Was Final Crisis Part of a Trilogy?

Early 2008. Dan DiDio goes public with the notion that DC's upcoming Final Crisis mega-event will be the third installment of a "Crisis trilogy," the last chapter to the story told in Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis. The earth beneath the feet of many a fanboy begins to quake.

Does this man realize what he's saying???

To those who take epic storytelling structure seriously (to me, at least), the word trilogy carries with it tremendous weight. Though the term is often carelessly thrown out there by ad execs in the entertainment biz who still seek to cash in on Star Wars, it takes more than just the presence of three parts to make a trilogy. Those three parts must work together to convey a single theme or idea. In a story-driven trilogy, each individual chapter resolves its own sub-conflict, but by the end of a trilogy the plot must come full circle to resolve an overarching super-conflict that is carried through the entire series.

This is why the original Star Wars movies are a trilogy, but the Mission: Impossible movies are not. A good rule of thumb in analyzing whether a series is a trilogy is to think about how a fourth chapter, if such a thing is even possible, would relate to the first three. A "Star Wars: Episode VII" would involve a vastly different status quo than its predecessors, while a fourth M:I could fit right into a continuous telling of Ethan Hunt's (yes, that was Tom Cruise's character's name and I didn't have to look it up) adventures.

The trilogy is actually a natural format for storytellers to use, and my Christian faith leads me to believe that there's a spiritual reason why. In my old blog, I wrote the following:

When looking at human history through a Biblical lens, three divisions of time emerge. The first era, spanning the years chronicled by the Old Testament, involves the fall of man in the Garden of Eden and a period of waiting for Christ to come. Man currently lives in the second time period, where Christ has arrived and his work to redeem us from the clutches of sin is ongoing. The third and final stage of human existence will occur when Christ returns and the relationship between God, man, and creation is restored to its rightful state.

So, if people are living in the midst of a real-life trilogy, it makes sense that they would write their stories according to the same structure. Even non-Christians, like George Lucas or the Wachowski brothers, unknowingly divide their stories into three parts that correspond to the stages of God's salvation of humanity.

So you can see what was at stake for me as I read Final Crisis. Sure, I wanted to discover the "final fate" of Batman and witness the "day evil won" and all that. But what really had me on the edge of my seat was waiting to find out whether the series would live up to its billing as trilogy.

Six issues through the seven-part series I was more than ready to write-off DiDio's rantings as more corporate hype. Despite a first issue that had some monitors in it, Final Crisis appeared to have nothing to do with the subject matter of the first two Crises, which were about the structure of the DC Universe and its multiple parallel realities. Issue 7 was going to need to have quite the clutch performance in order to satisfy trilogy hunters like myself.

Surprisingly, that issue really did an impressive job of thematically tying Final Crisis to the first two. If Crisis on Infinite Earths was the story of the creating of a streamlined and redirected DC Universe and Infinite Crisis was an exploration of the consequences of that redirection, then Final Crisis was the realization that the streamlined universe itself still owed its character to all of the crazy and chaotic worlds that came before. This idea is the heart of the series' climax, where the Supermen of many earths join together with an army of angels and the Zoo Crew to confront Mandrakk. It is taken further when Nix Uotan realizes that he and his fellow Monitors must no longer try to impose their logic and order upon a multiverse that thrives both in its seriousness and sillyness.

All of the above would have made a great DC Crisis: Episode III if it stood alone as a theme to the story. But the reality is that Final Crisis had much more packed into its pages, so much so that its conclusion to the CoIE story could be easily missed if you weren't looking for it. Yes, Final Crisis was a follow up to the other Crisis series. But it was also a sequel to Seven Soldiers and the fulfillment of stories started in New Gods comics back in the 70's. Heck, it even works as a modern retelling of the comics that came with the Super Powers figures I played with as a kid. (I'll never forget the awesome ending to my Super Powers book on tape where Batman saved the day by pulling out a mirror and reflecting the Omega Effect back onto Darkseid himself! Sadly, only the first and second books in this series are available on YouTube...)

The majority of Final Crisis, if not the ending, focuses almost exclusively on these other things. And a story that casts its net so wide just doesn't look like a Part Three when placed alongside its predecessors which were much more closely linked. There's just too much else going on for it to work. I fear that Blackest Night, which has been billed as the third part of Geoff Johns' Green Lantern trilogy, will suffer the same kind of escalation in scope, as DC seems to be setting it up as the company-wide event for 2009.

For the most accurate preview of Final Crisis, fans should have turned not to DC's marketing giants but to the writer himself. As quoted on Wikipedia from this interview before the series was released, Grant Morrison said:

I wanted to do the biggest crossover there’s ever been... it’s got nods to everything, going back to "Flash of Two Worlds" and the first 'Crisis on Earth-1', 'Earth-2', all that stuff. So there’s little elements of all that...

One cannot fault Morrison for failing to live up to the expectations created by his publisher, because by all indications this is not what he set out to do. Rather than limiting his scope to wrapping up the Crisis storyline, Morrison sought to give the last word on a multitude of elements from DC Comics' past, and this is the standard Final Crisis should be judged by. Call it a sequel, a tribute, or even a conclusion. Just don't let DiDio get away with calling it a trilogy.