Legends of Tomorrow, Season 2, Episode 17: Aruba
I know I'm a bit late as far as these things go. Mea culpa. Still, with Supergirl on break and Legends of Tomorrow having its season finale with, well, this episode, I should be able to catch up to the other superhero shows pretty quickly. Anyway... finales are a tricky thing, and the CW DC shows have not had a really good track at having great season finales, with the only one that can hold the lofty title of being 'holy shit, what a good finale' is only the first season of the Flash. The rest are either serviceable or downright dire.
This particular finale... falls somewhere in-between those two. On one hand, there are a lot of things that piss me off about this finale. The fact that the writers tease us with Laurel, but then yet again she's just a dream. The fact that once again the Reverse-Flash doesn't actually go for the throat and spends a good chunk of the finally just zipping around knocking everyone except the person holding the Spear. The fact that we had to spend a good chunk of the episode just having 'past Legends' and 'doomworld timeline Legends' have a bit of a scuffle with each other. The fact that the Black Flash ultimately just ends up showing up like a MacGuffin without much of an explanation. The fact that Snart was... a little too cartoonishly evil instead of the 'noble rogue' that he was even when he's a villain (though he was still absolutely entertaining, mind you).
But at the same time? It's, again, a show with a far more lighthearted tone than Flash and Arrow. Yes, there were some things that I think the show did wrong, but there were a lot of things they did right, too. The Legends' first season's finale was actually semi-decent, though not particularly groundbreaking, and this one feels similar to that. Which, of course, I will gladly take over a finale that's actually bad.
After a brief bit of regrouping, in which we get two absolutely hilarious moments of Heat Wave grabbing the shrunk Waverider with the most amused expression on his face, and Rip's overdramatic "FIRE EVERYTHING" moment negated by it doing jack shit to Darhk, who giggles like a little child at the sheer absurdity, they break out of the Doomworld timeline by flying into the temporal stream.
The Legends team from the doomworld timeline then returns back into the past, two episodes ago, to the setting of World War I (sans Tolkien) to fix what they fucked up, to prevent the Legion of Doom from getting the Spear in the first place. It's a bit of desperation as both Rip and Gideon make it clear that interacting with their past selves is a big no-no, and as Flash shows in his own show, it tends to lead to some disastrous events. Like practically every rule about time travel in Legends of Tomorrow, it's a loose rule that the show plays with and one they're breaking right now. Yes, the moment that the doomworld Legends interacted with the WWI-era Legends, it's clear that combining the two teams is the way they're going to get a version of the Legends where Stein isn't brainwashed and Amaya isn't a million frozen pieces on Eobard Thawne's lab.
I'm not totally sold on having the two Legends team meet each other. Yes, it definitely makes sense for the story progression for their confrontation to take some time, but it's one that kind of kills the momentum because we know that the fight's going to be against the Legion, not each other. Why can't they just act like Reverse-Flash, when he returns from the Doomworld timeline to the WWI timeline and tries to explain to the Malcolm, Darhk and Snart of that timeline that "I'm not your Eobard, I'm the Eobard from the future! No, not THAT future, YOUR future!" and just have them roll with it.
Eobard then ups the stakes in one absolutely cool scene as he faces off against the Atom, stabs him in the chest and rips out his heart. It's absolutely amazing, one that's done in a far more tense situation than Amaya's death last episode with him crushing the blood vial... though it's quickly watered down by the fact that the show's going to make this a last hurrah for the doomworld-era Legends. They have spares, so yeah, Merlyn gets to put an arrow through Jax's heart, Darhk gets to murder Nate, and Snart gets to coldly shishkebab Mick with an ice spear when he refuses to cooperate.
The final conflict also played out slightly differently than I expected. The big fight between the Legion and the two sets of Legends, as well as the mounting number of deaths, is pretty cool to watch, safely upping the three-way Vandal Savage battle from the end of season one. In all this, the Nate/Nate/Amaya and Mick/Snart storylines lurch to a conclusion. Snart and Mick's story ends far more neatly mostly because the chemistry between the two just works so much better with more foreshadowing, whereas Nate's regret for not saying "I love you" to Amaya is just kind of whatever. The post-climax talk, where Amaya decides to accept her fate... though not at the moment... is pretty cool. I thought they were going to pull another Hawkman/Hawkgirl thing and write Nate and Amaya out of the team (and the two of them returning to the 1940's would actually work very well at giving them a happy ending) but they decide to stay, leaving Amaya's return to the 1940's... for a later date.
And then the awesome entrance of Reverse-Flash... several dozen of him.
Which, after that absolutely awesome entrance... proceeds to be completely ineffective. Here is a man who just showed that he can rip out someone's heart by just running fast enough, but all he can do to a bunch of non-powered people (well, barring Steel and Firestorm, I suppose) is just run circles around them and knock them on their asses a little? That was where the action ground to a halt a little, and I wished the Black Flash had shown up a little earlier, if only to keep the huge threat that is Eobard Thawne busy.
Sara's conversation with Laurel (who may or may not be real) is a bit on-the-nose and didn't particularly work out for me, though it's at least an attempt at a conclusion, and it's not actually bad. I just am not a big fan of it. In the end, Sara uses the power of the Spear for good by using the Spear's power to disable the Spear itself, and then summon Black Flash. Why couldn't she have brought Laurel to life and have her hang out the Legends team, or something like that, I don't know. But hey, as expected, Black Flash shows up, vibrate-hand-executes Eobard, who disappears into the timeline. Well, this Eobard, anyway. There's probably a few others running around -- no one's buying that he's dead, though it is a pretty horrifying way to go out.
The Doomworld-era Legends get retconned out of existence and disappear, while the others drop the three other members of the Legion of Doom from the timelines they were plucked out of, with MIB memory-erasing guns (presumably this was how they dealt with all the temporal inconsistencies off-screen... a man can dream of consistent storytelling, right?) before Mick charts a course to Aruba... only to land in 2017, with a building from the future and a bunch of dinosaurs roaring, because by interacting with their past selves... they broke time even worse than Barry did.
That's not the best cliffhanger, but dang, it's a hilarious one! Rip's gone, Amaya's staying with the crew for now, the Legion's disbanded and either dead or mind-wiped, and we're off for more adventures.
So, how did season two of Legends of Tomorrow pan out? Better than the first one, that's for sure. The Mick/Snart stuff was very well-done, and as much as their more childish, hammy plans irritate me sometimes, the Legion of Doom are never not entertaining. All the members of the Legends of Tomorrow are nailed down perfectly by the writers, even less stellar ones like the newcomers Nate and Amaya. And yeah, there are a lot of parts of the season I'm not a big fan off -- the over-reliance on filler, the absolute misused opportunity with the JSA, and some disagreements over handling Doomworld and Aruba... but at the same time it's still a very fun journey and one that I'm not pretty fussed at.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Again, more of an internal thing, but Mick's mentions of Aruba date to the season two premiere as a location he'd like to visit. Reverse-Flash being killed with a vibrating hand through the heart (as well as him killing Doomworld!Ray earlier) are both examples of Reverse-Flash's own signature method of murdering people via vibrating hand. Reverse-Flash's death and disintegration is similar to his own being erased-out-of-existence death at the end of Flash's first season.
No comments:
Post a Comment