Legends of Tomorrow S02E03 Review: Can't Get Hard

Legends of Tomorrow, Season 2, Episode 3: Shoguns

This was a perfectly entertaining filler episode, which tried its best to kind of compensate for grinding the Legion of Doom and Mystery Time-Travelling Killer plotlines to a halt by giving the characters some room to breathe. Nate, Ray and Mick all got some character arcs in this episode, Amaya is apparently going to be part of the team, Jefferson and Stein discover a conspiracy. Oh, and samurais, and ninjas, and Mick getting to say "Konichiwa, scumbag".

It was fun, I'll give you that. It's another one of those episodes just set in a particular timeline and does it really make sense for the entire team to dress up in Japanese clothes instead of the normal superhero body armour they wear, and for them to leave Firestorm on board the Waverider? Did it particularly make sense for Ray to go from 'that suit is coded to my DNA' to 'yeaaah anyone can use it' so the evil Shogun can stand up and fight against Steel and SamuraiAtom? Did Mick fighting the ninjas who literally popped out of nowhere make sense at all? No, not really. But it's still an entertaining episode nonetheless.

The character subplots are partly recycled, and some partly new thanks to, y'know, new characters. We've got Ray trying to get into grips on whether he can be a hero and be meaningful without the Atom suit, something that has been explored to varying degrees in both Arrow and the first season of Legends, though arguably slightly more effective here because he actually has the suit stolen and ended up coaching his protege Steel to destroy it. There are some expected words of wisdom about how 'it's not the armour, it's the man', plus Ray going around with a sword trying attacking his armour, but that's about it. He ends destroying his armour with Nate's help, but hey, if this makes way for a less Iron-Man-y armour and an actual suit that's more spandex and true to the book with fish-scales and shit, I'm all for it.

Mick has a smaller subplot of trying to convince Amaya that he's a decent person. Well, more like Sara is trying to convince Amaya that Mick is a decent person. Mick's more interested in shooting fireballs at crazy shoguns and fighting ninjas. That little brawl against the ninjas in the forest? Awesomeness. Sara herself got some really cool fight scenes too, since being an assassin fighting ninjas is basically bread and butter to her. She ends up killing Samurai General Dude with what initially appears to be a simple iai clash, but, y'know, she's an assassin, and she stabbed Samurai General Dude with a small dagger.

Newcomers Nate "Steel" Haywood and Amaya "Vixen" Jiwe struggle with their own parts in the team. And Nate, well, discovers that he has superpowers that involves himself turning his body into steel... but as the other Legends joke about it, he spends almost the entire episode suffering from performance issues. You see, Nate almost immediately falls in love with the nice Japanese lady that saves him, and he really wants to impress her. Trouble is, she is betrothed to the shogun, and Nate has to fight them. But he fails to get hard, which depresses him a lot since he performed so well earlier when the drugs Ray gave caused him to get harder than ever. Ray to find out just what turns Nate on so he can stay hard and maintain his performance in combat. (We are talking about metal skin powers, not something more dodgy.)

There's some talk about how Nate, as a haemophiliac, spent his childhood struggling with fear of death, and while the romance (and the 'oh no the woman is actually betrothed to the evil overlord') is very textbook and felt rehashed, Nate's talk about being a superhero, as well as his... performance issues... are decent and help to shape this newcomer.

Amaya is the only member of the team that didn't work out that well for me. And while it's nice to have Sara and Mick have someone to bounce dialogue off of, Amaya felt... really flat. Having someone antagonize the token psychopath has been done already with Ray and Firestorm during season one, and Amaya's dialogue ends up just more or less a small introdump for the members of the audience who forgot Vixen's backstory. Yeah, defending the Japanese village is a parallel to her former role as the defender... big whoop. Can't we have gotten Stargirl, or Obsidian, or Dr. Mid-Nite as the tagalong? Amaya's animal antics all basically amount to her channeling super-strength anyway, none of the fancier things that Mari McCabe was able to do in Arrow.

Martin and Jefferson, meanwhile, find a message from the Barry Allen of 2056 directed to Rip Hunter, but we don't see what's in it, other than it spooked the two of them enough to not tell the others. It's really the only thing tying this episode to the larger overreaching seasonal plot.

The Shogun was... very generic. I'm not sure if he was a historical character or a DC lore character I'm not aware existed, but he served his role as evil overlord villain decently. Did my research, he's a historical character. He's very much forgettable, though. And so are the supporting cast, who just fit the role of that wise old man and the flat nice girl role that you find in literally every piece of fiction out there. It's a bit irritating that Flash is making so much a point about how a single mother's death changes so much in the course of history, but the leader of an entire country getting blown up by a high-tech suit of armour? No one even mentions the repercussions this would have on the timeline -- especially since these kinds of assassinations are ones that the Legends are supposed to stop. And considering the argument about Per Degaton last season, it's a bit of a strange direction to take. But y'know what? I bet not even time itself cares about the Shogun. He's boring.

The revelation that the nice Japanese people they saved are the Yamashiro ancestors is fun, but ultimately meaningless since none of them are anywhere as interesting as other guest stars, like say, Jonah Hex, Connor Hawke or Rip's adoptive mum. Add that to the oddly 'eh, we'll deal with it later' attitude that the Legends team have about tracking down the time-traveling assassin, or avenging Hourman and Rip Hunter's death, or whatever is kind of odd. Oh well. It was entertaining. Not the best Legends episode out there, but it was fun... which is something I really needed after a very, very exhausting week.


DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Nate finally gets his Citizen Steel powers. While he briefly calls himself 'Citizen Steel' while rattling off a series of names to match his grandfather's 'Commander Steel' (which I think is the first we've heard it in this series?) he ends up settling as 'Steel', which is what Haywoods' secret identities have been referred to multiple times anyway in the comics.
• The Yamashiros are, of course, ancestors to superheroine Katana (Tatsu Yamashiro), who is a major supporting character in Arrow's third season. No idea if the characters featured here (or the Shogun himself) are DC characters, and I'm too tired to research it.
• Tokugawa Iemitsu is a real life Shogun that ruled from 1623 to 1651, according to Wikipedia. He apparently ordered his brother to commit seppuku, and expelled all gaijin from Japan, which... isn't very nice. Wikipedia lists his death, but makes no mention of future powered armour or a metal man beating him up. The conspiracy is real, people.