12.03
Issue #9 or “When Fate Attacks!”
Equinox continues his rampage of equality across the world, but Batman has finally tracked him down to a remote area in the middle of nowhere. However, this time, Equinox has finally found the edge he has needed to top our caped crusader, and possibly the entire universe! What is Equinox exactly and where did he come from? Well, in this issue we will learn the answer, bat-fans.
With the world crumbling around them will Batman and his helpful heroes be able to stop Equinox’s vile plans? This time, the brave and the bold heroes of the world might not be enough to stop the evil of our overpowered fiend. As we reach the end of Equinox’s plot, we’ll be able to see just what equality really means in the world of heroes. It just might lead to a battle that decides the fate of the very universe!
So lean back and pay attention, bat-fans. This one could be a real nail-biter.
#9 – The Fate of Equinox!
Written by: Joseph Kuhr
Directed by: Michael Chang
Principle Cast:
Diedrich Bader as Batman / Batmonolith(?)
Greg Ellis as Dr. Fate
Oded Fehr as Equinox
John DiMaggio as Aquaman / Typhon
James Arnold Taylor as Nabu
Tom Kenny as Plastic Man
Equinox has set an appointed date for meeting with Batman, and our hero can’t be late. There in the middle of nowhere of the Mayan ruins, we find that the villain’s plans are already in motion. It will only take a single sacrifice- an opponent of the balance of chaos and order to give him the power he so desperately desires.
But what is it he wants? That much is not clear, though Batman has his hunches.
In the temple they are standing atop is the very relic of ancient time, the very object Equinox had been searching for. All Equinox needs to do is set it in motion is finish the job he couldn’t in the OMAC event and all will be right again.
“The ancients who worshiped here believed it was the gyroscope that kept the world turning and that if it ever stopped, the world would stop, too.”
“Leave half the world in scorching sunlight…”
“The other half forever in frozen night! Yin and Yang, Order and Chaos- an eternal Equinox.”
Batman’s fears are proven correct. Equinox is moving to the final endgame. All the pieces are in place, and he is more than capable of taking our hero down in a fist fight. However, this time our hero will not be caught off guard. He’s Batman- he has a plan and he’s ready for our erroneous equalizer.
With the final battle, Batman arrives ready for Equinox this time and brings Dr. Fate, agent of order, to help bring some stability to the situation. With the proper back up this time, Batman should now hold all the cards. Certainly, not even an unbalanced villain like Equinox can stand against an agent of order?
But he can, and he does.
Whoever Equinox is, he has the power of both chaos and balance under his control and he is more than enough to take on both Batman and Dr. Fate quite handily. However, just before Equinox is able to end out hero’s life the way he wanted to, he messes up and Batman takes advantage of is ego, sending him down into the device he was to sacrifice our hero into.
So is the fate of Equinox.
His quest for perfect balance ends with his own defeat in a twist of fate he couldn’t have seen coming. But… maybe he did. It was too easy, after all. Why would Equinox have let himself fall?
The pair escapes the burning wreckage of the relic back to Fate’s lair under the impression that it was much too easy to stop the villain. After one meditation session, his worst fears are confirmed. All over the world, chaos and order are swinging violently back and forth like a pendulum and things that should not be, are.
Equinox has won, after all. The world is no longer balanced but in the way Equinox deems it to be he considers it so. Just what happened to him when he fell into that device after all?
There is only one thing Dr. Fate can think of doing, so they head back to the source. That’s right, they must visit the courts of chaos and order to find out who Equinox really is. Surely they can shed some light on how he is such a threat.
Batman and Dr. Fate arrive in front of the masters of chaos and order to try and find exactly what it is Equinox is, and why the balance is so out of whack. It doesn’t take long before we learn exactly who Equinox is and why he has the abilities he has. Though neither lord of chaos or order thought things would ever be this bad, they apparently had their doubts about him from the beginning.
He was a mere orphan that was enlisted to stop the violent struggle between chaos and order that had existed since the beginning of time. His job was merely to balance the scales when one hand got over the other and make sure they were level, but it didn’t take long for him to take it too far. It didn’t take long before he began taking it into his own hands.
“Now neither side could gain an advantage over the other, for if either side became too powerful Equinox would tilt the balance back the other way. Peace at last.”
“But cracking under the strain, he became obsessed. Believing he could do a better job without answering to us. So he left.”
As we have seen back when he tried to kill both the Question and Gorilla Grodd to keep the balance, and when he wanted to obliterate an entire city with a nuclear power plant explosion because another country lost one village of their own in an accident- at some point it ceased being about making sure things didn’t get out of hand and became about encouraging retribution and lumping good and evil as the same basic thing to suit his own chaotic order. In other words, Equinox had fallen apart under the pressure, ceased listening to his masters, and decided to do things on his own.
His quest for balance has come to this. Logically, the easiest way to restore balance between the two is to flatten both, right? Well, Equinox sure thinks so. What occurred in the OMAC event could be much worse now with Equinox’s new abilities, and could level entire planets. Whatever balance there might have been is long gone now.
The result of the villain’s “work” is what we have seen so far, and it is nothing good. Not only is he a loose cannon, he’s a threat to the universe.
With his new powers, Equinox arrives to assault both the lords of chaos and order and drains their agents of all power into his own being. The lords send Batman and Fate away as their only chance left, but it doesn’t take Fate long to realize that he can no longer hear the others anymore when they arrive back in the material world. Equinox has succeeded in taking their powers for himself.
It’s going to take more than one bat-shaped detective and fading agent of order to stop the villain now. When he arrives back into the world with them, he shows them his new form that he had taken for himself. Whatever he had been before, well it is nothing to what he has become now in his powered form.
Things aren’t looking good.
Now that he has both the powers of chaos and order at his disposal, he is nigh invincible. But Batman and Dr. Fate get an idea on how to get an edge against him. Though they cannot beat him alone, maybe there is something they can do to at least slow him down. That is, they need the help of other heroes. What else is there?
Dr. Fate scours the world and teleports in many heroes that we know all too well, who have worked with Batman plenty of times before. From Blue Beetle, to Hal Jordan, and Black Canary, to Aquaman, Dr. Fate has run the gamut. Surely with this many in their ranks they can topple the terror before them?
Instead of leading a full on assault, they explain the plan of combining all their powers and skills into one hero that will lead the charge against Equinox and stop his fiendish plot.
Naturally, Aquaman has the perfect suggestion… but decides that Dr. Fate would work the best after some gentle coaching from Batman. He is the most disciplined, after all.
But Dr. Fate, realizing that Batman, who holds both order and chaos in him, would be a better fit than an agent of order who might be too rigid for the task ahead. Batman accepts and readies to battle with his arch-nemesis, though he might not see the irony. In other words, Equinox will finally get to battle his counterpart on equal ground after all which is what he had hinted at in their previous encounters. And what could the villain possibly want more than that? Well, that’s assuming he still sees equality the way he had before. If there’s one thing Equinox is not, it is predictable.
So, Batm… onolith(?) takes in all the hero’s powers into himself and charges forward into the fray to battle Equinox head on. Whatever he is, it sure isn’t the same Batman we know all too well other than his basic skills and maneuvers.
It goes without saying that Equinox and Batman have never been much alike, though Equinox had regularly considered them the same. Equinox came from nothing and was given everything, while Batman came from everything and was left with nothing, albeit in different ways. Equinox has powers that rival both the orders of chaos and order, and Batman has none.
Yet, Batman’s life has been spent doing good over the world, amassing allies, and making sure things never went south or out of hand. He has built up many skills, much knowledge, and a connection with the universe and its inhabitants that Equinox could never dream of, much less understand.
Equinox spent his life in the shadows, avoiding the world, and making sure things went the way he thought they should. Everything was given to him; he never earned anything, and holds no connection with anything. That is what enables the inefficient equalizer to be so unattached to the universe in order to destroy it and start it over. If he blames the universe for being out of order, then it proves it was really him that was in order the whole time. But, clearly, that has never been the case.
Batmonolith(?) and Equinox thrash about in a battle that could level the city, though our hero would never have it that way. Just before the villain begins leveling everything, he transports them both into the outer reaches of space where the fight intensifies even further. Their powers almost seemed matched this time.
He unleashes all the skills and powers he has be given from his allies, but the powers Equinox stole from his masters still add up to more in the end. If something is going to tip the scale in one of their favors, it won’t be through strength, as it never had before. It will have to be with their clashing personalities. Batmonolith(?) is eventually defeatedin the battle and begs Equinox for forgiveness despite the telepathic cries of Dr. Fate to not give in. But our hero always knows when he’s licked, and when it is time to think smart.
Still, Equinox is not really balanced, and he knows it. Our hero prods at him, saying that if he was at peace then why would he be destroying the universe? Doesn’t he know better by now?
Well, that’s easy, it’s because he is so perfectly balanced that he can set it right again by giving it a fresh start! But that’s not the whole story; it’s never been the whole story. The truth of the matter is that it has nothing to do with the universe or anything other than a lonely boy who never thought he was good enough. Equinox already knows that it isn’t that the universe was made unbalanced, it was that it actually was made balanced and it was his own interference mucking it all up. It has and always been about Equinox’s own twisted soul.
In truth, Equinox is not in balance with himself. He was given powers that were too much for him, and he grew to hate the ones who put him charge and everything responsible for his creation in the first place. He has never been at peace, because he has always hated them all and wanted them all to suffer as he had in order to achieve his “true” equality. Everyone could be miserable together. Isn’t that equal enough? Or maybe…
But Equinox knows it not only isn’t balanced- it isn’t right.
“The chaos deep in your heart outweighs the order. It’s why you rebelled against your lords.”
“I rebelled because the type of balancing act they demanded was impossible.”
“And you hate them for it.”
“What do you know about never-ending responsibilities? Of course I hate them! Wait. If I’m not in balance, then this was all for nothing?”
He loses control of himself and his powers, beginning to fracture with his tainted soul, and our hero smashes him to bits with the Green Lantern ring he was given by Hal Jordan (hmm) and sends him into his own ball of disorder that he was creating which wiped his self from the sight of the world. The universe has been put back in its proper place once again.
It has always been about eye for an eye with the poor polarizer, but he never truly let himself believe it until it was too late. As he cracks into countless pieces he still blames Batman, unable to take the blame for his own fall once more.
Now equality can return.
After all of Equinox’s posturing, he was never even close to balanced and he probably never was. The strain of his duties were too much, but yet he never backed down from his job. Instead he warped them to make it easier for him. If there is a viler villain in the universe, we have not met them yet, but Equinox truly was one of the most vicious if not pathetic in his own way. His lonely shell of a boy was fractured at the hands of the truly just to show him just how off base he was.
Batmonolith(?) returns the powers back the heroes and meets them back on Earth once again. The powers of chaos and order are restored and everything can be as it once was and all off Equinox’s strange changes have been reversed. Despite the war with himself, he could never bring things into equality once again. It was because Batman was the true equalizer, after all.
In the end, the fault of Equinox was more than his god-complex; it was his inability to take responsibility for who he was. Instead of rejecting the job he knew was too much for him, he decided to make it about himself instead. The lords of chaos and order clearly gave him free-will in regards to his choices, but he took advantage of their generosity and warped it into being some sort of a curse on his life. He began setting a plot to destroy the very existence that allowed him to be exactly what he was and what he had chosen to be in the first place. Confused self-loathing, sure, but underneath it all, Equinox really wanted balance most of all if only within himself.
So maybe he was the right one for the job after all, yet he made all the wrong decisions along the way. Who is to blame for the fate of Equinox at the end of the battle? It would have to be the one who decided to tip the scales of balance in his own favor for self-gain instead of for the universe, and the only one to blame for that is Equinox himself.
At the end of the day, his fracturing death was his own fault, for rejecting everything Batman stood for, for thinking he knew better than everyone else who tried to set things right, for stealing from the lords who gave him the powers he coveted in the first place, and for deluding himself into being an empty shell of who he could be along the way. Equinox’s tragic end was his own doing.
For now, let us salute Equinox and hope wherever he is now, he will finally be at peace. For now, anyway, the universe is safe and the villain has been vanquished- and that’s how it is and always will be.
“Justice wins the day, thanks to the brave and the bold.”
Well, that’s it for this exciting issue, bat-fans! Though we have dealt with who is probably the best villain in the series, there is still much more to see and many more fun surprises up ahead. Soon enough we will be bidding the first season goodbye (yes, we are still in the first season!) and heading into greener pastures.
Until next time, Bat-fans! Same brave blog, same bold place!