Welcome back to Legends of Tomorrow folks: first, a special thanks to Elias for covering last week’s episode, which saw the gang reunite and participate in Dr. Gwyn Davies’s time travel experiment in 1925. This week saw the group stranded in what they believed to be a prehistoric forest, with Zari and Behrad working to help Davies repair his contraption. Plus: we got confirmation of Bishop’s role in instigating the Legends’ ongoing predicament.
1. Blue HAL 9000
Surprise surprise, Bishop was the one who blew up the Waverider with his recreation of the ship, and sent the robots of J. Edgar Hoover and Thomas Edison after his copy of Gideon alerted him to the Legends’ alterations to the timeline. There was a good reversal of expectations here, with you initially believing Bishop’s maniacal desire to get revenge on his kidnappers would lead him down the same path as his older self, until Evil Gideon thoroughly proved herself to be a female HAL 9000, first by flushing “assistant Ava” out the airlock, and then trapping Bishop on board to fulfil his duties as a new Time Master, while creating a clone to carry out his role in season 6. As Hal is one of cinema’s great Frankenstein monsters, I couldn’t help but be reminded of how the monster blackmailed Frankenstein into creating his mate in the original novel: like Frankenstein, Bishop is a brilliant but arrogant scientist, whose life winds up being consumed by his own pettiness and anger.
2. Dr. Davies Goes to Therapy
Being stuck gives the Legends a lot of time to just talk and let off some stress, and Dr. Davies probably needed it more than anyone: Zari finds out who exactly he built his time machine for, as he dicloses that he fell in love with a soldier named Alun (Welsh for Alan), who died during a mission in World War One. It was really interesting seeing a stoic scientist from the 1920s learn to be open about his feelings, romantic or otherwise, and to Zari no less, whose counterpart was in a relationship with Matt Ryan’s previous character. Moreover, I got a sense of internalized homophobia from Gwyn: he talks a lot about how he feels God is trying to prevent him from succeeding in his mission, implying he fears God disapproves of his sexuality, and I wonder if Zari (who is a Muslim woman) could understand that more than some Legends.
Zari manages to stop Gwyn from becoming constantly overcome with panic when she reveals the Legends brought her brother back from the dead, though that does leaves me curious as to how he’ll feel when he finds out the exact circumstances of their arrangement, with her not being able to remain for too long, thanks to her overwriting his timeline. On that note, I do worry about how much time the original Zari is spending with Behrad, despite how much I enjoy having her for an extended number of episodes.
3. It’s the Russians!
After a group of Soviet soldiers capture Zari and Gwyn, Behrad learns the group landed in Chernobyl, on the day of the nuclear power plant’s meltdown in 1986. The discovery leads the trio to choose to save “some” lives by announcing the meltdown over loudspeaker, even though the change to history would alert Evil Gideon to their presence. (It’s a good thing Gwyn knows some Russian, seeing as the Waverider can no longer translate for the Legends.) It was a moral scenario that was much more compelling than B just saving Gwyn and his sister would’ve been, and I wonder if it might encourage the Legends to make other, “small,” beneficial changes to the world.
4. I Don’t Believe It
Y’know, while I was watching Gary and Gideon gather plants for Nate’s shelter, and discuss what it’s like to be human, I was just thinking: they’d be an interesting couple right? An alien and an A.I., one who’s just become human, the other who’s been living as a human for a few years…
And then Gideon straight up asked Gary if he wanted to engage in sexual intercourse.
It was funny afterwards that Sara and Ava wondered what was up with them, and then dismissed the idea of them rolling in the bushes as being too outlandish: I’m still trying to process it myself. Just imagine telling yourself four years ago that Gary would one day have sex with the ship’s A.I: this show is truly astonishing.
Continued below5. Oh Crap
Early on in the episode, Bishop tells Evil Gideon that he didn’t give her access to the ship’s bathroom for privacy reasons, but after refusing to fire on the Legends during the ending, it turns out he had an ulterior motive: the ship’s toilet is actually an escape hatch, complete with a parachute. I was wondering why this episode was called “Deus Ex Latrina (God out of the latrine),” and my jaw absolutely dropped on seeing Bishop ride a dripping toilet down to Gwyn’s time machine, as the Legends escaped Chernobyl — it may well be the show’s most surreal moment to date. (I mean a toilet, really? Ending with Sara yelling “oh crap” as they accidentally picked him up was pure icing on this lavatorial cake.)
Bonus Thoughts:
– I won’t lie, I really liked Bishop’s “Time Mistress” Ava, she felt more like our Ava than most of the clones we’ve seen (although I will concede that, at this point, we can’t rule her out turning out to be our Ava all along.)
– Nate agreed to move in with Zari to the spirit totem realm, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s leaving the team.
– Is it me, or was Gwyn’s backstory a reference to the whole plot of 1917?
– Hehe, God out of a toilet.
See you all next week for the midseason finale (really, already?), “A Woman’s Place is in the War Effort!”
