One part of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice that people seem to be confused about is the apparent dream within a dream Bruce Wayne has, a “knightmare” in which he’s fighting what appears to be Darkseid’s Parademons in a post-apocalyptic desert. Then he’s confronted by a Superman enraged that Batman “took her from me,” and — when it appears Bruce has awoken from this vision — The Flash (Ezra Miller) bursts in, seemingly rustling real-world papers, and tells Batman that Lois Lane is the key and, “You were always right about him! Fear him! Fear him and find us.”
It would be easy to write this all off as an awfully convenient movie-style dream sequence, where a character knows details and people they shouldn’t possibly know about. But what if it wasn’t a dream? According to Jay Oliva, the accomplished storyboard artist who worked with Zack Snyder on this sequence, it wasn’t just a nightmare Bruce was having. It was — in Oliva’s opinion — a Time Boom.
Oliva tells the Hall of Justice Podcast, as transcribed by Screen Rant:
“Okay… you’ve watched The Flashpoint Paradox, my movie, right? In the DC Universe in the comics, [..] when you go back in time you create this kind of ‘Time Boom’ kind of thing where lots of things change. […] I don’t know if this is Zack’s thinking, but this is mine: What if that isn’t a dream sequence? What if what you saw was a Time Boom, a latent memory from the future when Flash comes back? If you look at the cut, he doesn’t go to sleep! He’s waiting for the [Lexcorp file decryption] and suddenly this [Knightmare sequence] comes in, and he’s jogged out of it seeing his own death. And what does he see? He sees Flash. And if you’re a DC fan, you know what’s happening. You know that Flash going back in time, that memory is now coming back to him… mind you, it’s jumbled.”
Oliva went on to talk about the message Flash traveled through time to deliver:
“And remember, when Flash goes back in time, he tells him ‘you were right about him.’ He doesn’t say exactly who ‘him’ is. The average audience member, and even Bruce Wayne, is going to think that he’s right about Superman, when in fact he’s referring to someone else.”
That someone else is probably the “bigger enemy” Zack Snyder said is coming, which the signs so far — the “knightmare,” the deleted scene — suggest is going to be Darkseid. Or a character they really want us to think is going to be Darkseid. Whoever it is, consider us scared and horny.
(Via Screen Rant and Hall of Justice Podcast)
