2x11 A Better World (1)

[9.0/10] My favorite choice in this episode is the fact that we barely get to see any of the real Justice League. Aside from one brief fight and a quick bit of setup, this centers squarely on the Justice Lords, their divergence in the timeline, and the consequences that wrought.

It gives the audience time to take in this different universe. The first part of “A Better World” feels of a piece with The Killing Joke and Under the Red Hood in a number of ways -- asking the question “Why not just kill this guy?” That’s the central lever of this episode, putting a thumb on the scale for what would finally cause our heroes to snap and cross that line, and exploring what would happen if they did.

For Superman, it’s seeing Lex Luthor ascend to the presidency and still threaten the safety of the world in his lust for more power. It’s hearing Lex boast that whatever form of justice Superman tries to dispense, he’ll just wriggle out of it. It’s witnessing Lex point the finger at Superman himself as an “accomplice” arguing that it’s not the law or the “will of the people” that held Superman back from killing, but his own vanity and need to be adored.

What I love about that scene is that it attacks the issue from both a moral and personal standpoint. Lex himself basically makes the argument that Superman should have killed him a long time ago, that if these heroes wanted to do the greatest good for the world, they would eliminate him as a threat. But noble farm boy Clark Kent wouldn’t necessarily fall for such arguments. What he’s more susceptible to is an attack on his honor, on the idea that he’s putting himself before the people, and that’s what finally breaks him.

They’re compelling arguments. I’ve long since made my peace with the idea that serialized storytelling in a superhero context is more fun with recurring villains, and so I’d rather the Joker escape even if he’d more than earned a grim fate after all he’d done. But it’s worth deconstructing these ideas, just a little, and examine what superheroes who become the law rather than enforce it, who kill the worst of the worst instead of hand them over to the authorities, would be like.

If the two-year time jump we see in “A Better World” is any indication, they would become brutal, authoritarian, and most of all, feared. The world that the Justice Lords rule over is safe and seemingly threat-free after two years of their harsher form of enforcement, but it’s also one without civil liberties, without elections, and without the people’s trust or consent.

The episode does well to make Lois a vessel for those criticisms. Using a civilian we know, one romantically connected to Superman no less, as the vanguard for what’s wrong with all of this gives it some extra force. Her presence even reinforces the severity of how far Superman has fallen, given how she was able to pull a similarly fascist alternate dimension Superman back from the brink in Superman: The Animated Series’s “Brave New Metropolis”.

There, what drove Superman toward a far more exacting approach to law and order was Lois’s death. Here, the episode implies that it’s Flash’s death, something that raised the stakes for the Justice Lords and made them feel like they couldn’t allow things to continue as they had. It’s another smart way to tie the practical and philosophical with the personal. This isn’t just a question of the right way to deal with evil or the best way to order the world in a universe with quasi-gods. It’s a story about individual losses and connections and how they move us to change who we are and what we’re about, not always for the better.

I also like the sense that having stomped out crime due to their new lethal, authoritarian bent, the Justice Lords are all a little bit unhappy and bored. There’s still some signs of joy. Superman and Lois seem to be together (albeit in what seems like an unhappy marriage). Hawkgirl and Green Lantern also seem to be together, albeit a little wistful about when they were loved by the public. And yet GL resigns himself to the idea that it’s for the greater good, that they don’t have to worry about the end of the world anymore. But they also have nothing to do anymore in such a locked down, freedomless world.

So they come to the prime timeline to cause trouble. That’s putting it too far, but unsatisfied with their “success” in their own universe, they hop over to ours and replace the Justice League in the name of the same “greater good.” The fight that ensues feels like a waste of Doomsday, but it does demonstrate the different lengths to which the Justice Lord version of Superman will go, lobotomizing his foe instead of just subduing him. It’s enough to have Lois declare that he’s “out of character” and for our Lex (who’s buying off prison guards with big screen TVs and new cars) to recognize that they’re not really our heroes.

That’s one hell of a tease. I’m a sucker for alternate universe stories, because they give us a glimpse of who these characters might have been but for a small change in circumstance. It’s easy to adore these sorts of powerful characters when they inevitably use their abilities for good and vanquish the similarly outfitted folks who would use them for ill. But the thought experiment of what such benevolent yet oppressive gods would be like if they didn’t have such respect for our institutions and freedoms is a striking one, calling to mind other deconstructions in the D.C. pantheon.

There’s legitimate questions to be raised about why Batman doesn’t just kill the Joker, why Superman doesn’t just take out Lex Luthor, why our superheroes don’t eliminate their supervillains for good. “A Better World” suggests it’s because that way madness lies, or at least an abandonment of the ideals and principles and self-limitations that make those heroes humanity’s partners, rather than its overseers.