DC Comics released Final Crisis #1 last week, its latest continuation of the past year’s bid to completely ruin the franchise by chronicling the “epic” threat to the Multiverse, boring story after boring story. In Final Crisis, writer Grant Morrison has a throwaway line I was willing to ignore at the time (read: skipped reading it because of its absurdity), until Lev Grossman geeked out over it.

The setup is that a couple of Green Lanterns get summoned to a crime scene, some superbeing’s corpse that turned up in a dumpster. Morrison plays it noir — the Lanterns jaw at each other like beat cops. The crime is a 1011: deicide. The victim: Orion, the soldier god of New Genesis. “A-number one, cosmic hard-ass.”

The guy from the head office back on Oa weighs in: “Seal the crime scene out to the planet’s Lagrange point. No one must enter or leave the gravity well.”

Sure, I’ll keep reading that.

Lagrange point??? Gravity well? What are these awesome bits of astrophysics jargon? I bet the Lanterns have to seal off, like, a basjisoegjillion miles of space, from here to the next frikkin galaxy.

Oh, wait, the jargon is useless? Yeahbuhwhat?

The Lagrangian point(s) “are the five positions in an orbital configuration where a small object affected only by gravity can theoretically be stationary relative to two larger objects.” So what’s that mean for Final Crisis? Short story: absolutely nothing. Without saying what the two larger objects are, Morrison is just spewing bullshit.

And Earth’s gravity well? That is more-or-less the gravity field around Earth, which is not very big. The corps is effectively sealing off Earth and a little bit of empty space around it.

Astounding!

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