DC's Legends of Tomorrow S04E08 Review: Constantinepoint

DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Season 4, Episode 8: Legends of ToMeowMeow

I completely didn't realize that Legends of Tomorrow had another episode before the winter break. Whoops!

Anyway, this episode basically is a relative bottle episode of Charlie, Constantine and Zari being trapped and trying to restore time because, well, things have utterly been fucked. It also gives a pretty fun tongue-in-cheek explanation to why the Legends missed out on this year's annual crossover, while at the same time... we go straight through some utterly hilarious timelines. I could just go and say that "they are pretty great parodies of old-timey shows", but that's underselling it.

So after an actually sensible sequence where Charlie goes to 1962 Las Vegas after regaining her powers and feeling not the slightest bit bad that she turned Zari into a cat -- a character bit that feels absolutely natural considering how utterly (and rightfully) angry Charlie has been throughout this whole experience, she gets to witness The Custodians of the Chronology shot her leprechaun buddy through the chest. Oh, and Ray Palmer dresses up like goddamn Rambo for some reason.

And this is the first timeline, the Custodians of the Chronology, in which Constantine being removed from the timeline causes him to not be around in the unicorn episode, causing Sara's death and eventually leading to the Custodians of the Chronology being this hard-assed kill-everything group. But the way this is presented, with its own opening, techno-retro music, and an 80's style "Starring X as X!" opening sequence while we get a montage of the Custodians murdering random magical creatures while we get zoom-ins on their faces? Fantastic.

We also get the brief revelation that Zari was turned into a cat due to Constantine's lack of involvement during the fairy godmother mission... and after a disastrous sequence where Charlie gets stabbed in the gut by Garima (who, by the way, is apparently part of the team now and I am okay with that), Charlie manages to get her way to 2018 and into the Time Bureau, where she finds Cosntantine being half-mad and making a smiley face on the ground out of cigarette butts. Just because.

And we get a hilarious bit with Constantine turning Zari back into a human, leading to the hilarious image of her crouched on top of the kitty-window bag (where did Charlie find that bag?), and after the obligatory exposition (like Barry Allen in flashpoint, Constantine remembers both timelines) and I absolutely love how Constantine and Zari just wants to save Sara and prevent her death, and not restore the timeline. Zari's protests gets her turned back into a cat, which is hilarious.

Also hilarious? The encounter with Gary later on. "I'm you from the future, help us!" the transformed Gary claims. That's funny. After instigating a shoot-out between the Custodians and the Time Bureau (don't think too hard about how everyone's dead, as the cast notes), Charlie and company goes off and blows up the unicorn. mission accomplished... except this time around, in this new timeline, the boys are the one that are killed, and apparently the Legends are turned into the Sirens of Space-Time, with an insanely hilarious Charlie's Angels style opening segment with Sara, Ava and... Gideon-in-a-robot-body, allowing Amy Pemberton to get a rare showcase of acting instead of just voice-acting.

And this time around, it's the fairy godmother episode that #TeamMagic has to help out with, and Charlie ends up infiltrating the S.O.S. team as Amaya... but quickly fucks up when she accidentally lets slip that she has no idea what a "Zambesi" is. Anyway, after jumping through some hoops... we get Charlie-as-the-godmother convincing Prudence to relinquish the bond with the godmother... by forcing her to eat broccoli. Which I honestly can't decide if it's absolutely brilliant or absolutely nonsensical.


And at this point you could be forgiven for thinking that this is just a rehash of the fantastic season 3 episode "Here I Go Again", which has Zari trapped in a time loop... except this is Charlie, Zari and Constantine continuing to try and fix the timeline and continuing to break it in different ways. The third timeline we get to? MOTHERFUCKING PUPPETS OF TOMORROW, at which point I kind of lost my shit, and any attempt at trying to describe this is simply not doing it justice.

Seriously, Legends of Tomorrow is the loosest adaptation of any superhero IP ever, but it's easily the most fun.

The explanation for the Puppets of Tomorrow timeline is hilarious (Rory became the Fairy Godmother's new host, and turned them into "damn Time Bureau puppets", and now goes around like this badass biker gang with the Godmother), but the joke's sort of eclipsed by, y'know, the fucking singing puppets of tomorrow.

And we get the obligatory montage of them changing the timeline over and over and over and finding different people dying all the time, while the mounting stress of remembering two timelines causes John Constantine to keel over from all of the stress. We also get a pretty great sequence of Charlie arguing with John and Zari that her powers define who she is, and she's damn well willing to fight for them. It's not something the 'hopes' can come back, and there's definitely a huge X-Men vibe going on here.

After an argument, Charlie disguises herself as Ava, and joins the Legends team (this time with no dead members) to try and stop John and Zari from actually fixing the timeline, and to her horror Charlie finds out that the Legends are still pretty damn kill-happy. This leads to a confrontation between Sara and Charlie in the background, where Sara straight-up snaps Charlie's neck (something that she thankfully is immune to thanks to shapeshifting powers), and Charlie realizes that the only common thing between all of the different timelines is that without interacting with Charlie, the Legends team never actually got it out of their system that the magical creatures are all evil. It's... it's honestly a bit obvious and has very little subtlety, but it kind of works. Again, it's got shades of Zari learning to respect the greater good in "Here We Go Again", but it does work relatively well for Charlie's character. Honestly, this episode and the previous one really ends up making Charlie as a character work pretty well, even if her introduction into the show hasn't been the best.

Meanwhile, in a bit of a hilarious riff on CW's own Flashpoint, we get to see John Constantine #3 walking up and meeting Desmond outside of the apartment, returning his phone and basically having a pretty damn tender moment... before using a memory-wiping device to wipe out John Constantine #2's breakup from his mind, leading Desmond to basically be restored to normalcy and meet up with John Constantine #1, kiss and restore the timeline. It's kind of an obvious storyline, but one that's handled pretty well.

Ultimately, it's John and Charlie realizing the whole "greater good" stuff that ends up saving the day. It's not the most perfect character work since, y'know, all the sheer madness and hilarity that's going on in the episode is admittedly kind of distracting. But it's some great work, and we even get a fun little apology moment between Charlie and Zari, as well as Mick and Ava.

Which, of course... leads into the actual mid-season cliffhanger. Hank Heywood finds out that Konane the Kaupe has escaped (how is Mona? Last we saw her in the regular timeline, she got maimed), and talks to his golfing partner... who, of course, is Neron taking the form of Desmond. And we even get this disgusting-ass CGI ripple of Desmond's face transforming into this... this faceless mass of holes. Ew!

Anyway, it's a pretty fun romp throughout the first eight episodes of Legends of Tomorrow. As you can see by the length of this review... I did enjoy this episode a whole ton. Perhaps not quite as much as the huge romp that is Elseworlds, but still, it's a thoroughly insane and enjoyable sequence.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Thanks to the whole Constantine-point stuff, it's apparently why the Legends of Tomorrow misses out on this year's CW-wide crossover, with the Custodians team handwaving away calls from "Oliver Queen, Barry Allen and Kara Zor-El" as the "annual crossover". 
• In the Sirens timeline, Ava Sharpe is given the codename of "Roundhouse" while Gideon's huamnoid body is called "Hard Drive". While there are very minor DC characters with those names, it's pretty safe to say that these particular usages are original to the TV series.