The Flash, Season 2, Episode 8: Legends of Today
Who the hell thought it was a great idea to title the first episode of a crossover 'Legends of Today' and the second episode 'Legends of Yesterday'? I mean, it definitely fits when you consider the events that happen in each episode -- and this one is more about accepting your fate in the present day does not have to be bound by the past -- but come on! I nearly watched the wrong episode first.
As much as Arrow and the Flash firmly establish themselves to be in the same universe, crossover episodes are a whole different beast to tackle. It's different than to have Barry or Oliver show up in the sister show for five minutes and do something cool, or to have an episode of the Flash starring Felicity and the Atom as guest stars, or to do a bit of a cast transplant for an episode or two. Their previous attempts at crossovers have been mostly standalone episodes that happened to (a) take place one after the other and (b) feature both Arrow and the Flash. This particular event, though, is structured as a two-parter and it honestly can't be watched in any other way.
In addition, "Legends of Today" and "Legends of Yesterday" are both being used as a prequel to hype up the upcoming Legends of Tomorrow series (Trailer #2), the latest after two episodes in each show that star/explain the characters that are about to star in that series -- White Canary and Atom in Arrow; Captain Cold and Firestorm in the Flash. No pressure.
And, well, the plot for this crossover honestly is more firmly rooted with Flash's cast, with it revolving around Kendra Saunders facing face-to-face with finding out that she's, well, Hawkgirl. It also introduces Hawkman, as well as the main villain for Legends of Tomorrow, Vandal Savage. I do love how it keeps itself rooted to just telling the backstories of the Hawks and Savage, resisting the urge to really be an advertisement and just throw the entire concept of the show at us.
And it definitely fucking delivers. In addition to being a really solid episode and definitely the stronger one of the two-part crossover, it's also a pretty great backstory and features a crapton of faithful and creative adaptations of the uber-complex backstory that is Hawkman's origin story. Which I might actually talk in full in a wholly different post if I do find the time.
The main bulk of the plot focuses on the arrival of Vandal Savage in Central City, who immediately makes his presence felt by just swaggering and knife-stabbing a bunch of people like he doesn't give a damn, and just showing to be, well, a force to be reckoned with. While it's doubtful how Barry knows that Oliver has dealings with mystical forces -- Lazarus Pit aside, Oliver doesn't seem to have mentioned it up until the fourth season. It's also slightly doubtful that Barry realizes that Vandal Savage's knife throwing skills and seeming teleportation isn't just another metahuman power and immediately knows it's magic... last week we had a telepathic gorilla and alternate dimension wormholes, after all. It's flimsy, but might as well as get to having the two teams together as quickly as possible.
Equally flimsy and frown-inducing is how shoddily the secret identity thing is being handled in this episode. Cisco outing Barry accidentally in front of Kendra is forgivable, but there really is no excuse for Oliver to reveal his identity to Kendra Saunders unless Oliver's had a peek into the season script and knows that Kendra will be Hawkgirl in the future. And, well, the thing about a crossover with the Green Arrow is, well, he doesn't have powers and all he has is experience. I find it odd how Oliver doesn't recruit Constantine after all the deal made about how he's an expert at magic, but, y'know, real-life network problems.
We get Team Arrow sans Laurel fighting Darhk's men with a generic 'villains trying to steal a weapon' plot, and apparently Damien Darhk randomly got a hamminess upgrade since his last appearance in last week's episode of Arrow. He doesn't do much other than ham it up and nearly kill Oliver before Flash zips him out of the way, and gets forgotten because Vandal Savage's so much cooler.
Can we say how fun it was to have The Flash's episode primarily happen in Star City and Arrow's episode primarily happen in Central City?
And, well, Savage shows up, and just seeing Oliver, Barry and Thea do battle with Vandal Savage's knife storm while the Arrow siblings are in their civilian clothes is pretty great. It also illustrates Savage's awesomeness, being able to track them down (Thea's poor apartment windows have been broken like seven times now) effortlessly, able to quickly pinpoint Barry's trajectory and throw a knife there, being able to withstand a ridiculous amount of punishment and able to survive mortal wounds. We go from one thing to another until the great final showdown in that church where Savage finds the Staff of Horus (not to be confused with the Orb of Horus featured in the Constantine crossover) and starts absolutely pwning Green Arrow and the Flash with magic energy blasts. The two of them working together and Oliver still being effective even in a fight involving immortal warlocks and speedsters are great.
The cast interacting with each other is pretty cool, too. Kendra's just mostly confused, and Oliver and Barry are being the Bro Squad while occasionally throwing friendly verbal barbs at each other that's a mere shadow of their terse working relationship in the first crossover episode. But seeing Thea just going all "did we know the Flash? Um, no one told me we know the Flash" is hilarious as fuck, and having Thea and Cisco just playfully verbal-smack each other regarding nicknames and curly hairs is a treat. Cisco talking smack about the Arrowcave with Felicity is also fun. It's nice to see the obvious friendship between Barry and Felicity isn't forgotten, even if the bit of introdumping of what's happened in both their respective shows are honestly kinda weak. Not everyone appears, of course... Laurel is egregiously absent, and among those present Diggle really didn't get anything interesting to do.
The funniest scene had to be how Merlyn shows up literally from the shadows with an army of ninja assassins a couple of times and Barry just lampshades this and goes all 'is that the only way you know how to enter a room?'
Magnet arrow's another great moment. Despite the promise for more trick arrows in early season three, we really haven't seen much of them being used asides from the odd grapple line or two. And Oliver definitely employs the magnetic arrow to great effect, and creating a zipline during the Hawkman battle is definitely an impressive visual.
Let's talk about the newer characters for a bit here, yeah? Vandal Savage's like ten times cooler than his comic book counterpart, who really to me always felt like a more exaggerated Ra's Al Ghul ripoff. But since Arrow's Ra's Al Ghul is a disappointment and takes out the whole 'shaped history' and 'immortal' aspects and focuses more on the leader of an assassin league aspect, all of the things we never got from Ra's Al Ghul both in Arrow and the Nolan Batman films are shown in full display here... and so much more since Vandal Savage knows how to use them magic spells.
The main spotlight here, however, are on Hawkgirl and Hawkman, infamous among the DC comic fandom for being pretty major characters... before all the conflicting origins (Thanagarian space police, reincarnated pharaoh, wing-harnesses powered by meteorite, curators and Egyptian artifacts, etc etc etc) kind of forced DC to put an embargo on the characters until they sort out the multiple origins by retconning them into, well, basically what this two-parter is adapted into.
Kendra Saunders takes a lot from her comic book counterpart, being entirely confused with the whole reincarnation thing because for one reason or another her memories don't quite surface the way they did for her previous reincarnation. Instead of just making it a mere identity crisis, though, CW decides to go one step further and make it into a bit of a love triangle... and it's a bit of a rarity for me to welcome this additional drama with wide open arms. The scenes between Kendra and Cisco are great as they're both forced to struggle with the whole thing about destiny and whether to accept the present or the past or everything, whether her present-day relationship with Cisco is worth sacrificing just to know Kendra (or, rather, Shayera)'s full story. Granted, any viewer with genre savviness will know that the conclusion is moot and Hawkgirl will end up with Hawkman, but there's always a candle held up for Cisco-x-Kendra to be a thing, especially since the girl herself seems to be quite conflicted about the whole thing. Honestly it's a shame that the scripting for Kendra kind of falters at times, leading to some awkward lines that sound out of place.
Carter Hall, a.k.a. Hawkman, a.k.a. Khufu, just wants Kendra to get on with the program. He's a lot younger and a lot less angrier and doesn't have a vitriolic rivalry with Green Arrow as he does in the comics, but they actually do fight in this episode so all is right in the world. (The two are extremely violent frenemies in most of their comic appearances) He definitely comes off as a bit of a tool -- in no small part because we're rooting for Cisco's nice little sweet thing with Kendra. He doesn't really start to feel like a proper character until the next episode, and the whole nonchalant attitude about throwing someone off the roof is both frown-inducing and darkly hilarious.
Visuals are decent. It's not really as wow-inducing as lightning super-speed, but the wings sprouting out of the Hawks' backs and them flying throughout the city is handled pretty well. Their costumes look decent, and while we don't get an explanation for their wings (alien physiology? Technology?) beyond ambiguous Egyptian magic, no one really cares.
Also Barry totally lightning-bolts Hawkman. That's awesome.
Also Barry totally lightning-bolts Hawkman. That's awesome.
Incorporating Vandal Savage's backstory into the Hawks' backstory (they're wholly unrelated in the comics) is a genius, with Savage apparently needing to hunt down the Hawks' reincarnation and kill them to maintain his immortality, giving them a nice sense of urgency and a far more personal stake for Carter, Kendra and in extension the Justice League ArrowFlash team. Tying the backstories of characters together can be done to varying degrees of success and elegancy, but this one is done particularly well, even before the more detailed explanation we get in the second part.
Flimsy excuses aside, the subplot with Harrison, Caitlin, Jay and Patty is definitely the weakest part of this episode and just feels like a gigantic distraction. I am not the biggest fan of Patty, really, but everyone's got to admit that she wouldn't have fucked things up and shot Harry in the chest if someone had bothered to tell her what's going on. Especially since the whole point of season one's climax is not to keep secrets. Double especially since both Green Arrow and the Flash reveal their secret identities to Kendra despite Barry being far closer to Patty than Kendra. But no. Joe and Caitlin don't give Patty the time of the day.
It's a big time-waster, and it feels so truncated and tacked-on just to give the B-team something to do. After being absent for the better part of this season, Jay shows up, spouts some antagonistic lines to Harry, ends up injecting himself to temporarily get his superspeed back... and instead of donning the helmet and joining the Justice League in fighting Savage, he just gives another rant and heads off, making this particular plot point entirely pointless to the entire scheme of things. At least the Oliver's-son subplot in the succeeding episode had a thematic significance to the whole second chances thing. Poor Caitlin misses out on hanging out with the rest of the ArrowFlash B-team!
The superspeed drug (which makes the DC geek in me ridiculously happy for a different reason, see below) promises to be an important plot device, possibly in the upcoming midseason finale, but it just feels like a random thing to be tacked on to the already information-heavy episode. Oliver seeing the son he didn't know he had (and I forgot was even a thing) felt random as all fuck, but as I mentioned above unlike the Team Caitlin plot it sorta comes into play next episode.
I want to talk a bit about this nice little meta-joke. The drug that Harry is developing is called Velocity-6. In the comics, there is a drug to enhance superspeed called Velocity-9, used by several Flash villains like Inertia and the Rival (the latter being one of the many villains that inspired CW's version of Zoom). Appropriately enough in a meta joke, Vandal Savage was the one responsible for the creation of Velocity-9 in the comics.
Overall, yeah, I pretty fucking love this episode. The bad subplot with Team Caitlin and the flimsy excuse for a team up aside, it's definitely a solid episode that really shines despite its warts, delivering on both its premise: an origin story for Hawkman, Hawkgirl and Vandal Savage, as well as being a big crossover episode between the two shows. No, it's not quite as epic as Firestorm and Green Arrow randomly showing up to fight the Reverse-Flash during the penultimate season episode, but it's still pretty freaking awesome.
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