To anyone who's read Final Crisis, the microscopic-life motif should be pretty clear: much as microbes chill out on head lice chill out on your landlord's hair, life in the DC multiverse is, from a Monitor-view, either a microbial infection or a bunch of helpful bacteria, depending on how you want to look at it. The point of the narration here in that context is pretty obvious, and you don't need Sexy Shirtless Jeff Goldblum to tell you that, as usual, Life Will Find A Way. <cue John Williams theme>

But there's something else going on here, too. A landlord is collecting rent. And while at first glance this looks to just be a framing device for introducing Nix Uotan and his new status quo, keep it in mind: the owner of a property knocking on a door demanding payment for the right to live there. Insisting on payment for residence, an attempt to enforce mutual symbiosis between two lifeforms (or groups of lifeforms). Keep that in mind as we travel through the rest of this issue, since we'll be coming back to it again and again.

As for exactly where Uotan's set up shop, that bridge in the background is familiar and I see skyscrapers over the river, so I think it's pretty safe to say that the Last Monitor and Judge of All Evil decided he wanted to rock skinny jeans and support organic fair-trade food in Brooklyn, or whatever the Brooklyn-equivalent of Metropolis is (he was listening to WGBS in this same room at the very end of Final Crisis). The more important question, though, is which EARTH this is, as it's the only one we travel to in this issue without a designation caption, which makes me think that it's Earth-0, where we last left Nix Uotan at the end of Final Crisis. (However, though, that'd mean that DC was publishing comics on Earth-0, which doesn't scan; maybe, guessing by Uotan's apartment number, this is Earth-41? (which is, in fact, highlighted on the cover)).

Also: eight panels and a background, while we're on watch for "8" motifs, since the multiverse is built on vibrations and each Earth occupies the same space, just a pitch apart, as is explained later.