Legends of Tomorrow, Season 2, Episode 9: Raiders of the Lost Art
So the plot for January's episode of Legends of Tomorrow involves the Legends having to rescue George Lucas from the Legion of Doom in order to preserve the history maintained by him making Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies.
Sometimes I forget how hilariously silly some of these superhero comic book plots are. With so many modern adaptations playing up generic doomsday weapon plotlines, or deep angsty character drama (not that those two don't have their places in superhero fiction, mind you), it's absolutely refreshing to have something with such an absolutely silly and campy plot like this. It's not entirely moronic, of course -- it's still told with a fair amount of seriousness as we move the Rip Hunter and Spear of Destiny plotlines along, but as far as stories go, it's definitely one that doesn't really lend itself to a lot of seriousness.
So, basically, Rip Hunter wasn't actually undercover, and he's actually lost a huge chunk of his memory thanks to tampering with the Waverider's time drive, which not only stranded him in the 60's, but he also gets his memory jumbled up. So now Rip is Phil, someone who's trying to direct a sci-fi movie based on fragmented memories of his exploits. We even get 'Phil' angrily berate the actor playing 'Vandal Savage' for not being menacing enough in a nice bit of meta-humour.
And who else but George Lucas that acts as Rip's prop director? A conflict between the Legends and the Legion of Doom (the name is a catchy one, no?) causes George Lucas to get so freaking terrified that he swears off moviemaking, which causes a bit of a chain reaction that causes both Ray and Nate to lose their knowledge about science because without the movies that Lucas made, those two won't be inspired to become a scientist and an archaeologist respectively. It's a bit of a silly thing and frankly the way the time travel transformation is portrayed is a lot more for laughs (compared to, say, Martin Stein discovering that he's getting memories of a daughter he didn't have a week ago, or anything in Flashpoint) but eh, it's not a big, super-serious episode.
The real good parts of this episode, of course, is allowing Rip Hunter's actor to flex his acting muscles. He's been stuck for the majority of season one just basically being a British stuck-up leader with a heart of gold, or crying over his dead family, and never really had the opportunity to actually act beyond those two sentences, and seeing him play a terrified civilian thrust into all this madness -- he even swaps the British accent for an American one -- is a bit of a delight.
The B-plot has Mick finally address his hallucinations of Snart to Martin Stein, and the two have a bit of a hilarious subplot as they try to find out what's wrong with Mick. There's a bit of a red herring when it appears that it's the time-ghost of Snart transmitting things into a device in Mick's head implanted when he was Chronos, but Stein removes it, it's apparently not even active -- meaning that, yeah, Mick does have emotions and he is hallucinating Snart. There's a bit of a hilarious moment where Sara keeps walking into their hush-hush conversations, earlier in the episode with Mick and Stein covering it up with Mick having very bad migraines, and twenty minutes later Sara and Jax walks in to Stein doing "brain surgery, what does it look like?" The subplot ultimately is a bit juvenile in how it's written, and could've had more revisions, but it's still entertaining simply on the strength of the two actors.
The main plot was serviceable. It's definitely not one of the stronger episodes of Legends, as fun as it was, with Rip's note that in his movie, the Spear of Destiny is a 'MacGuffin', the thing that everyone fights over, and that is the most perfect description of what the Spear plot is in this episode. Both the spear and the weird mystical Longinus thingie are simply things to be fought over with very little history or relevance to the plot.
Perhaps one of my biggest problems is how... weak Malcolm Merlyn and Damien Darhk ended up being in this episode. It's always fun to see the two already hammy Arrow seasonal villains ham it up, and they don't disappoint in that regard, but as two men with merely above-average martial arts skills (well, Darhk is immortal, but that's not helping him out much) they don't really stand up much of a chance in combat against the Legends, and act like two stooges that the Legends just prefer to avoid than to fight. There are several scenes where they just run after the heroes ineffectively shooting their space guns like total idiots, which, while undoubtedly hilarious, doesn't really make them that threatening. Especially when Merlyn screams like a little girl when Vixen tosses him bodily during the junkyard fight.
Merlyn and Darhk gets absolutely trounced in that fight, by the way. Between Vixen, Citizen Steel and Atom, the number of super-powered characters out of the two assassins are just too much, and it's Reverse-Flash zooming in and saving the day. All I'm saying, well, these two really kind of need a power-up or something. Like, maybe give Malcolm Merlyn some super-awesome trick arrows or something?
Still, even if it's not the pinnacle of good storytelling, it's still a very fun episode to waste 40 minutes watching regardless.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Nate gave the Legion of Doom its name, citing that he remembered it from an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon he watched as a kid. The Legion of Doom, of course, is the name given to the group of villains in the Hanna-Barbera produced Challenge of the Super-Friends. Presumably the equivalent in the CW-verse doesn't actually star DC characters, though.
- Howard the Duck is briefly mentioned among the films that George Lucas was responsible for directing, and both Nate and Ray quickly shoot down Amaya's attempt to add it into the pile of movies they were going to binge-watch. Howard the Duck is an ill-fated adaptation of the Marvel comics comic... and while DC and Marvel both have a history of portraying each other's superheroes as fiction within their respective universes, Howard the Duck does deserve some derision.
- This is a George Lucas-centric episode, so obviously there are a lot of shout-outs to Star Wars. Maybe Indiana Jones, too, but I'm not that geeked-out on that particular franchise. Star Wars references I caught (beyond the obvious spaceships and laser guns) include Han Solo mentioned by Ray, Amaya telling George that he's their "only hope", and the group being trapped in a trash compactor about to squish them and using a long chunk of metal to try to stop the compactor ineffectively. Perhaps somewhat ironically, the only person in the Legends Team to not know about Star Wars, Amaya, is portrayed by an actress that also acted as a minor character in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
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