DC's Legends of Tomorrow S05E14 Review: Wax Museum Fight

DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Season 5, Episode 14: Swan Thong

Well that sure was an ending. I'm not sure if Legends of Tomorrow's season was even affected at all by the whole pandemic thing, but it sure doesn't seem like it! I'm not the biggest fan of "Swan Thong", though, and that's probably because the two episodes that preceded it were such solid fare that this conclusion... is just there. It's not bad by any means and wraps up most of the over-hanging plot threads, and other than the relatively weak writing for Charlie/Clotho (her motivations in episode 13 and 14 is just kind of wobbly) it's relatively solid. That said, though, there's nothing here that's particularly spectacular or good or wow-ing, so the season finale just... sort of feels like it's there.

The episode first starts off picking up where we left off last episode, with our heroes sort of regrouping and splitting up, with one part of the team going off to find the Waverider, which is somehow not destroyed (the Fates kind of suck at this changing history thing) and is somehow just hanging out there in a Forbidden Dump, where everything the Fates don't like are just dumped there instead of being destroyed or whatever. Okay, sure. Meanwhile, another team goes off to destroy the Loom of Fate, because, well, I guess Astra's accepted her mother's death? It's never quite clear, but we get this bit of cool back-and-forth as Atropos confronts Sara and mocks her for drawing her newfound future-sight powers from her; while Astra is confronted by the spooky voice of Lachesis as she's unraveling the Loom.

Ultimately, Sara shoves Atropos into the Loom which implodes around her and kills her, and the Legends (sans Mick and Charlie) end up escaping through the Waverider into a couple of months into the future, seeing that the world has been warped again, by Lachesis giving everyone a smart-watch that tells them what to do as per what the Fates dictate, and that the Legends are branded as the enemy of the world as 'god killers', while Charlie has sort of lost all her self-confidence and stuff and would rather remain in captivity as penance due to what Lachesis says to her.

And Maisie Richardson-Sellers certainly is a good actress, selling all of the scenes that the script asks her to. Her scene as being panicked because she wants her friends to survive and they're clearly not willing to just stick around in a television dream; the later scene where she thinks it's all her fault that everything's fallen apart; the later scene with Lita; and the confrontation where she forgives Lachesis... all of these are very, very powerful scenes. But we just jump from one huge Charlie/Clotho moment to the next without filling anything in-between, and as such it really hurts the pacing of her character arc when I don't even really buy that she would so quickly be so guilt-ridden that she'd follow Lachesis and be shamed daily in the wax museum. The only real justification the show gives us is the whole 'some time has passed' excuse, and that's not very good writing, and that's why this episode ultimately is a bit of a disappointment. There's just enough here and there to infer as to why Charlie is doing what she did, but considering what a headstrong, devil-may-care person she's been before, I feel like it's not quite enough.

Thanks to a bit of wax-statue impersonation, the Legends end up calling Lachesis's bullshit out, revealing to the populace that the Lachesis doesn't have the Loom of Fate anymore and all she's doing is basically controlling everyone with her own computer algorithm (a repurposed Gideon) instead of using a mystical artifact. I'm also not particularly sold on this part of the storyline, but it's not really the focus of the episode, so whatever. We get the huge climactic fight, and it's the Legends fighting Caligula, Vlad the Impaler, Joseph Stalin, Marie Antoinette (yay Courtney Ford!) and a bunch of random cavemen while wielding a bunch of 'mistakes' like, uh... pogo sticks and other American references that fly over my head entirely. All set to the song 'Thong Song'... which -googles- it's apparently a real song sang by a real singer who made a cameo in this episode. I thought it's a parody. Okay, yeah, this part just fell absolutely flat with me. Anyway, after the fight, Zari 2.0 disconnects Gideon with the cheekiest smile you can ever get, and Charlie talks to Lachesis. And, again, it's a very powerful scene as Charlie calls Lachesis out on all her bullshit and her control freak tendencies, but ultimately forgives her and tells her to live as a human. It's a well-acted scene, but Charlie's character just jumps all over the place in terms of motivation and whatnot that it's hard to really say that it worked.

What actually ended up working well, if slightly rushed, is the Zari-and-Zari story, where the two Zaris don't really take up a whole ton of screentime and mostly just bicker with each other, Behrad, Nate and Constantine. The dynamic is fun, and while I genuinely never really cared about the whole love triangle nonsense, the fact that Zari 1.0 basically decided to sacrifice herself and return to the totem after realizing that her existence is causing a paradox that's threatening to cause original-timeline Behrad to die from the whole ARGUS-fighting thing. There's a lot of great moments here and there with the Zari situation (best of all has to be Behrad telling Zari 1.0. "I thought you were Zari."). A short but fast farewell at the end of the episode acts as a quick coda to basically make it so that Zari 2.0. is the Zari we're getting moving forward.

Also, Charlie decides to stay in the 60's or whichever time period the Smell is performing, as a way to write out the actress, and... again, you can kind of infer and get why Charlie's doing this, but the way that we jump from one Charlie scene to the next genuinely does feel super-awkward. Among other plot threads resolved here and there include Mick and Lita bonding as parent and child, and Sara regaining her sight before, well, being abducted by aliens or something as the requisite seasonal cliffhanger.

Ultimately, it's a bit of a messy ending that mostly concludes a lot of the plot points in this season perfunctorily, and it's still ultimately a pretty fun episode, but it's one that I feel like it had a lot of ideas but didn't have enough time to really explore them. Oh well, that's another CW season down!