Legends of Tomorrow S01E10 Review: Per Degaton!

Legends of Tomorrow, Season 1, Episode 10: Progeny

Hail Hydra!

After last week's entertaining episode with Chronos/Heat Wave, it's a bit sad to see the follow-up be so... bland. In theory it would be interesting to see the Legends team travel to another point in the timeline to once more do battle with Vandal Savage. And with the fact that they're fighting Vandal Savage in the future of 2147, they can choose to be slightly more liberal with what they do, since it doesn't technically impact their present-day situation (and prevents viewers from scratching their head at how setting off nuclear explosions in Russian prisons or TerroristCon doesn't change the timeline). 

The backstory of this particular timeline is even quite nice for the short time that it's shown on-screen. The world's taken over by corporations, chief among them one led by Tor Degaton, father to classic DC villain Per Degaton (who, in his comic-book incarnation, is a Nazi with time-travel powers). Oh, and the world of 2147 is suffering from overpopulation, and the only stability to be found is in Tor Degaton's dictator-led nation of Kasnia policed by Iron Sentinels OMACs Atom robots (as if the Iron Man jokes aren't enough already). And in several years Per Degaton will become Future Hitler in releasing an Armageddon virus or whatever which will wipe out a chunk of the population, thus leading Vandal Savage's rise to power in the future. Vandal Savage, of course, is playing the evil vizier, being the Palpatine to Per Degaton's Anakin and whispering in his ear and eventually leading to Per Degaton committing patricide and genocide.

Also Per Degaton was totally name-dropped in the first episode by Rip Hunter, which is a nice little call-forward.

Alas, Degaton really wasn't that memorable a character beyond being basically Child Hitler, though he does manage to raise some interesting moral questions -- whether killing a child to save millions when the child hasn't done anything wrong is ethical. It's a classic dilemma in all time-travel stories, but this episode really fails to be that dramatic, mostly because the final decision on pulling the trigger on Degaton ultimately fell to Rip Hunter, who we all know won't do jack shit to kill the kid. And what Rip did to dissuade Degaton? Two or three cryptic sentences to try and convince him that Vandal Savage is evil. Yeah, three sentences against years and years of Vandal Savage brainwashing. That really won't work, will it? Per Degaton is set up to be caught between loyalties to his father and to Savage, but nothing ultimately came out of it as the Legends did a half-assed job of trying to reform him before buggering off and leaving 2147 to Degaton and Savage's tender mercies.

Seriously, you would think that the likes of Ray Palmer and Martin Stein would ball for Rip Hunter to go to the point where the Armageddon Virus was unleashed and stop it and prevent the deaths of millions if they were not comfortable with killing the child Degaton. Hey, killing the dude when he's grown up into Future Hitler is a different thing, right?

A far more interesting chunk to the plot is Captain Cold and Heat Wave, which I think is something that holds true for every episode, really. The two finally have their dirty, angry confrontation and ended it with a brutal fistfight. Rory kind of lost all desire to escape, though he's still kinda angry at Snart, the two more or less made up by the end of the episode. It played out organically over two episodes, and is one of the better character moments of the show. Sara also had a nice role to play, goading both Rory and Snart into eventually confronting each other and duking it out. Unlike Degaton, there was a threat that either Snart or Rory would seriously injure the other enough to irreparably injure their already-broken friendship, and it's something when two dudes fighting felt more tense than the stop-future-Hitler plot.

Sadly, add a huge chunk of uninteresting side plots and you can just see how much of the time that could've been spent to making the Degaton dilemma interesting be thrown out of the window. Ray and Kendra's romance is just weak, and the long-ass amount of screentime that they spent on whether they should be together really felt like it should have happened, oh, I don't know, before they lived for two years together in the fifties? The random flashbacks to Carter and Kendra's life in the past really felt unnecessary and shoehorned in. 

Ray Palmer's arc is also weak for all the wrong reasons. The fact that the dude was so obsessed with possibly impregnating a random woman (not even Felicity!) and having a child to further his legacy is just... kinda dumb, considering that, hey, he might have gotten married and sired a kid after the events of Legends of Tomorrow. The fact that he was so obsessed with the idea of being a father without knowing he had a child is just dumb when really focusing on his brainchild, the Atom suits, being perverted by Vandal Savage, would've been a far less stupid character arc for him.

The fact that the episode ended with the oddly stupid and pointless twist that Ray's brother was the one behind weaponizing the Atom suits really doesn't add anything to the story either and just felt... strange.

The action scenes in this episode was a nice treat to behold, though, with Firestorm and Hawkgirl going up against the army of Iron Legion Atom drones being pretty cool, with Atom making far more liberal use of his shrinking powers. 

Also, Rip's indecisiveness and stupidity ended up, well, actively aiding Vandal Savage's rise to power in the future as Per Degaton killed his father two years too early, and Savage's rise to power, again, began way too early. At least the show punishes its characters for being such idiots this episode. But still, other than the Rory/Snart moments and the cool robot army fight scenes, a good chunk of this episode are simply poorly-realized good concepts. Which, I think, is a recurring theme for this show in the foreseeable gauntlet of episodes we have left to review.