Art By: Igor Lima, Ruy Jose
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: September 24, 2014
The End and The Beginning
Okay we've dealt with all the Lanterns so far and if you've been keeping up, the only one of them to have what would appear to me to be a happy ending was Guy Gardner. Now I don't know, maybe John Stewart gets some kick out of being in the Indigo Tribe, but that just seems like a living hell to me. Compassion...... Bah. Putting my awfulness aside, today we'll be looking at our final Lantern; the Fuhrer of Fear himself Sinestro and up until today I guess I wasn't looking at the cover properly, because I never saw that the future Sinestro had a jumpsuit on. I seriously thought that Sinestro was like Jambi from Pee Wee's Playhouse with hands. I guess I can put my Jambi fears aside as we jump Five Years From Now and see what he's up to. Let's check it out.
Explain It!:
Our story begins with Sinestro now being an inmate on a prison world, where we see that his ring finger has been burned off and for all of Sinestro's machinations in the past, his life has become one where his greatest joy is working in a shop making sentry robots that eventually guard him. Poor poor Sinestro.
We get the back story on how Sinetro came to be on this Riddick like Slam, through the power of his imagination as I'm sure he muses over it again and again. It seems that at some point in the future, (our future, not his) after Sinestro stopped "The Paling" from taking over the universe, he became a more wanted man than he already was and a group of mercs came looking for him on New Korugar, where his mighty Sinestro Corps was no match for their onslaught. We also learn that Sinestro has freed himself of Parallax and has bound the entity to the planet's core to achieve something........ I really don't know if it's to keep the planet going, or if Parallax became too dangerous to control and was looking for a little payback for being imprisoned for so long. I just know that when Sinestro was trying to tell Soranik why they couldn't release Parallax, she responded by saying "We could find a new planet." So yeah, it could go either way. To save his Corps and the surviving people of his race, Sinestro sent Lyssa Drak on a mysterious mission and then led the Apex League away where he was eventually captured and incarcerated. Now I don't know these characters but with a name like the Apex League, they could really be a interstellar Justice League like group, who really feel they're doing the universe a favor by keeping Sinestro out of it.
Once we're out of the daydream, we find out that Sinestro has been squirreling away parts from his job creating sentries and a former Indigo Tribe member has built a prosthetic finger for Sinestro out of them and while I was sitting back thinking to myself, "What the hell good is that without a ring?" the story said "fuck you" and somehow the finger has the ability to use the yellow emotion.
I don't really get it, but Sinetro uses his new weapon to commandeer a ship and escape the prison world, where he's now being led by a ghost like Lyssa Drak, who tells Sinestro that she achieved her mission. Out in space Sinestro finds Lyssa's skull and takes it back home to New Korugar, where he finds that his Corps and his race have been completely destroyed.
In the end we find out that without him there, Parallax broke free and sought his vengeance on it's captors and in Sinestro's darkest hour we also see that the Apex League has arrived to take him back to prison. Now dig this, Sinestro breaks Lyssa Drak's skull and finds a Black Lantern ring inside. It seems Five Years From Now that Sinestro has found a new calling and that calling is death. The only way to bring his Corps and race back now was to renounce the power of fear and embrace the call of death. So we leave Sinestro; Futures End knowing that the Apex League are about to have a very bad zombie filled day.
That's it for the Futures End Lanterns and I can't really say that this was a happy ending for Sinestro, so I guess Guy Gardner is the only lucky ring bearer in the universe. Now I liked this issue enough, the only thing I really have a problem with is the way the rings work for Sinestro Five Years From Now. I don't know how the prosthetic finger was able to use the yellow energy and I don't know how Sinestro was able to become a Black Lantern without dying first. I mean it wouldn't have been too hard for the Apex League to kill him first and then the Black Lantern ring to take him. Maybe I'm just a dummy and this is perfectly clear for everyone else reading this and that's not too far fetched to believe, it just rubs me the wrong way. See you next month as we begin GODHEAD and continue Sinestro's badassery against the New Gods.
Bits and Pieces:
While not the happy ending that Guy Gardner received, I dug the direction that Sinestro was taken Five Years From Now. The only problem I have with the issue is with the way Sinestro was able to manipulate the emotional spectrum. It really seemed to be a bit wishy washy with it's explanation and lack thereof. But all in all if you can get past that, it's a really cool story and takes the character into a new interesting direction, even if we'll never see it again. Go check out Sinestro and complete your foray into the Lanterns Futures End.
7/10
I know I'm WAY late to the game in answering this one, but since i see no others doing so, here I go.
ReplyDeleteSinestro was the one who created the yellow rings of fear. He learned how to manipulate the yellow energy from Parallax itself. We've even seen him turn a yellow ring into a liquid mass to destroy it with only his thoughts.
He chose the ring form because it was a method of use he was familiar with, being an ex Green Lantern. Its not unreasonable to imagine that, given five years of planning, he would be able to think of and create another artificial method of using the yellow energy of Fear. He has shown to be an extremely intelligent strategist.
So, incorporating his history of expertise in manipulating fear energy, its reasonable to see how he was able to use the energy in the way we see in this issue.