DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Season 5, Episode 12: I Am Legends; Episode 13: The One Where We're Trapped On TV
Episode 12: I Am Legends
In a very cool scene, too, Atropos the Shearer waves her hand over a globe and straight-up just kills an entire country's worth of people just to stop the Legends from getting to the Time Bureau base they were trying to get to. Being a supposed goddess of death, it does baffle me why Atropos doesn't just kill the Legends themselves, or waste time with hand-to-hand combat in their last encounter with Sara... but we'll chalk it up to plot convenience. Unlike the other superhero shows, Legends tends to be so bizarre that these sort of inconsistencies really isn't worth thinking too much about.
The Waverider side of the episode is sort of a tense bottle episode for Gary and also... Gideon? Who seems to be able to manifest herself to Gary after a freak electrical accident. Which is an excuse to get actress Amy Pemberton to show up once a season, basically, and this time Gideon sort of helps Gary out in stealing the Loom rings while being all sneaky. There's a fun combination of just zany goofiness (Gideon bunny-hopping to distract Atropos, cluing in that she's really just Gary Jr. II through Gary's hallucinations) and genuinely tense moments when Atropos finally catches up with Gary and he still manages to do one last stand by using a spell to hide the rings.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Legends team, fresh off of a hangover and also completely immortal, end up having to hitch a bus ride (and just plain hijack a bus) before the whole zombie apocalypse setting kicks in. Why Constantine can't cast a teleportation spell is best left to the vague magical ways of the Legends world. We get a couple of fun scenes as our heroes fight against zombies, and thanks to their immortality, we get some black comedy injury as some of our heroes are brutally killed only to crick-crack themselves to being all right moments after. We get a hilarious bit when the military shows up and panics at the sight of 'sentient zombies', and, of course, the way they get out of it is Mick exploiting a weak point in the prison transport vehicle and then just jumping off the moving vehicle and becoming roadkill.
Throughout all of this, we get a couple of great scenes between our Legends. Sara clearly sees something uncomfortable and remains zen through it all, sort of more or less being a mentor figure to Ava, and the show seems to lead this more towards Sara seeing that she'll die soon and needs to be replaced. Constantine and Zari go off on their own and bugger off and have a lot of discussion about death and whatever while hijacking a truck, get besieged by one of those Walking Dead/Resident Evil giant zombie hordes, and Constantine uses a spell to stop Zari's heart and restart it again. It's all jolly good fun... up until they reach the final point and try to get a Time Courier. The Time Bureau facility is abandoned and the clock ticks down as they literally have to wait for the device to charge -- which also marks the end of their immortality clock. All the while, Atropos's zombie horde waits to charge in outside.
And this is when the episode makes great, great use of Sara's ominously calm and quiet demeanour throughout the episode. Sara's always been pretty happy to go as wild and insane as the rest of her crew, but for a vast majority of this episode it's the rest of the crew that does the brunt of the crazy fun they're doing, and as they sit down around a table and do a little talk as they literally wait for the clock to run out, apparently this is Sara making peace with their deaths. Now there's a bit of a question since we've seen Sara change the future from her Atropos-vision like during the hellhound episode, but ultimately the moment that Sara leads the team to is a pretty neat one, because all she wants is to lead the team to this quiet moment where they're all together and a family, and while she knows she will die there, she trusts Ava and the rest of the Legends to do what's necessary regardless of whatever happens in the future.
Again... thinking about it too much, it doesn't really make too much sense. Why wouldn't Sara lead the Legends in a completely different direction where none of them die? Did she know that the other Legends die there, too, in the zombie apocalypse? Did she see whatever Charlie did when she jumped through the portal? That's the trick about giving future-sight powers in a show that has been, in its core, about saying 'fuck you' to fate and destiny. But presented as a single episode with a powerful monologue, I'm inclined to handwave this.
And then, at the end of the episode? People die. None as shocking as the first one, of course, where Gary, under electroshock torture, manages to talk Astra back to the side of the good guys in a surprisingly earnest and well-done moment, reminding her of all the times and memories that she would've had with her mother, and the sum total of a human's life isn't just their death. And then Atropos shows up and kills Astra for her failure, and that's pretty shocking -- unlike the other members of the Legends, I've never quite felt that Astra is a 'safe' addition that would be immune to a surprise death like this, and it is very effective.
And then, of course, the zombies break down the doors to the bar that the rest of the Legends are hiding in, and despite their superpowers... everyone gets overwhelmed in this huge zombie apocalypse (okay, the rest I buy, but Nate's literally metal, though). It's not just Sara laying her life down as a heroic sacrifice, it's the entire team, just to give Charlie time to use the portal to the Waverider while all her friends die around her. You even see Ava's arm getting ripped off in the background and tossed in the air. And the episode ends with the Legends and Astra all dead, and Charlie on the Waverider... getting the Loom from Gary and deciding to team up with her sisters Atropos and Lachesis. That sure is a huge cliffhanger, and ultimately, plot holes aside, this episode was a blast to watch through. A lot of great moments for Gary, Ava and Astra in particular.
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Episode 13: The One Where We're Trapped on TV
And the concept of the episode itself seems to be leaning towards that. Mona works in a office where everyone wears the same sort of quasi-prison outfit, burning all evidence of free will throughout history and sanitizing history for the populace (but don't the Fates control... fate? Whatever, best not to think too much about it), they feed everyone mush, Charlie's Clotho again, and everyone goes around saying 'Fates be praised' and sometimes big spooky ol' Atropos will show up on a TV screen and declare that someone's time is up and they drop dead. But there are four whole TV shows to entertain the populace.
And this was a fun episode. As our characters later find out, Clotho/Charlie has put their souls into television programs as a way to appease her sisters, keeping them alive but not running around mucking things up. And she even fits everything that they want in a similar vein to what their stated last wishes were in the previous episode, which is fantastic. Zari and Behrad get to live a normal life as siblings, Constantine gets to 'do right' by Astra, Astra's reunited with her mother, Ava and Sara are badass co-captains of a spaceship where no one gets to die, Mick gets to be a thief again. Oh, and Nate's kind of there.
The way that our heroes break free from the control of the Fates' scripwriting program makes sense, too. All too often in this 'alternate reality' storyline in comics and CW shows, someone just... remembers the memories of the past life when they see or experience something similar to the original timeline, and then they start reminding everyone and stuff. It's cool stuff, but at this point (particularly in Legends) kind of predictable. So the way that our heroes regain their memory this time around is by exploiting another time paradox.
Nate, Behrad and Zari 2.0 find themselves in "Ultimate Buds", a pastiche on Friends where they're a sitcom or whatever with a laugh track, but then Zari 1.0's 'ghost' or whatever possesses Zari 2.0's body and she starts to get all confused and stuff. Her incoherent yelling brings Mona in the real world to realize that something's not quite right if what this TV character is saying fits with what that crazy loon Gary's been talking about, while poor, poor Zari ends up realizing that they're stuck in a television program. The setup for this is great, and the fact that other than Mona and Gary, apparently everyone else in the populace thinks this is just a wacky crossover is hilarious.Also, while Zari manages to convince Nate and Behrad to join her to go to other shows (where, of course, their clothes immediately transform to fit the style of the other shows) none of them are really cured, so so speak, from the tropes of their original show. Nate and Behrad in particular keep repeating their sitcom characters' catchphrases and devil-may-care comedy attitude. It's Highcastle Abbey (Downtown Abbey) that they show up in first, where Lady Astra Logue is living in Constantine's House of Mysteries with a living and breathing mother, while Constantine is their faithful butler. Then it's Star Trip (Star Trek) where the Waverider is co-captained by Sara and Ava, crewed exclusively by handsome men in miniskirts, and they are fighting "Dahn", a.k.a. Mick with a hilariously bad wig.
Again, all of this correspond somewhat to their ultimate wishes, sort of similar to that one Dominator dreamworld in the "Invasion" crossover, but instead of 'history as it should be', this all takes place with hilarious television tropes and shows being lampooned. It's silly but very entertaining, and while I don't know too much about cinematography to comment, there's a distinctive style of camera movement that gives each of these fake shows their own distinctive style. Hell, there's even a fair bit of stylistic suck in the Star Trip sequences, and all of these bright, colourful and warm shows end up contrasting very well whenever we cut back to the bleak, somber tone of Gary and Mona running around in the real world, trying to infiltrate Clotho's TV production show.
As the Legends try to rebel in their TV shows, Clotho/Charlie show up where Mona and Gary are trying to break our heroes' strings free, and she quickly types in her own script in the fourth show, Mr. Parker's Cul-De-Sac, trying to convince the Legends that everything is fine, their lives are all happy and they're all alive and they have their dreams... but it's not real, and the real world is still a Fate-controlled shithole. Hell, apparently Clotho can just rip Zari's thread of fate into two, allowing Zari 1.0 and Zari 2.0 to co-exist, which is such a hilariously 'fuck it' mundane solution to the two-Zaris plotline that's been plaguing the season. Of course, the Legends being Legends, they refuse to be propaganda tools and each start their own rebellion in their own TV shows, each of them leading to their respective shows' cancellation. The biggest moment here, I think, is Constantine's offer to allow Astra to make her choice -- he was damn serious about doing penance, and while the Not-Friends and Not-Star-Trek Legends are rebelling against the rules of their show, Constantine was fully willing to serve his penance in this dream-world and allow Astra to live this life with her mother. They don't, of course, but the moment was amazingly handled. Sara's speech about how life isn't a formulaic story like these TV shows but you have to take the good and the bad together is also very great.
Ultimately, the Legends break free, meet up with Charlie, Gary and Mona in the studio, and they are ready to take the fight to the two Fates. It's a great episode, and it's just such a shame that I feel like the Charlie side of things feels rushed. We're not quite sure just why she did this, and a couple of additional lines explaining that this is the only way, or that she was traumatized by the death-by-zombie last episode, would've worked wonders, I believe. Considering that this episode had a lot of great character work for Constantine, Astra, Zari and even Sara and Ava, I really wished we learned what caused Charlie to submit to the idea of the world going on with the Fates at the head without free will.
On towards the finale, then. A very fun, funny and genuinely entertaining episode, and one with something hilarious at every corner as we muck around TV-land. If nothing else, Legends of Tomorrow does make me smile.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Not-Friends!Nate apparently ended up getting an audition to play "Robin Hood" in the vigilante show Arrow. That's actually kind of hilarious.
- The "Zari 1.0" and "Zari 2.0" monikers actually come from a blink-and-you'll miss it part of Clotho's automatic-typewriting machine.
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