In this review of Event Horizon: Dark Descent #3, there are some choices to be made as the forces of Hell continue to plague the crew.
Event Horizon: Dark Descent #3
Writer: Christian Ward
Artist: Tristan Jones
Main Cover: Jeffrey Alan Love
Variant Cover: Chris Burnham
Pages: 32 pages
Release Date: November 12, 2025
This review contains spoilers
Event Horizon: Dark Descent #3 kicks off with a flashback to when Peter got his cancer diagnosis. He’d lied about his condition because he knew that this was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and that he’d never get to experience that view otherwise. Of course, the Chaos Realm is very much not the sort of amazing view he’d had in mind.
There’s mass panic aboard the ship, and the Captain has barricaded himself on the bridge and taken an inventory of just how screwed the whole situation is: the communication system is down, with them unable to receive anything and the jury still being out on transmitting. The clocks have all stopped. Their chief engineer is dead. The gravity drive is offline and something stepped out of it. He’s been hallucinating his dead father, and there’s no word on where Kwon, Devlin, and Nia are.
Kwon, meanwhile, has run from Devlin after discovering that he’d killed Nia, and he ran in the opposite direction. She ends up reuniting with Jen and Peter, all while the demonic entities (or mass hallucinations; it’s a bit ambiguous, but they’re real enough to the crew) prey upon everyone.
Devlin follows the entity that resembles the kid he’d run down, as he leads him to Paimon himself. Paimon tells Devlin that there’s a Special Place In Hell for him…but he wants him to do something for him first.
Jen and Kwon debate about how to deal with their creature issue, as Peter suggests a third option. If he can suit up and blow the airlock, he can send this thing into the vacuum of space. There’s a bit of worry about his own safety from Kwon, but the Captain approves of the plan.
Peter goes to follow through with the plan, gets most of the suit on…but then the creature catches up to him. He looks it right in the eye before going through with the next phase of the plan. It’s his last action alive, as he’s pulled into space (sans-helmet).
The Captain sees this, and doesn’t really have the time to grieve, as Paimon catches up to him, informing him that his crew is dead. And he’s next.
Chaos is the name of the game in Event Horizon: Dark Descent #3. Everyone has been seeing something in this dimension, and it seems to be different for everyone. The Captain keeps seeing his deceased father. Devlin’s encountering the image of the kid he’d run down. In Peter’s case, it seems to manifest as his cancer taking on a physical form outside of himself (or at least reminds him of it).
On the one hand, it feels pretty clear that there’s something aboard the Event Horizon that nobody asked for, but on the other, I’m not sure if it’s simply manifesting differently for everyone or if it’s more of an extremely vivid mass hallucination. Either way, Hell has entered the ship and it’s come for them all.
The moment where Devlin asks the one resembling his victim back home if he’s real helps to add to the ambiguity; he doesn’t get a straight answer out of it at all. And I wonder if Paimon can’t physically hurt anyone himself or if he just prefers to compel mortals to do what he wants them to. He tells Devlin that he needs him to do something for him, which is what gets me wondering about his own physical abilities.
In terms of telling this part of the story, the use of Peter’s diagnosis flashback was a heart-wrenching exercise in bookends. He’d wanted to see something amazing with the time he had left. He was all too aware that death was coming for him. But seeing the Chaos Realm, and all the horror that comes with it, is probably not the awe-inspiring view he’d had in mind. Granted, it does inspire a sort of awe of its own, albeit of a more terrifying sort than he could have ever imagined.
I also appreciate that he managed to go out trying to save what was left of the crew. His sacrifice may have been for naught, but he went into that plan with the knowledge that he probably wouldn’t be coming back. He had nothing left to lose when he enacted it. But the fact that he got the opportunity to look this thing square in the eye and say to it what he wishes he could say to the disease inside of himself makes it all the more powerful.
Final Thoughts
Fear with a side of tears await on this leg of the Event Horizon: Dark Descent journey. The terror this time around comes with an added layer of humanity and emotional resonance, and I look forward to seeing how it ends.
