DC's Legends of Tomorrow S04E07 Review: Changing History Commando

DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Season 4, Episode 7: Hell No, Dolly

It's interesting just how much better this episode is compared to many of the previous ones. And part of it is the sudden injection of some drama that feels like it carries a fair amount of weight, and I'm pretty glad that Legends of Tomorrow still carries a tone of whimsical fun even when we're dealing with John Constantine's deeper drama. I'm actually somewhat enjoying Constantine's depiction in this season, honestly, and how there's always a simmering, darker undertone in Constantine's history and personality that is threatening to bubble out. Constantine has always been someone who fucks up teams he's in, and throwing him into the Legends team has always been interesting due to that regard.

We get Constantine's backstory with one of the only people he truly loved -- a dude called Desmond -- and how he was apparently dragged off to hell during one of Constantine's many, many casualty-heavy adventures. And we slowly learn Constantine's backstory about Desmond in a way that's actually tied in pretty well into the rest of the storylines that take place throughout this episode. The 'main' plot of this episode takes the Legends to New Orleans, trying to save voodoo priestess Marie Laveau from being framed as a serial killer... and turns out Marie Laveau is the ancestor of Constantine's boyfriend. This revelation leads to a relatively neat scene for Constantine as he tells Zari and Charlie about his backstory with Dez, and how he's genuinely one of the only people he truly loved... and someone who was dragged off to hell by one of Constantine's demonic enemies, the demon Neron. (Who actually excited me when I heard his name -- we're using actual DC villains this season!)

This leads to Constantine and Charlie striking a deal -- Charlie wants her shapeshifting powers back and clearly doesn't give a shit about the Legends (she's technically being forced to cooperate), while Constantine goes to the past and tries to change it. Their attempt to stop Constantine and Desmond's first encounter gets annulled by the timeline 'fixing' it and having the two meet up later (is this how the timeline fixes many of the fuck-ups that the Legends do?). I'm also a huge fan of how Constantine notes how he has made a career of finding loopholes to 'break' magic, so it's time that he finds a loophole to break time travel.

Eventually, Constantine travels back and impersonates his past self to basically break up with Desmond. Matt Ryan delivers a spectacular performance of someone who clearly is still in love, but knows that he has to be mean and break up with Desmond to save him. With this, we get the revelation that it wasn't Neron that dragged Desmond to hell as punishment... but it was Constantine himself who was forced to send Desmond to hell. Apparently, out of love, Desmond has made a deal with Neron, but Constantine had instead sent both back to hell. It's an appropriately "you damn bastard!" moment from Constantine, one that portrays both his assholishness and his heartbreak amazingly well.

Of course, this leads to a huge explosion of... time-changes or whatever, as John Constantine pulls a Barry Allen and apparently causes everything else in time to freeze in place. And restores Charlie's shapeshifting powers. And turns Zari into a cat for some reason. Yeah, we're still having hijinks in this show!

(Also fun hijinks: the fact that throughout all of the more dramatic bits it's noted that Constantine is "changing time commando" because he knows that Gideon's tagged all of his underwear with trackers)

The other storylines of the episode are actually well-intertwined to the Constantine stuff. The New Orleans serial killer deal ends up with the Legends team having to fight against a Dybbuk (a kind of Jewish spirit) that goes around possessing demons. First, a Chucky-expy doll, and later on attacking the Legends in their ship inside Martin Stein's puppet from season three. In the middle of it all, we get an argument as Sara tries to get her girlfriend Ava and her 'family' Mick to sit things out, because Ava has confiscated Mick's Garina-making journal, and this has caused tensions to rise between the two. It's... it's an okay scene, I suppose, and one that builds up relatively well from previous episodes.

There's the rather m'eh scene of Nate, Gary and Mona going through another high-school love triangle nonsense, with Nate trying to be a wingman to the dorkish Gary, while Mona is apparently in love with the Kaupe. Mona ends up going through the expected hilarious-hijinks route of confessing to the Kaupe instead of Gary... but gets thrown straight into a conspiracy as she witnesses and tries to stop the Kaupe from being taken away by some shady people, presumably the ones working for Hank Haywood's Project Hades. Again, this ends in a cliffhanger as Mona gets accidentally slashed in the gut by the Kaupe, right as the time-change explosion passes her.

Overall, one of the surprisingly more powerful episodes of Legends of Tomorrow, and kudos to the writers for not sacrificing either the show's playful and whimsical tone, nor did it sacrifice Constantine's darker and more jerkish tendencies. One of the biggest worries I had was that Constantine was going to be 'neutered', and it's neat to see that they managed to tie in his darker and more-willing-to-sacrifice-others tendencies alongside the show's tone.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Neron, mentioned by Constantine, is one of the mightiest demons of hell and the main antagonist of the 1995 maxi-series Underworld Unleashed, in which Neron sent out candles to all of the DC universe's supervillains and some superheroes, giving them Faustian bargains -- their soul for whatever their heart desires, leading to a fair bit of power-ups for the supervillains of DC. After his defeat in that series, chiefly by the efforts of Captain Marvel and the Trickster, Neron would return time and again to menace the DC universe in several arcs, among them "Hell to Pay", "Paradise Lost", "Day of Judgment" and "Reign in Hell".
• Neron became an antagonist of John Constantine in the New 52 series, although his role here as a far more personal antagonist seems to be conflated with several different demons in Hellblazer's run, like Nergal and the First of the Fallen. 
• Constantine briefly name-drops the Triumvirate of Hell, as something that Neron sought to usurp. Throughout the history of the DC comics, Hell has been shown to be ruled by various Triumvirs of demons -- with one of the more prominent depictions in The Sandman showing the demons Lucifer, Azazel and Beelzebub. Hellblazer's stories would have Constantine deal with a different incarnation of the Triumvirate, consisting of the First, Second and Third of the Fallen. 
• The Martin Stein puppet first appeared last season in "Beebo, the God of War", where Leo Snart uses it as therapy for Mick. The title of this episode is, of course, a reference to the musical "Hello, Dolly", which, in addition to the whole doll pun, is the musical that Stein's actor, Victor Garber, left the show to star in.