The best part about a messy Legends Of Tomorrow is the promise of what comes next
TV Reviews Legends of Tomorrow
There’s plenty to enjoy in “Bay Of Squids,” as there is in (almost) every episode of Legends Of Tomorrow. The people who make this show love to have a good time, and that’s as obvious here as ever; it’s the kind of episode that tempts one to pop a Gideon edible or two and simply enjoy the ride. But more unusually, there’s also a messiness that’s not a result of the wildness of the plot, nor the admittedly twisty lives of the characters. Instead, for the first time in some time, Legends finds itself struggling with tone, and for a show that can make a fight set to Sisqo’s “Thong Song” just a little bit moving, that’s quite a surprise. And while it’s not a terrible episode by any stretch of the imagination, the very best thing about it is the promises it makes about what’s to come. Could be worse. Could also be a lot better.
Hey, at least the episode has that in common with the mission on which it centers. And who doesn’t love a Dr. Strangelove tribute?
Constantine, Astra, Gary, and Sara are all off on their own adventures this week, and while the latter two would obviously be better off dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis than hanging out on a weirdo planet with the season’s big bad, Astra and John are probably better off sitting this one out. Behrad, too, probably wishes they’d forgotten him on the ship again. But it’s not because Mick is driving. It’s because it’s never quite clear what kind of story is being told. (Nate excepted—more on that in a minute).
The action takes place almost entirely during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, with the Legends split between Cuba (Spooner, Ava, Behrad, Mick) and the White House (Nate, Zari). The stakes couldn’t be higher, as the team has screwed things up for the not-better, accidentally stealing a nuclear warhead instead of the alien that’s crash-landed there. (Castro thinks the CIA has sent squid mutants to murder him, naturally.) From there, things get progressively worse, with Ava blaming the mishaps on Rory and essentially telling him to stick to what he’s good at (namely stealing stuff and shooting people), Nate and Zari coming face to face with a paranoid, war-hungry general and then confronting their own mortality, and Behrad singing a Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam song about the dream of peace. It’s a lot.
Except it’s also the episode in which everyone went to Harvard, a guy playing JFK wears some truly terrible false teeth, Behrad gets mistaken for Che Guevara because he puts on a little hat, Spooner talks about hippies and burnouts and shooting things because she’s super tough and loves the second amendment, and Nate literally intercepts the nuclear football after Zari makes a little tornado for it. Then the dangerous general dies when a warhead sans plutonium lands on him in the middle of the White House lawn. What?
Listen, if any show could find a balance between a) Zari and Nate holding hands while they prepare to die, b) Behrad a.k.a. Che Guevara’s cousin Jay Guevara getting blazed with Castro, and c) a terrified, frustrated Ava cutting open an alien while doing a bad Russian accent, it’s this one. But in this case, it seems like maybe no show could. Legends can blend its appreciation for the absurd and its commitment to character-driven storytelling with great elegance, and it often has. (Beebo was introduced in the episode where they mourn Stein! That’s amazing!) But it doesn’t work here. The Mick/Ava storyline makes perfect sense in relation to the rest of the season and as a continuation of their ongoing, evolving friendship, and it’s always nice when Mick has something to do. But it’s handled haphazardly, with some emotional beats arriving too quickly and others skipped altogether.
The bigger problem, however, is Behrad. Shayan Sobhian is incredibly watchable, and he’s especially invaluable when episodes have a more comic bent. (His sitcom acting in “The One Where We’re Trapped On TV” is next-level, honestly.) But Behrad’s story is all over the place here, and I’m not sure Sobhian’s expert timing and amiable presence helps much. What does this mission mean to Behrad, who makes a point of calling himself a pacifist? How does he react to, well, any of it? Is this a heartfelt (stoned) performance, or just something to do while high? It doesn’t seem like intentional ambiguity. Instead, it’s as though someone said, “whoa, we could make this guy look kinda like Che Guevara, also can we get rights to a Cat Stevens song?” and then they called it a day.
Thank god for Nick Zano. On the one hand, the nuclear football thing? Not as effective as the usual so-dumb-it’s-great Legends storylines, both because it’s telegraphed from so early on and because it’s just too long. On the other hand, anytime Zano gets to do The Rom-Com Look at someone, that’s an undeniably good thing. He’s great at it. I’m not sure his assertion that this Zari no longer reminds him of his Zari is earned, but it’s a lovely scene, and it’s so nice to see Nate have some history things to do.
Honestly, it’s hard to be too frustrated about any of that, though, because the episode ends on such a promising note. In two weeks, we’ll get the start of not one but two potentially top-tier Legends storylines: all the Legends have to move in with John (amazing), and Mick goes on a galaxy road trip with Kayla, who is basically real-life Garima, but who is also not to be trusted. If I, too, can use a sports analogy or two, I’d call this episode a bit of a fumble, but it seems to set the show up for a home run and also a buzzer-beater basket and also something soccer-related. It’s going to be good.
Stray observations
- Does Nate use his extremely helpful superpower in this episode? Yes! More here! Maybe, somehow, this is a bad weekly check-in?
- Dark Gideon watch: Nothing major, but she does sound generally pretty delighted about the prospect of imminent nuclear war—and are we meant to think she purposefully dropped them in Cuba in 1962 (or at minimum didn’t give them a heads up?)
- General Kilgore.
- Avas-alien-stealing-face.gif
- Zari typing with her thumbs is a great detail.
- Oof, that Kennedy.
- Episode MVP: Nick Zano! See above!
- Why the fuck not?: Behrad’s whole deal. Like, all of it. I wish it worked better.
- Line-reading of the week: “Whatever you say, Steele.”
- Gideon, what’s the most meta moment?: “Girl, we don’t ask those questions.” A real crime-solving devil moment.
- Episode title ranking: 1. Meat: The Legends. 2. Ground Control To Sara Lance. 3. Bay Of Squids. 4.v The Ex-Factor.
- This week’s episode in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend song form: I’m mostly retiring this category, because I kept wanting to repeat songs I’d already used, but I couldn’t pass this one up:
106 Comments
Mick-Ava have become one of the show’s best friend relationships, on the same level as Nate-Ray, Mick-Snart, Stein-Jax, and Zari-Ava
I really like both Behrad and Zari 2.0 but I agree that the show struggles a bit to know what to do with them, as it is too easy to reduce them to being just a stoner and an influencer, both with powers, but kind of shallow
The show just seems a bit overstuffed with characters right now. I feel like they haven’t even made Astra more integrated with the group before bringing in Spooner.
It’s never a great sign when characters on a show have to come up with reasons to explain why literally half the cast is absent in any given episode.Like many shows, Legends needs fewer main cast members, and more recurring characters. Like, for example, having John more officially become just ‘guy who they drop in on for help and/or company now and then’, which actually fits his character better than having him on every mission anyway.
The bloated main cast curse is all-encompassing in modern tv.
The biggest factor I think is modern union contracts: there have developed quite strict rules about what consistitutes a guest role, recurring role, main cast role, etc, and those statuses are agreed on a season-by-season basis, or even in multi-season contracts. So shows can get ‘locked in’ to certain cast members, and find it difficult to temporarily sideline them without losing them entirely (or paying them for episodes they don’t even appear in). Shows that are willing to go the ‘Wire’ route and just say “actually, our main character isn’t needed right now, we’ll turn him into a cameo role for a season!” are few and far between…
But also, a lot of it is a hangover from the network procedural mentality – the days when every episode had to be standalone, because you couldn’t trust the audience to have seen the rest of the show. As a result, there was a need to keep the talent on-screen in each episode, fresh in everyone’s memories, and there was a reluctance to do any world-building – the world had to be all on screen every episode too. Which means you can’t “park” characters in other bits of your world until the plot demands them. Modern shows have more freedom in what they can do – but writers often don’t seem to realise it. So the shows often seem to have to drag all their characters with them wherever they go (in this case: literally on the Waverider in most cases), rather than setting up their characters in different places and moving the plot around between them.
[tangent: I know it won’t happen for a long time, but it would be great to see a show that embraced the “franchise” model – and Legends would be an excellent fit for it. Have episodes that are just John fighting demons in England with magic, or Astra comically adjusting to mortal life, or Ava running the Time Bureau (or its replacement), or Charlie being a shapeshifting punk rock musician, and so on, and just have the plots intersect as the narrative demands…]
Regarding the “franchise model” Wastrel brought up…I am so here for a “Legends of the Legends” anthology series, especially if it ran IN ADDITION TO the main show. But I dare not hope for something so extravagant. I don’t pay much attention to ratings, so I could be way off here, but I always felt like this show is the runt of the litter in the Arrowverse, the weird, silly little show that those of us here love. I get down and praise Beebo for every subsequent season pickup we get as if it’s always on borrowed time.
The last season of Legends was indeed the second-least-watched Arrowverse season, after the last season of Black Lightning. According to the general public, the first season of Legends was the best and it’s been downhill ever since, so it surely won’t be long before Legends is cancelled.[In overnight viewership, it looks pretty catastrophic now you mention it. The first episodes of the first three seasons got 3.2m, 1.8m, and 1.7m viewers; but that plummeted to 1m for S4, then 0.7m for S5 (not counting the Crisis episode), and finally only 0.4m for S6. That’s… not a promising trend, unfortunately. Particularly if we’re not doing crossovers anymore, to remind other Arrowverse viewers (to the extent there still are any) that it’s still on air…]
“According to the general public, the first season of Legends was the best and it’s been downhill ever since”The general public is pretty stupid.
Yup. Or at least, the general public wants certain shows mostly just to have something comforting on in the background while they do the ironing, and don’t appreciate any deviations from their expectations.Likewise, 16 million people wanted to watch Person of Interest when it was a conventional, albeit unusually good, investigative case-of-the-week procedural. When it became highly serialised sharp-edged political commentary in the guise of one of the best science fiction TV shows of all time, only 6 million of them were willing to stick with it.
[huh. so POI’s least-watched episode got twice as many viewers as Legend’s most-watched episode, and more than ten times as many as Legend’s current season. A good reminder of how much more fragmented the market has become…]
Constantine could definitely be recurring. The show’s made steps to show him as a team player, but yeah he was never designed to be one originally.With Olivia Swann, she hasn’t shown up for three episodes now but I assume someone did the math and realized they needed Astra enough this season to promote her. Same with Courtney Ford prior.Legends gets some leeway from me in that the show’s crew decorum is so loose, characters can drink/sleep in/be absent as the plot requires and you just take it as how things are. Compared to like Flash, where it’s always all hands on deck for every crisis and it becomes noticeable if someone’s not there.
I agree that personality/character wise, Constantine being a joiner full-time doesn’t make the most, but I’ll be damned if I won’t fight tooth and nail for every bit of Matt Ryan as Constantine we get on this show.
Any time Constantine isn’t onscreen, the other characters should be saying, “Where’s Constantine?” (At least they had Z 2.0 kinda sorta do so this episode!)
I think part of the reason why half the cast members aren’t there is because of COVID protocols? Though I don’t know when they filmed the season.I actually prefer John as a mainstay. The more “out there” characters that stay, the better. It’s just that they bring in new people too soon, without letting the previous one settle in more nicely first. Last season alone we get Behrad and Astra, and while they fit nicely, they still need more screen time.
Behrad especially. Likeable but why is he here. Zari 2 has a few more layers.
I always appreciate Legends’ revolving door of characters, it keep the show fresh and gives characters actual character arcs that don’t all end in death. And I like Behrad, but he just doesn’t click as a main Legend for some reason. He’s very likeable but just not that interesting, the stoner comedy and brothers/sister bickering is a little dated. They’ve jettisoned most of the “super” characters at this point so anyone new they bring in to the fold really needs a reason to be there.
-Rory’s a writer, of course he has words. We’re just lucky, genre-wise, none of them were “turgid”.-“We have to get the Russians their nukes back!” “That defeats the purpose of stealing!” Never change, Mick.-If Jes Macallan wants to attempt a new accent and undercover character every week, I am here for it.-Love the detail of Zari 2.0 thumb-typing 120wpm.-As soon as I saw Behrad put the beret on I knew we were getting a Che thing. Didn’t mind his scenes in-show but you’re right they could’ve gone deeper on his character.-Mick+Ava are BrOTP but in a more cantankerous way than the show’s other BrOTPs, and I’ll miss their scenes if Rory is separated for a while/once he leaves.-I’M SO GLAD YOU BROUGHT CXG SONGS BACK FOR SPORTS ANALOGIES
Rory’s a writer, of course he has words. We’re just lucky, genre-wise, none of them were “turgid”.That’s very true, I was wondering where Mick’s personality shift came from at the top of the episode, but he’s always had this person in him, he just chooses to be someone else.
“-If Jes Macallan wants to attempt a new accent and undercover character every week, I am here for it.”Or at least a new undercover hairstyle each week. The Oktoberfest pinned braids were an adorable touch.
I was really surprised Rory didn’t bring that up!
This felt like a season 2/3 story but mashed with the antics of the current era, and I think that contributes to the uneven tone. I did enjoy that there was no B-plot this week, and the different threads of the Cuban Missile Crisis story gave each character something to do, which the show doesn’t always excel at (see: Ava and Spooner literally watching the competition on TV last week).
Literal nuclear football was a groaner, even for this show. I guess it wouldn’t have been very heroic for Nate and Zari to just teleport out of the Oval Office, but they had that option, right?Need a little history lesson, was Castro not totally onboard with the Soviet presence in Cuba? I felt like I was missing a little political nuance somewhere.
Yeah, I was thinking all the stuff at the White House felt like a very Season 2 story.
I think the team try not to lean on the time couriers (the portal watches) too much, but you’re right, they could have gotten everyone out of there. They even use the couriers later in the episode. I would have appreciated Zari calling it out, it’s reasonable to think she might not have remembered it. But yeah – a symptom of having to acknowledge that this tech still exists while trying not to sideline the Waverider and Gideon.
Okay, they need to stop with the Nate and Zari stuff. It’s over. Let it go.Mick getting his act together.Spooner working out. I know a certain subset of the fandom that’s going to love that.Zari speaking French.Something is telling me that Spooner and Mick are going to get along famously.I
can normally roll with the things in this show, but all of the
situations where the crew just walk into high-security situations is
going beyond my ability to suspend disbelief.I
don’t think that Spooner’s abilities are getting stronger. I think that
Kayla is her mother. It would also explain why she can read Kayla’s
language.“I’ve never seen someone type with just their thumbs before.” That was hilarious.A football game with the nuclear football. Only on Legends.NEW
THEORY! I had thought that Mick and Spooner might hook up, and Spooner
would be a sort of stepmom to Lita. Now I think that Mick and Kayla are
Spooner’s parents with Spooner being Lita’s half-sister.
whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat on the Kayla being Spooner’s mom theory. that’s really interesting.
I definitely think that Kayla is Spooner’s mom. Why else make her female, and look like her. And it explains their telepathic connection
I didn’t mind Zari/Nate so much at the top of the ep as a nod to continuity, but I fully cringed when they brought it back at the end. Zano’s romcom looks fall pretty flat for me, honestly.
“I didn’t mind Zari/Nate so much at the top of the ep as a nod to continuity, but I fully cringed when they brought it back at the end. Zano’s romcom looks fall pretty flat for me, honestly.”
HARD agree! Pun…slightly intended.
Gary’s a father.
But if Kayla was Spooners mom wouldn’t Gideon have found some kind of alien DNA in Spooner when they were doing all those scans of her when they first got her on the ship? I was also fully on board the ‘Spooner is an alien’ train but then when I remembered Gideon it made me pause.
1. The way that Gideon’s been acting lately, who knows?2. Do we know that Gideon did a DNA scan of her? All I’ve seen is Gideon basically did an MRI of her brain.
True, we don’t know what kind of scans Gideon did, but it seemed to me like they were just looking for any kind of anomaly to explain her alien senses. I don’t buy that Gideon would do a simple MRI and say “didn’t find anything, guess we’re done here”. EW put out an interview with Tala Ashe a few weeks ago, and asked her specifically about Dark Gideon. Her answer is pretty interesting. Without tone it’s kind of hard to tell if she’s being coy about it to not spoil anything, or if she really doesn’t know what’s up with herhttps://ew.com/tv/legends-of-tomorrow-tala-ashe-season-6-episode-3-preview/
I appreciate that the Legends Of Tomorrow all remembered to use their powers tonight.
At first I thought Mick abandonned everyone in 1962. Couldn’t he have at least left the jump ship?Is this the first episode sans Sara?Spooner really hates Commies.
They’ve got those little portal clicker thingies, which somehow take you exactly where/when you want to go, even though we never see anyone enter any sort of coordinates into them.“Girl, we don’t ask those questions.”
I am assuming the jump ship really blew up and they never got it replaced when Charlie’s mean sister blew it up in Vancouver.Yeah, I’m pretty sure this was the first episode without Caity since the beginning…unless I’m forgetting s1 (which happens a lot). Even in the episode she directed, she still showed up.
I remember it felt really weird last year when Caity only showed up for the bookends of the two episodes back-to-back (her prep, then her directing ep). The plot this season nicely justifies her absence.
Yeah I got confused momentarily when Mick booted Spooner off, then I thought he left them in the present day when they all started discussing crashing with Constantine. Stupid Vancouver forests all look alike.
Solid episode but why didn’t anyone else go with them especially Spooner who can translate. Like what was Mick’s plan just go with no way of communication. Also why didn’t ava use her watch thing to take the alien to the ship when she first finds it. She did it last episode almost immediately? Behrad is fine but stop with the Stoner jokes
Mick was protecting Spooner by kicking her off the ship…. almost like SHE WAS HIS OWN DAUGHTER!
We need an all-Behrad episode so badly!
I want one where we see the alternate season 3 and 4 with him in Zari’s storylines.
Yes!
I know it’s probably impossible, but if they could somehow recreate parts of the S2 episode and do “Behraders of the Lost Art” that would be amaaazing.
He’s so chill I wonder if he’d need a Here I Go Again episode.
oh his version would be a bad trip with Gideon as his spirit animal.
Here I Go Again Again
I really want to see how he joined the team. Most of the big plot stuff is just ‘Behrad does the thing Zari did’, but for actually joining the team he obviously wouldn’t be in the dystopian future they found Zari 1.0 in.
Or at least a Behrad-centric one like what Zari had with “Hedgehog Day”
with those sweets of his….among other things.
I’ll take this JFK over Michael C. Hall’s pathetic attempt.So let’s see. Washington, jfk, lbj, Obama, am I missing any presidents?
Nixon!
Yes! … with the sneeze-bee.
Ah yes
Ulysses S. Grant
Doctor Nate Heywood, PhD definitely said “nucular” on several occasions.That guy looks nothing like JFK.Jay Guevara was amazing.Nobody seems to remember that Mick is a celebrated author.
I have to admit, “nucular” drive me up the damned walls, and Nate saying it drove me kinda nuts when I picked up on it. It was scary enough when President George W Bush was always saying it…
“I know words” really should have been, “I write books.” I know Mick deliberately hides his light under a bushel, but how can they all forgot how much he can do?
It’s really a shame that Garima’s not around anymore.
So, is that the same Kayla that Sara fought? Or a past version? That was a bit confusing. Was a bit disappointed that JFK and RFK looked/sounded nothing like the actual JFK/RFK, especially when the look and accent are both so iconic. Will be curious to see if the Nate/Zari relationship goes any further–it seemed like they started hinting at it.
It’s the same Kayla, Sara kicked her into the temporal zone – along with other pods.
The bigger question is where did Kayla get a pod to land in, given she was tossed out of the ship mid-fight with Sarah, and I think we even saw her go through the time tunnel wall without one.
Maybe she kicked out they shark-eyed thing that splatted on the Waverider windshield from its pod and took that one.
They did not even TRY with that JFK beyond the dollar store fake teeth.
It’s like they heard “Kennedy” and thought “OK…they had hair, right? I wonder what it looked like. Surely there’s no way to find out for real.”
Even the casting though – that guy’s resemblance to JFK was ???
They probably couldn’t afford a good set of teeth. Blew the budget on steeling Nate up.
Like, at least do Mayor Quimby I mean come on…
Pretty sure Nick Zano had a closer resemblance to JFK than the actor they got.
I wondered if it was meant to be a joke on how Hollywood, with a few exceptions, gets the Kennedys so wrong so often, especially Bobby (Barry Pepper? John Shea? Zeljko Ivanek? Peter Sarsgaard?). Even when they do get it right, the Boston accent is notoriously hard to nail for actors.
Also did appreciate weird looking they made Jack and Bobby, because the Kennedys kind of are. Still my favorite JFK in pop culture:
While I had so much fun – as usual – I think the episode suffered from the stakes being so high (even though plot-wise it had a very simple premise). They could have easily made this a two-parter so all the plot lines could breathe.Most of the crew ending up in Cuba in their PJs was something I never knew I needed. It was slightly confusing though at the beginning that they didn’t know they were in Cuba – I thought Gideon was telling them where they are headed to.Behrad calling Ava mom was hilarious.Nate and Zari looked way better as Kennedys than the actors hired for JFK and RFK imho. And with the rate Nate got hot and bothered over JFK (and, in the past, Dion), let Nate be bi already! I wanted an Astra episode desperately and Praise Beebo we are getting it, this show delivers!
My favorite part was throwing in a nod to Kennedy’s real life chronic back pain with zero foreshadowing. If you know about it, great, but if you don’t, the show’s not going to bother holding your hand and is just going for the gag.
The football scene was my favorite of the episode, and the back gag absolutely killed. If only they had put the button on it by having JFK say “luck of the Kennedys” rather than “luck of the Irish”… but maybe that would be veering too close to Clone High territory.(as if there was anything wrong with that)
Literally seconds before JFK said “My back!” I was thinking “Kennedy had Addison’s so he wouldn’t be able to do all of this running and jumping.”
“Why the fuck not?: Behrad’s whole deal. Like, all of it. I wish it worked better.”You can hate me all you want, but I could not stop laughing at “Jay Guevera.” I just couldn’t. Like, multiple times I had to pause and stop myself.
Yeah to me Jay Guevara made the episode (with Ava’s Russian accent close behind.) Getting Castro high and singing Cat Stevens to him was a pretty good Legends approach to a problem.
Stoned Castro worked in the grand tradition of undermining feared figures that gave us Vandal Savage’s makeover into “I love those groovy guys…JENGA TIME!”
I wasn’t even made that they did the obvious trope of “WHY I OUGHTA…give you a kiss you wonderful friend!”
I loved the stoner vibe that Behrad gave off when he was first introduced last season, because it seemed to be just a fun side thing, but he was still all in on being a “Time Bro!” but now it seems like that’s become his whole thing, and that makes it a little boring? I hope they figure him out, because he is absolutely excellent.
My favorite Behrad moment is still him explaining to Highcastle Abby show-stuck Astra that “a diva is a female version of a hustler”
He is *so* good in that one. When they get back to the Ultimate Buds show and he hears the laugh track for the first time is absolute gold.
That is one of my absolute most favorite LoT episodes & he stole a number of scenes
Last episode, I congratulated Legends on acknowledging that they’d been having problems making Mick feel like part of the team and addressing it. I may have to rescind those congratulations, depending on how long it takes him to find Sara and get back to the rest of the crew. (Since he has the Waverider, and [I hope] there’s only so much to be done with the premise of “Everybody’s roommates in John’s haunted house!” I’m cautiously optimistic it’ll be quick.)Yeah, Behrad suddenly going full stoner hippie caricature for an episode really didn’t work. Please don’t try making this his thing from now on, writers.An actual football game breaking out over the nuclear football sounds very Legends, but just ended up feeling kinda… stupid. And not brilliantly stupid like Legends usually is.
So after offhandedly mentioning explicitly promising us Space Cabbie last week, Sara and Gary’s space cab will end up being the Waverider. COWARDS.
Nate’s broey-ness CAN be used as a strength. Seeing him excelt in the frat world of “Freaks and Greeks” was one of the best things they ever did with him. Putting him in the room to play nuclear football with the Harvard men was a bit of a diminished return.
Oh, absolutely. There’s nothing wrong with Nate’s broishness (or Behrad’s laid-back stoner energy), but it can’t save an idea from itself when said idea exists on the wrong side of the “gloriously silly”/“just plain silly” divide that this show usually navigates so well. As opposed to the football thing, I actually thought “Behrad talking Castro back from the brink of Armageddon by playing him ‘Peace Train’” was, on paper, very much on the right side of that divide. But the cartoon hippie we got in this episode was not, IMO, Behrad as we’ve come to know him over the last year-plus. And as has been pointed out in so many Legends reviews, NONE of this stuff works if it’s not rooted in who these characters are. There seems to come a point in every TV comedy’s existence when the characters stop being characters and simply become louder versions of their most obvious qualities. When it happened to Everybody Loves Raymond or Modern Family, it made the shows worse, but I have a feeling that if it happens to Legends, it’s death.
Last episode, I congratulated Legends on acknowledging that they’d been having problems making Mick feel like part of the team and addressing it. I may have to rescind those congratulations, depending on how long it takes him to find Sara and get back to the rest of the crew. (Since he has the Waverider, and [I hope] there’s only so much to be done with the premise of “Everybody’s roommates in John’s haunted house!” I’m cautiously optimistic it’ll be quick.)Yeah, Behrad suddenly going full stoner hippie caricature for an episode really didn’t work. Please don’t try making this his thing from now on, writers.An actual football game breaking out over the nuclear football sounds very Legends, but just ended up feeling kinda… stupid. And not brilliantly stupid like Legends usually is.
So after offhandedly mentioning explicitly promising us Space Cabbie last week, Sara and Gary’s space cab will end up being the Waverider. COWARDS.
Re: the bad JFK, I’m curious how difficult it is to cast for single-episode guest stars with the whole COVID situation. Canada is still requiring two-week quarantines for anyone traveling from outside of the country, which obviously limits the pool of available actors considerably. And I’m guessing there aren’t too many people who’ve worked on their Kennedy accent north of the border.
They finally addressed (in the typical Legends fashion) something that has always bothered me when time travel is involved in solving a crisis (yes, I’m looking at you too, Doctor!). Why do they HAVE TO leave immediately? It’s a freaking time machine. Get dressed, eat your lunch, have a schvitz, it doesn’t matter when you leave. It only matters when you arrive. October, 1962, is still going to be there. What’s the rush?And the same thing goes when waiting for the time travelers to return. It’s time travel. Unless something goes horribly wrong (or if the Doctor is driving cause he’s bad at it), they’ll can be right back. It can take an hour, a day, a freaking decade, to deal with whatever they’ve time traveled to deal with. And then, set the navigation system to a few minutes after you left and, Bob’s your uncle, everyone is standing right where you left them. None of the, “What should we do while they are gone?” or “Where will we live because the ship is our home?” is necessary. Home, sweet, time-travelling space ship will be right back, even if the occupants have aged several years.
Home, sweet, time-travelling space ship will be right back, even if the occupants have aged several years.At least on the ‘return’ aspect, the show has been mostly consistent in showing the characters can’t just return a few seconds later from when they left. I think it’s mostly narrative convenience to line up with the other Arrowverse shows for crossovers and such, but there’s repeated instances where for example if they’re off adventuring for a month, they have to return a month later by their own timeline. In season 3 Stein had to be present for his grandchild’s birth at a specific time. Last episode when Zari 2.0 returns to 2045 it’s mentioned she’s been away for months (presumably since the perfume incident in season 5). So if Mick takes the time ship for two weeks his time to find Sara, the other Legends need somewhere to stay for that time.
Indeed, I have considered these “rules” too, but this show ALWAYS works better when, as Z 2.0 pointed out, “we don’t ask those questions.” Season One beat us over the head trying to explain how time travel worked in this universe and it never made sense anyway (remember all the talk about time “hardening” or whatever the fuck?!), and the show only got better when it threw up his hands and said, “You know what? It doesn’t fucking matter.”
We need to kill Vandal Savage in three different time periods at the same time …
They seem to stay in touch via phone calls, email, and the like while off adventuring, so I could see there being problems (or at least confusion) if they return a few seconds after they left, if it means arriving BEFORE all the text messages and stuff they already did occurred.
This week in Sara Is The B- oh, no Sara this week. At all. Well, that sucks. And it looks like the next episode is directed by Caity Lotz, so Sara probably won’t be in that one much, either. All I can say is the episode after that one better be a full-on Sarapalooza, because I need my captain, dammit!Maybe I should do a special Gideon Is The Best for this week, though, because I love that she not only made packaging for those edibles, she even designed her own logo!
I’m hoping there’ll be some Sara next episode – it would feel weird to leave the audience hanging on the introduction of the season big bad and not follow up for two episodes in a row. There’s definitely been actor-directed episodes where the actor also has a decent-sized role on camera as well so maybe it just depends on the script and their experience level.
Do we know that guy Sara met is the season’s Big Bad? I keep seeing people say that, but has it been confirmed?
It’s been confirmed in press releases and an interview with Phil Klemmer, though they could always reveal a “man behind the man” scenario later.
Sara is the gravity that holds all the foolishness together.I have always thought Jes Macallan has underrated comedic chops. I lost it in the scene where she suddenly realized she was using the accent for no reason whilst speaking in said accent.Getting more pissed that Mick is leaving because on top of being the best they have finally given him a storyline and some actual meaningful interactions with other people like Ava and even Spooner.
If they want us to accept a shipping-via-entropy of Nate and Zari 2.0, I’m not buying what they’re selling. There’s no denying that Nate has had it rough when it comes to losing partners to crazy circumstances, but I really don’t like the show going back to the well TWICE that he’ll pursue a woman who happens to share the face of his ex. I was glad that he didn’t end up with Charlie, but then I wished dearly that Zari 1.0 had ended up with Charlie, with whom she had much better chemistry than EITHER of them had with Nate. And frankly, it seems too heartless to think of Zari 1.0 sitting around inside the totem listening to Nate getting hard-ons for a woman who looks just like her. If it goes further, it might give the impression that Nate only cares about her appearance and not the person she specifically was. Especially given the interesting work they’ve done JUST ONE EPISODE AGO developing a deeper connection between Constantine and Zari 2.0 (which is compelling in its mismatch), setting up Zari as the type to be charmed by Nate and hold his hand simply because he is the Legend in closest proximity comes off as short change. Especially in an episode without Constantine at all, at LEAST Zari suggested swinging by to get him, but after their steps forward, for her to not be the least put out by hurtling into the next mission without him comes across as slapdash, especially if they are artificially clearing the board to establish a parallel attraction to Nate. The prospect of a Nate/Zari 2.0/Constantine love triangle doesn’t really excite me, even though I trust this show to pull off whatever it tries. If they ARE going to do that, putting most of the Legends under the same roof at John’s house is probably the most interesting way to go…and I’m always ready to be surprised. If we’ve got to pair off poor forlorn Mr. Heywood, what about…Astra?
To be honest, I kinda love fake JFK. Trying to get an actor to be a perfect match for one episode of TV usually just lands in the uncanny valley, going cartoonish and broad can work better, especially on THIS show.
Behrad and Spooner are still proving themselves to me as presences on the Waverider. I, too, would love for Spooner to show some more depth than Shooty McBlamBlam. Examining her from a legitimate place of trauma was a good way to start, and she did some good work with Mick on this episode, but establishing her as the team’s resident 2A advocate isn’t exactly my idea of bringing something fresh to the table.
And Behrad is rather one-note from a different perspective, the affable, dopey stoner guy who happens to know Yusef Islam songs well enough to play Fidel Castro into changing all of his political ideas (with a bit of help from some weed gummies). Depending on your tolerance for stoners, that genre of dude might be okay to hang out with, but he hasn’t truly proven himself an asset to the team. Establishing a pacifist/conscientious objector on a superhero team regularly involved in violent battles is a potentially fertile concept, but so far we have seen a Behrad who would rather deal himself out and get high on the ship that take an active roll in fighting for the peace he loves.
As always, after going on at length about my quibbles, I feel the need to clarify that this is my favorite show, and even when I feel like certain plot points and character beats need more work, I know that this show is capable of putting IN that work, and even on an episode where I have quibbles, it is still one of my favorite hours of the week hanging out with this team (both the in-universe team of Legends AND the cast and crew who bring them to life).
I am excited for the upcoming Constantine arc, and Mick’s jaunt into space. I do wonder if we are going to have to wait until the season’s endgame to get any Sara interaction with the team at all, which would be a true shame, given Caity Lotz’s incredible work over the previous seasons establishing herself as the fulcrum on which this team hinges, and the one with the most fleshed out relationships with each individual.
Point of order: how are the team going to get to Constantine’s house WHEN Constantine and Astra are there without the Waverider? For that matter, how did the Cuba team and the DC team meet up at the end after Mick took off? If they met up in Cuba, 1962, where the ship was parked how do they get back to England, 2021? Do all of the team members, or possibly even just Ava, now have individual time couriers? I suppose that’d be a good enough answer.
Final thought: Mick is definitely going to be getting down with Kayla aboard the ship. How sad it will be for Gary to suffer yet another in an endless line of indignities to find out that Rory’s been banging his ex en route across the cosmos…
Gotta disagree on the Line Reading of the Week. For me it was “Nobody wants your drugs!”
Mom!
If Mick and Kayla are gonna hook up, it’s gonna be very awkward when Gary returns and finds out.Nate being in the presence of his thesis was delightful. Should the same happen to my history-majoring college roommate he would be the officiator of notable 19th-century duels.
I quit edibles a long time ago but I would try Dark Gideon’s Sweet Dreamz.Excited to see the Legends left on Earth reenact “Ultimate Buds” at Constantine’s castle. That’s gonna be fun.
Not sure if it’s because it’s on Sunday or what but I haven’t watched one of these on the day it came out. I just don’t feel this season so far.
I’m struggling with the CW shows this year – and the lack of the leading ladies. Ok, Ruby Rose quit and Melissa Benoist on maternity leave. Where is Caity Lotz? To me the balance of the show is off with no Sara with the team. I’m missing Zari original and Charlie too. Hope Legends gets its mojo back
This episode definitely had a loose feel about it, like they were just tossing in ideas because why the fuck not? Behrad has definitely been portrayed as more of a typical chill stoner lately, and it feels like the writers are going for easy laughs. You’re better than that, LEGENDS writers! Mick sorting himself out to make a plan that still basically involved ‘shoot them with my flame gun’ was funny, although I wonder (in light of Dominic Purcell’s imminent departure) if we’re going to see him go back to ‘surly drunk who’s only tangentially involved in hijinks’. I hope not – Take-Charge Mick is really fun to see!
Ha! I’d hoped you’d resurrect it for this one. SPORTS ANALOGIES!
What have you done to the site? Half the reviews are now missing. There’s only 2 LoT reviews showing up atm when you’ve reviewed all 5 so far.its only been since the mini revamp.