This week on Legends of Tomorrow, Behrad decided to go back to London, 1977, to prevent Sara’s abduction (y’know, during the titular last season finale). And meanwhile on Bishop’s planet, Mick met up with Gary and the Avas, and put a plan in motion to rescue their captain.
Special thanks to Elias Rosner for covering last week’s episode: saying I “had to go fight a bunch of Beebo who worshipped that creepy Dr. Stein puppet” is the best thing anyone’s ever written about me.
1. The Worst Back to the Future Movie
Like the title suggests, this episode is a big homage to Back to the Future Part II — aka the weird, dark one they did before the fun western one — with the crew going back in time to fix things while trying to avoid themselves à la the two Marty McFlys and Doc Browns in 1955. We got a lot of amusing hijinks in this episode, like Behrad and Zari deciding to make a mannequin of Sara filled with fireworks to fool Gary, and Past Ava discovering what’s going on, and choosing to get blackout drunk to forget what will happen (instead of just using the bureau’s memory wiper for some reason).
By far the best part was when a grizzled, one-eyed Nate (Snate Plissken, anyone?) arrived from the future, while his past self (our present version) went to the bathroom after eating too much Indian food: now that’s how you change the past! I loved that Zari found him attractive (must’ve been him wearing Constantine’s jacket), and the way everyone just shrugged at his dire warnings, causing him to vanish as our Nate returned from the loo. (That’s Londonese for bathroom.) All in all, this was much better than Back to the Future Part II.
2. Spooner on the Sidelines
Something that also made me laugh was no one realizing Spooner would’ve made the perfect infiltrator since she and Sara have never met, until they bumped into each other at the punk bar. Spooner decides to share her alien history, including her fears that her DNA was tampered with, and that she might really be an alien. (Sara, who’s struggling to pick up the courage to propose to Ava, relates to her nervousness about her future.) Now what’s interesting is that Sara doesn’t experience this alteration to the timeline popping into her memory in the present, and speaking of…
3. Alien: Resurrection
Hey, remember how Ripley was resurrected in the fourth Alien movie as a clone with Alien DNA? Anyway, on top of being a clone now, Sara learns Bishop spliced her genes with those of a creature capable of quickly recovering from its wounds, which horrifies her: she comes to believe she’s not the real deal, and persuades the nurse AVA to construct another, unaltered copy to take her place. Rory gets her to snap out of it, saying he recognizes her as his friend and captain, and it doesn’t matter if Bishop has changed her. Isn’t Rory such a good papa bear? What an amazing arc Mick has had.
Let’s hope Bishop was right and Sara won’t turn into a monster (again) later.
4. Wow, Explosions!
Sara’s escape was an surprisingly spectacular climax, with pyrotechnics galore as she, Mick and Gary ran from the loose Zagurons (the species Amelia Earhart was turned into), while Kayla helped with her ship’s cannons (and later her tentacles). Sure, Sara kicks butt every week, but Legends hasn’t been a superhero action show for a long time, and it made a lot of sense when I learned director Glen Winter (who helmed the show’s pilot, as well as a whole bunch of other CW superhero stuff) was brought back to oversee this episode.
5. No Foreshadowing?
I was surprised that after Sara proposed to Ava that we didn’t cut back to Bishop’s planet, and see how his consciousness may have survived, or where the Zagurons dragged Kayla off to. I guess we’ve got the rest of the season for that, so I guess it’s neat that the episode ended solely on the beautiful shot of our two co-captains, celebrating their engagement while the fireworks in the mannequin of Sara fired out of the dumpster.
Continued belowYeah, that sounded weird, but it’s a perfect encapsulation of the show right?
Bonus Thoughts:
– Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen Caity Lotz being reconstructed: the first time was in 2013’s indie sci-fi film The Machine, where she (amusingly) played a character called Ava.
– I think Bishop was lying, and that he was uploading himself into the unaltered clone of Sara, but that’s moot now since his base was blown up before he could. And since this may be the last time we see Bishop in (a copy of) his original body, I have to say: Raffi Barsoumian is a really gifted physical comedy actor.
– Anyone shipping Behrad and Astra now? Just me? It’d be easy for them to go on double dates with his sister and her adoptive father (not that they’d like that of course).
– I love that Spooner was still mad about being turned into a fork. Speaking of paternal behavior, wasn’t Nate so sweet saying he’s glad she was still with them at the end?
– So Sara totally did it with Ava after their reunion without having a shower first huh?
See you all next week, for when the gang heads back to the Old West for “Stressed Western” (directed by John Diggle himself, David Ramsey).
