This week on Legends of Tomorrow, Sara had Bishop placed in the ship’s brig, and agreed to let Ava interrogate him. Also, Zari, Astra and Spooner discovered the truth about what happened to Constantine in Spain, and Mick went into labor!
1. Who’s Playing Who?
As you might have guessed from the title, this episode is inspired by Silence of the Lambs, with true crime enthusiast Ava getting to play the Clarice Starling to Bishop’s Hannibal Lecter. Her creator is still smarmy, but he displays remorse and shares some helpful advice, which naturally leaves you worried if he’s getting under Ava’s skin, since she can relate to not being the best communicator. Sara has the utmost faith her fiancée knows what she’s doing, feigning the rapport she’s building with him, until we see Ava actually breaks down over the bond she develops with him. As Ava explains to Sara, she feels like Bishop is the father she never had, but as Sara reminds her (and hopefully the audience), you’re not broken or incomplete just because you never had parents. It ultimately turns out Bishop managed to pull the wool over both their eyes, which we’ll get to in a minute.
2. Give It Up for Johnny Boy
After Astra restores Spooner’s memories, Zari learns about the Fountain of Imperium’s rejection of Constantine, and his usage of blood magic. The subsequent confontation, where he demands Z hand back the flask she swiped from him, before deciding to dump it in the trash, was pretty tense: Constantine’s addiction is so visceral, between his ravenous delivery, and sweaty make-up, that it made me realize how much I take Matt Ryan’s performance, and those of the cast in general — I think it’s because I appreciate the writing so much, that I don’t consider what might happen if there’s a weak link among them. Matt Ryan and Tala Ashe really sold the gravitas of the situation, reminding you why they work so well in the otherwise comedic situations on the show: because they perform it all with the utmost seriousness.
3. Sara Meets Her Match
Although six percent of his genetic code was not uploaded to the cloud after everything on his planet went kablooey, Bishop managed to return by using Sara’s DNA, granting him her memories — it’s how he was able to be so approachable to Ava, and enable himself to escape from the brig. When Sara confronts him, he reveals he’s also inherited her martial arts training, and puts up a pretty good fight, which was cool: I can’t remember the last time Sara has had a worthy foe, physically speaking. He also uses his sneaky brain to give him the edge over her, concealing a pistol until the perfect moment to shoot her (he was likely aware that it wouldn’t hurt her in the long run, having turned her into a hybrid with an accelerated healing factor.)
4. Mick’s Bulging Eye
Bishop suggests Sara and Mick soothe Mick’s pounding headache, by pouring ginger down his ear canal, which is where the Necrian embryos are supposed to come out (it ain’t Hamlet, but it’s certainly funnier.) Turns out it was a ruse to induce labor, with Bishop overseeing the delivery, and a good thing too as it turned out, as complications forced the eggs to come out of Mick’s nostrils. It was easily the funniest part of this fairly serious episode, with Mick’s head shapeshifting like a funhouse mirror reflection while the eggs found their way out (perhaps my hysterical reaction to something as grotesque as a bulging eye is nervous laughter on my part.)
5. Dark Constantine
John vows to go cold turkey on his fixation, and Zari trusts him enough to leave him alone while he isolates himself at his home. Bishop tries to contact him with the ear piece he stole from Mick, but he responds by dumping his comm in the trash. However, John’s alter-ego — the sneering mirror image who played as the Monster in last week’s board game — proves to be much more powerful than we realized, throwing John around the house, leaving him a bloody mess. (I was genuinely shocked by how graphic John’s injuries were.) John is forced to retrieve his blood magic flask to recover, as well as to listen to Bishop’s offer — this is gonna be one seriously tough inner demon to exorcize.
Continued belowBonus Thoughts:
– Zari’s line about how Bishop’s “turtleneck is doing him no favors” is funnier if you know Tala Ashe and Raffi Barsoumian are married in real life.
– By the way, does anyone else find Bishop’s leopard skin pants really distracting? Talk about an eyesore.
– Where did Kayla go? I know we’ll find out in the next two episodes, but it was still weird her whereabouts weren’t brought up.
See you next time for the penultimate episode of the season, “There Will Be Brood,” directed by the former Amaya/Charlie herself, Maisie Richardson-Sellers!
