaller than the basic unit the eye uses to detect stuff should be impossible, and if he can do that, he's a lot more powerful than i thought.
i had to laugh to see Deathstroke looking around in front of him, asking the Atom where he is. at the scale that he'd have to be working on to see Atom, the space that he's searching is unimaginably vast, but he's just casually glancing around like it's no big deal. it's just stupid.
finally, GL. so... Deathstroke is a deadly hand-to-hand fighter, right? like in the realm of people like Batman and Lady Shiva, right? Kyle, for all his many wonderful qualities, is not, right? but he does have a FUCKING GREEN LANTERN RING. which, you know, shoots rays and makes force fields and which Kyle uses to build all kinds of imaginative things out of green energy. Kyle could, easily, do something, like, say, make a big freaking cartoon hand and have it pick up Slade like a ragdoll and suspend him in midair with his arms pinned to his sides until he said "uncle." or just trap him in a big force field. or something. anything. all things being equal, in straight-up one on one combat, Deathstroke vs. GL should be a non-starter.
so what does Kyle do? put a little force field around himself and close in for hand-to hand combat. has he been taking stupid pills? this allows him to get stuck in a pointless wrestling match for the stupid ring, which may be the most powerful weapon in existence, but only if you freaking use it.
it's the most frustratingly stupid, poorly-written part of the scene - the hero is fighting to stop a villain from taking something because it's so powerful, but the fact that it's so powerful means that the fight should have been over before it started. it's like "hey, i have a GL ring, which i know is important and powerful, but, gosh, i just couldn't tell you why, since i don't seem to know what it does."
shit. just shit. |
