I think that was deliberate. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not supposed to. Hence Courtney’s “What the f-” reaction. Which I thought was great. Smash-cutting to the “Stargirl: Frenemies” title for next season was also great.
I thought following that with the Mr. Bones stinger was actually kind of a let-down. Oh, look, another sinister conspiracy. Blech. Whereas a season with formerly-Evil-but-still-not-really-Good Shiv trying to join the JSA; and the apparently genuinely-friendly-but-still-psycho-killer Crocks as next door neighbors (and which way is Artemis going to go?); and the suave, dramatic, kind-of-sort-of-good-guy-maybe?-but-also-still-a-criminal Shade up to Something in Blue Valley; all together seems like a great premise for a season.
BTW, as for Grundy, he’s literally a zombie. In the comics, the fact that he can’t actually be permanently killed and he just keeps coming back from the dead is kind of his whole schtick. And Shade explicitly says that Grundy has a habit of coming back, if he’s buried in the right place (presumably the magic swamp where he was created).
I mean…that’s kind of his whole thing. Eclipso can see the Darkness in you. He knows your fears and hatreds. He knows exactly which buttons to push. He preys on your weaknesses. He dredges up the worst parts of you and shows them to you. Even if you intellectually know that you’re being shown an illusion and that Eclipso is behind it, emotionally it’s crippling, and the victim simply isn’t psychologically capable of just ignoring it and leaving.
That being said…
I actually didn’t think the show did a very good job overall portraying all of that. I got that was what was supposed to be going on, but I don’t think the show sold it all that well. And I would personally have preferred to have seen more of what they did when Beth found the inner strength to confront the Darkness inside her a couple of episodes ago.
I agree. Eclipso was very heavy handed in it- apparently, he just wanted to hear that you hated him. You had to actually say the words. Chalk it up to magic, I guess.
…and at the right time, which according to his poem is “buried on a Sunday”, so that he can be (re)born on a Monday.
“Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
That was the end,
Of Solomon Grundy.”
I meant to reply to this earlier. Sorry for the delayed reply.
I think the writers left that deliberately ambiguous, to give themselves wiggle room going forward for which way they want to take that subplot.
We in the audience only saw Brainwave appear to Yolanda after Eclipso appeared. But Yolanda said in dialogue that it started long before Eclipso, and as I mentioned upthread, it’s very much in-genre for Brainwave to have implanted a facet of his psyche in Yolanda’s mind as he died.
So, if the writers decide they want to go down that road, they’ve left open the possiblity that Yolanda’s vision really was Brainwave, not Eclipso, and it may be a nasty shock when he keeps appearing to her even after Eclipso’s defeat. Or as a slight variant, Eclipso might have enhanced Brainwave’s psychic implant, which lets them handwave pretty much anything they want to do with that going forward - any “inconsistencies” can just be attributed to weird interactions between Eclipso’s powers and Brainwave’s.
Or, if they decide they don’t want to deal with that plotline, they can just leave it as is. Yolanda may have just been experiencing mundane nightmares and flashbacks due to PTSD, which may be what she was referring to as happening long before Eclipso, which Eclipso just ramped up into a full-blown interactive illusion, and now that he’s gone, she’ll be back to “normal” PTSD symptoms.
Or maybe not even that. They may decide that Yolanda has come to terms with what happened, and they may drop that subplot altogether. (I personally hope they don’t - the show has done a better job of portraying the lingering psychological trauma of inflicting violence better than a lot of “serious” dramas).