DC's Legends of Tomorrow S04E16 Review: The Fear Machine

DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Season 4, Episode 16: Hello, World

Yeah, not the biggest fan of this season finale. Like, I was all on-board with a season full of silly hijinks and wackiness, but... I dunno. The huge plot points of this episode feel very... inconsistent, I guess? We get the Hellblazer-lite plot of Neron actually capitalizing on fear to actually open a portal to hell. We get the whole scene with Constantine and Nora trying to make deals with evil hell torturer Astra to help them rob Neron's soul-coin-vault to get Ray back. We get the little "fool a demon" sequence by getting Neron to choke a disguised Nate to death. 

And on the other hand, a good chunk of this episode still hinges on the genuinely bizarre sequence of them using the magic book from "Tagumo Attacks" to properly create Hank's Hey-World theme park, and any unfortunate comparisons to it basically being another prison or a circus is quickly brushed aside with "haha, wacky hijinks!" Throw in the whole dragon subplot which honestly just feels shoehorned in, and the too-cheesy-even-for-this-show bit of holding hands together and singing kumbaya to bring Nate back to life... I dunno. It just makes for a really uneven season finale. I realize how they're probably trying to ape the finale of the previous season, but using the Beebo doll as an avatar isn't quite the same as the genuine randomness of dragging this on and on. 

Fortunately, the episode has way more to offer than the silly theme park and dragon sub-plot... it's just a bit of a shame that we move through things so damn quickly that things never really get a chance to sink in. Charlie ends up being forced by Neron and Tabitha to basically transform into a Senator, then into Tagumo, on live television, causing everyone to panic even more. Sure, the Legends show up and save Charlie, but Neron's real plan is revealed as not just getting souls via the terms-of-service thing, but also to use the sheer fear of everyone to power a hell portal to unleash hell upon earth. Okay, fine, kind of a more generic plot than the previous one, but it fits. 

Meanwhile, in hell, Fairy Godmother Nora ends up freeing Constantine and kills his torturer (Calibraxis, I think?), and in relatively breakneck pace, ends up finding Astra Logue in a demon bar and manage to sweet-talk her into helping them out in doing a raid on Neron's hell-vault where souls are kept as coins... which, again, is also done in a breakneck (if funny) sequence. For both of these sequences, I really wished they were explored a bit further, and I can't help but think that if they had taken out the honestly pretty redundant dragon scenes and juggled around some plot stuff, we would've had a far more solid ending. 

But instead, y'know, we get the genuinely bizarre sequence of them making this huge sequence of getting the monsters together to make a circus act, and the fate of humanity ends up hinging on exactly that one specific show panning out. There's also the sub-plot of the horrid CGI dragon baby and the genuinely bland bit of it befriending Zari, and later on being captured by the Time Bureau. It's honestly just something that was genuinely just happening in the background of the past couple of episodes, and I definitely am not invested in this one. It's just there to give some additional Nate/Zari angst, which honestly would've worked fine without the dragon or theme park subplot. At least the Theme Park one, as silly as I think it was, had decent buildup. 

Anyway, Tabitha shows up to crash the little skit, complete with a grown-up dragon, and begins scaring everyone. Little 2019-era Zari stops the dragon from being evil and killing everyone, and the dragon eats Tabitha and quite literally exits stage left, forgotten by the episode. Nero shows up, opens the gate to hell, and murders Constantine... only to find out that it's actually Nate he kills, which means his deal with Ray is off, exorcising him and allowing Constantine to blow his smokey true form up.

Nate seems to be dead... but then we get the actually heartwarming sequence of the ghosts of him and Nate talking on the rafters, and with the help of country music, a bit of possession, and Constantine weaponizing the element of love, they bring Nate back to life. It's corny as all hell, but this is the sort of wackiness that I do associate with Legends of Tomorrow, y'know? The rest of the episode honestly feels too much like them being a bit of a tryhard. 

Oh, by the way, while all of this is going on, everyone tells Zari that she should stay on the ship, because the time changes caused by this particular operation is likely to wipe out the bad future she comes from and erase her from existence... but, nope, she shows up honestly to do nothing, and gets wiped out of existence in what's honestly one of the most forced drama injection I've seen in these CW shows (although Alex's amnesia in Supergirl still irks me more). The cliffhanger for this season is the combined unsettling walk of triumph as everyone just forgets about adult Zari, while in hell, Asta unleashes the soul-ghosts of a bunch of history's worst dictators and tyrants into the real world.

Oh well. Plot frustrations and tone whiplash notwithstanding, this is still a pretty neat episode of Legends of Tomorrow, featuring a lot of fun, wacky gags. Highlights of this episode (which are strong contenders for "highlights of the season"):

• Sara, Nate and Gary dress up as Supergirl, Green Arrow and the Flash to film an advertisement, which is hilarious and works so well. We also get some barbs in on crossovers and apparently they actually called in and tried to get the real Oliver, Barry and Kara to do so.
• Mick's off-hand revelation that he's stolen the creativity-realization book thing, and how after a quick peck on the cheek we just sort of move on. 
• VANDAL SAVAGE IN HELL, who is completely random, unexpected, and he's a goofy groovy guy playing Jenga with Ray and this really should be more of the comedy Legends capitalizes on more instead of the overstretched monster musical stuff.
• Best of all, the ominous shot of the Monitor in the crowd. All the other CW shows have had the Monitor ominously show up and basically foreshadow the Crisis on Infinite Earth crossover later this year. His contribution in Legends isn't an ominous warning or foreshadowing. He's just in the crowd, MUNCHING ON FUCKING POPCORN. This is best Monitor. 

Overall... it's not a bad season finale. It's just one that honestly feels inconsistent, and moves through its set pieces so blazingly fast that some of them genuinely felt like they were shoehorned in. I wonder if we originally had a full 'kid Zari and dragon' episode that they ended up jamming together with the climax, which is why everything felt so rushed? I dunno... the villains were disposed off pretty quickly, the hell bits move on pretty quickly... at least it's extremely entertaining right to the end, though, which is definitely this show's greatest strength.