DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Season 4, Episode 9: Lucha de Apuestas
Legends of Tomorrow is back and... and it's still as insane as ever? The huge, huge break does always makes it jarring whenever it's time to return to the most light-hearted and made-on-drugs superhero show in existence, but the fact that Legends of Tomorrow is so fucking crazy does make it a fun, fun experience to return to."Lucha de Apuestas" picks up on a couple of the cliffhangers from the mid-season two-parter deal, but just mostly deals with Mona and her love for the escaped Kaupe, Konane. Who, after the merry hijinks of the previous episodes, Mona ends up becoming Public Enemy #1 when the (obviously doctored) security footage shows Mona releasing the Kaupe. Mona ends up flashing poor, butt-monkey Gary with the memory-wipe device, and uses a stolen time-travel gateway device to send the Kaupe into time, displacing it into 1961 Mexico City where it's now "El Lobo", a luchador wrestler. And "El Lobo" is happy that he's being worshiped like a god, but, of course, this causes ripples through time and our heroes have to make sure that the animalistic mystical Hawaiian demigod is willing to throw a staged wrestling fight in order to maintain peace through 60's Mexico City, all the while protecting him from the time-traveling police.
Honestly, I just took a sip of water and re-read the paragraph I just read, and I chuckled a little because that's the sort of batshit-crazy insanity that happens here in Legends of Tomorrow.
Mona's whole character arc in this episode is that she is SO convinced that Konane is completely misunderstood and is running for his life against an unjust world, and I think the episode plays up a teensy bit too much just how blindly Mona adheres to this pointview. Granted, the poor girl's in love, but there's "in love" and there's just being a goddamn moron. To her credit, though, Konane is pretty sweet on the girl, and I'm a big fan that the Legends team are actually operating on shoot-first mentality and aren't caught up in an angsty "should we take down the magical monster" until they actually get evidence to prove otherwise.
The big drama point is Sara and Ava constantly hanging up on each other, and... I don't particularly care for it. The actresses do a pretty great job at conveying the story, but I just genuinely and honestly don't care. We've had Ava as an uncooperative, obstructive villain before, and now to do this again just because of some genuine poor communication just seems tiresome. The random insertion at Ava suddenly being xenophobic and hates non-humans, and doesn't care about Hank experimenting on non-humans to protect human history also honestly seems to come from out of nowhere.
There's also a charity ball for some reason -- which is, strangely enough, the part of this episode that feels shoehorned in the most. Zari and Nate have to pretend to be a couple to try and get Hank's phone and see if Hank is lying (he is), Ava and Sara have an awkward conversation, and I'm genuinely not sure why the Time Bureau genuinely needs to hold freaking charity balls just to get funds. It's funny, don't get me wrong, but at the same time, it's also a mite too silly for my tastes.
We get some fun moments with Ray's flash cards, amnesiac Gary and a pretty great sub-plot with Mick realizing that Mona reads his apparently-popular romance novels, and eventually giving her some good advice... and that last bit ends up leading to the cliffhanger for this episode. Mick basically convinces Mona to not get lost in her romantic fantasies and let Konane go, but Konane gets shot to death by some random Time Bureau schmuck, and Mona ends up transforming into a Kaupe herself.
Overall... not the biggest fan of this episode. It's at about exactly this pointin the episode where the romance between Konane and Mona ends up feeling grating, but throw in the whole drama storyline between Ava and Sara, and this episode just feels too bogged down in exaggerated angsty drama that I just genuinely don't really care for.
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