Legends of Tomorrow S04E03 Review: She's A Killer Queen

Legends of Tomorrow, Season 4, Episode 3: Dancing Queen

Okay, this is... definitely a weird episode, and I'm not sure if I'm a big fan of the big revelation at the end, which we'll cover at the end of this episode. Instead, let's talk about the rest of the episode first.

The main story of the episode is a relatively tame one as far as Legends of Tomorrow goes. It follows Ray Palmer as, thanks to some of your obligatory hijinks, he ends up being the 'inside man' of a group of punks in 70's era England, despite, y'know, being the only member of the current cast of Legends (which have been severely trimmed down) who can't pass off as a punk. While infiltrating the punk group, Ray ends up on this bizarre run through emotions and motivations as he gets through a pretty unlikely message of "fight for your own freedom/think for yourself" storyline as Ray ends up being forced to hand over the non-harmful shapeshifter Charlie to the rest of the Legends, who's pretty trigger-happy and willing to send her to hell. 

Somewhere across the line, in typical Legends wacky fashion, Ray gets to steal one of the royal corgis, gets a tattoo of a mohawked dog, and ends up confessing the group that he let Nora Darrhk  go and gives this impassioned speech about second chances and how the team's made of people on their second chance. Oh, and after that confrontation, the shapeshifter, Charlie, ends up transforming into Amaya's form. I'm not sure I'm particularly happy about it -- it's a bit of a stretch that the shapeshifter even knows what Amaya looks like, and it seems like an obvious way to either cheat the timeline and have Amaya be with Nate while Charlie dies.... or simply a way to get actress Richardson-Sellers back on the show, but playing a completely different character?  I mean, CW has had a history of doing so before with Earth-2 characters and the like, but this one seems genuinely random and out of nowhere, and I can't in good conscience call that anything but an asspull. 

The two B-plots of this episode vary in terms of quality. Nate and Gary bonding over their desk job is fun if ultimately bland -- although they did at least get to chase after a prehistoric Audrey II. It does seem like we're just shoehorning the whole 'Nate tries to get over his breakup' storyline to contrast the whole Charlie-turns-into-Amaya bit, although, again... not a big fan of shoehorned plot threads. 

The other B-plot involves Constantine wandering around the past by going to a bar ran by his mother, and then delivering a surprisingly honest monologue to Zari about how his mother died as a child and his father beat the crap out of him, blaming him for killing his mother. It really makes sense that even an accomplished warlock like Constantine would be baffled and out of his comfort zone when travelling through time, and his attempt to give his own father a vasectomy (no, really) is equal parts heartbreaking and gloriously hilarious. Also manages to work in Constantine's angst without dialing down the zaniness of the series all too much.

But as much as I do love the Constantine and Ray character developments, and as great as Anjli Mohindra is as Charlie's base form, I do feel like this episode was a great concept for a standalone episode that ended up going slightly off the rails by trying to shoehorn that shapeshifted-Amaya storyline. We'll see how it goes, but this episode ultimately fails to really impress. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Constantine mentions how he used to perform in the London punk scene as part of Mucous Membrane, which, of course, is Constantine's job before he became a full-fledged arcanist. CW's Constantine has only really been seen as part of Mucous Membrane in the CW Seed animated mini-series, though.
• Constantine's mother dying during childbirth leading to a strained relationship with his father was explored in The Family Man arc during the original Hellblazer run, although I don't think the comic-book version of Thomas Constantine was actually physically abusive. 
• Gary name-drops "dare to defy" as Time Bureau's motto -- "dare to defy", of course, is CW's motto. 
• The newspaper that Charlie finds is a reference to the B-plot of season three episode "Here I Go Again", where the Legends team had to perform disco offscreen. Apparently they ended up being immortalized in a magazine cover, which can't be good for the timeline... but we've established that this show just doesn't give a rat's ass anymore on that front.